Gearbox: "Soon, we'll talk about," the next Duke Nukem game, "but not today"

Gearbox's Randy Pitchford said during a community panel at PAX Prime that the firm would "soon," start talking about creating a new Duke Nukem game, but for now the firm wants to focus on releasing DLC.

Speaking in front of around 900 Gearbox community attendees, here is what Pitchford had to say regarding Duke Nukem Forever, its critical and public reception, and what the future holds for the wisecracking action hero (via Kotaku):

"It's such a polarizing thing... There was this one guy that mapped out the different review scores. Here's the number of people who gave it a zero to 10. And here's the number of people who gave it 11-20, 21-30, and so on and so forth. And most games have a perfect bell curve, you know, where the center of the curve is the average score. Duke had two curves. There were people who panned it and there were people who kind of liked it. And Allen [Blum] pointed out: 'It looks like a pair of boobs.' That was our plan from the beginning! That actually happened. That's a true story.

"I hope some people kind of enjoyed it. When I dug through all the stuff that 3D Realms had done, I expected a trainwreck and I was actually quite pleased. I had a lot of fun with it. It was fun for me, and I'm really glad that we not only rescued the franchise but took the time to make sure the world could see what those guys had been doing for all of those years. And I'm also proud of the things we added to it. I think we did some things to make it a little better.

"I liked it. And we're no giving up. We've updated the game. I know the load times weren't very good on the 360 and so some of the patches improve that. I don't know if you guys noticed.

"And then, we also have some DLC coming. It's pretty cool. It's pretty fun. So if you like Duke… I think you're really going to like the DLC coming out that's being developed by the guys that actually made Duke Nukem Forever—the guys at Piranha, the guys at Triptych. The Triptych guys are the ex-3D Realms developers. And they're still working at our studio on the 10th floor, and they're committed. They're going to go all the way.

"And then soon… I know that you guys figured out that, when Gearbox acquired the franchise, we didn't do it just to make sure we could all play Duke Forever, but because we wanted to make our own Duke game. Soon, we'll talk about that, but not today."

Last week, it was rumored in the latest issue of OXM that Gearbox plans on developing its own Duke Nukem game once development on Aliens: Colonial Marines wraps up.