I can't believe people keep excusing what this game is because of the "hype". The hype is what Gearbox and 2K made it. They created it and blew it way out of proportion to make sales. It's the same thing as the disappointment when UT3 was released. Fans were promised a lot and didn't get it. When you promise great things, people expect great things.
Hype wasen't an issue for me, i know that no game can change hands so many times and not have problems as a result. We don't see it often in games, but it happens a lot with movies, where a director will get in a fight with the studio and quit, and then another one takes over, and the end product allways suffers for it.
So yeah, i was fully expecting choppy narritive flow, old assets mixed in with newer assets, probably a bad rushed ending, i knew there would be problems, there simply had to be.
What i was also expecting, however, was a game that was like DN3D, a classic and fun shooter, voiced over by the Duke.
What i was not expecting where all the boring puzzles, the Doom3 style constant monster spawn-in, the boring vehical sections, the even more boring turret sections, the prolonged sections where you never get to shoot anything, all the setpieces of the game that where obviously just copied from other popular games, and just how few jokes the Duke actually makes, and how so many of them falls flat (yeah Duke! make fun of Valve's redundant puzzles! ... wait what, you still expect me to do the damned puzzle? shoulden't this be where you pull out the shotgun and yell "BLOW IT OUT YOUR ARSE!" and destroy it? WTF!?).
I knew the game would probably lack direction, what i did not know was that it would so frequently be, well, boring..
And sure, it has it's good moments too, thouse mostly beeing the ones that are like the old DN3D game with some honest to tits action, but you have to wade through a lot of dull and boring gameplay between thease sections.