New Dungeon Keeper Game

[TheFeniX]

For mobile devices. Where gameplay goes to die. Also, EA. Also, it sounds fucking terrible because there is literally nothing EA can't ruin. But saying EA made a shitty game is pretty redundant at this point.

The most important piece of info you can take away from this preview is what the mobile version of Dungeon Keeper isn’t. It isn’t an enhanced port of Bullfrog’s classic, a la last year’s Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition. It also isn’t something you’ll be able to sit and play for hours at a time unless you have an excess of patience or discretionary income to blow. That being said, it also isn’t a bad game, and if its change in focus and free-to-play business model aren’t issues for you, it has all the makings of a fun tower defense/strategy hybrid.

Just what the market needs: more cash-dump shitty tower defense games! But ho ho ho! We're combining it with a Sim Builder! INNOVATION!

This is where the free-to-play factors stick their nose in. It’s worth noting that there’s no pay-to-win element here, but there’s a whole lot of potential for waiting around if you don’t open up your wallet. In order to erect structures and make pathways, you need to dig out the blocks you want to build on. Each block takes one of your imp minions a full minute to clear, so with two imps, clearing a 3x3 area for construction would involve five minutes of staring at your screen while they toil away for you, less if you slap the little guys around a bit to motivate them like in the old games. Unsurprisingly, you also get a prompt to spend “gems” (which you attain through in-app purchases) to complete individual blocks instantly.

Make gameplay so fucking terribly boring, people will pay extra money just to skip it. EA on the cutting edge of INNOVATION! (Actually, that is brilliant if you're a shit-bag who hates video games, but loves money). 10 to 1, there's no longer boss mobs either. Too video gamey. Also, it's totally not P2W even though you can build a better dungeon faster with cash monies and there's invasion type multi-player.

I like the core mechanics of this new version of Dungeon Keeper. It recalls much of the mischievousness and depth of its namesake. Right now, the free-to-play implementation feels a little intrusive and limiting, but honestly, that fear isn’t going to stop me from downloading it.

Thank you IGN for continuing to supply (and get others to) EA's cocaine habit while they continue to beat dead IPs until they squeeze out every last bit of excrement. Hope you didn't get whip-lash as you pretended you were slapping minions when you were really giving EA their required review handjob.

RIP Bullfrog.

[Losonti Tokash]

Haven't you spent at least $30 and months grinding for progression in a F2P game?

[Sharp-kun]

War for the Overworld seems to be the best bet for people that want new Dungeon Keeper.

https://wftogame.com/

[TheFeniX]

Haven't you spent at least $30 and months grinding for progression in a F2P game?

Not all F2P is created equal. I played Warframe for a bit and there is the same "pay monies to get stuff faster/instantly" tripe in it. However, you have other options rather than to pay the money or set the game down.

Warframe is a great example on how to do F2P: you can play the entire game and unlock everything (at least last time I played) aside from vanity items without spending a single dime. In fact, buying weapons and frames seems to be counter-productive because you're paying to skip actually gameplay, aside from build times. Where they got smart was requiring money to purchase additional slots for Warframes and weapons. So, if you're a collector, open your wallet.

The other F2P game I played was some shitty Ice Age Village that came with my Windows phone. It was the same style of garbage this DK is: frustrate the player with wait times just long enough so they consider paying money to speed things up, but not long enough that they actually put the game down. Also, no actual gameplay, so it's basically a hole in your phone you're supposed to dump time and money into. But it gets a pass because Gameloft is all about this garbage and they used a movie IP for it.

The new Dungeon Keeper is rated E, which is enough by itself to flag the game as garbage. But seeing the actual gameplay sterilized by the gouging and idiot-proofing (rooms are built wholesale, rather than tile-by-tile, which was extremely easy with a mouse) is painful to watch.

This isn't Dungeon Keeper: it's fucking Sim City and invasion MP with a Dungeon Keeper skin. But EA is so creatively bankrupt, they can't even be bothered to come up with something new. They just dig up old corpses from the companies they've bought out and prop them up to sucker people in.

[Vendetta]

And if you wanted to sim dungeon with invasion multiplayer, you'd be playing Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, which is also free to play.

[Zaune]

And the reviews are in.



Bloody hell. I didn't expect great things from the game, but that is... there are no words.

[Mr Bean]

For those of you who don't want to watch the video it can be summed up this way.
In the original Dungeon Keeper Game it took about three minutes to dig out a 3x5 room with a few minutes. Less if you slapped the little guys around or hasted them.
In the mobile version that same room would take two weeks or six dollars to fourteen dollars of real money to do the same room. The average dudgeon contains about four such rooms or bigger.

It's like the treatment the Star Trek game for the ipad got. The made a game (Of sorts) removed several features then added up gates everywhere to make it impossible to play as a game but only play as a very slow moving game.

[TheFeniX]

I was going to post this but it feels like all I've been posting about lately is how shitty EA is and I actually laughed audibly when I realized that, as bad as the OP review from IGN was, it was about 100 times better than what we actually got.

I don't care to dig it up, but some developer for the game said something to the effect of: "This game isn't for fans of the original games." No shit?

This is why Mobile and F2P gaming is going to be a fucking joke for years, if it even manages to get better at all. When fucking EA Games is giving us Gameloft quality mobile games and beating dead IPs even more to death while doing so, the market is going to be garbage. I also have to give props to the reviewer for calling out the thousands (many likely bots anyways) giving the game 5 stars as "fuckwits," he's pretty spot on.

Maybe I'm just an asshole, but that's the mobile market for me: idiots with too much time and money to just throw into the hole their smartphone has become. And as long as these idiots keep spending hundred upon hundreds of dollars on shitty games like this, then just moving onto the next in a week or two, the market is going to continue to be garbage because it's profitable garbage.

[InsaneTD]

There are some decent ones. Though almost all are pay to win.

[Steel]

How are there so many 5 star reviews on both ios and android? Every written review is 1 star and negative looking at the first hundred or so.

Either this is a horribly blatant example of vote rigging or most people are silent morons who voted 5 stars for anything with pretty graphics... ah that'll be it then.

[Borgholio]

On the D&D Arena of War app, most people who actually play hate it with a passion. I agree, it's fucking terrible. But it still has *decent* reviews due to people posting gift codes and buddy invites and disguising them as reviews. They mostly give 4 or 5 stars so their codes / invites don't get deleted.

[Grumman]

How are there so many 5 star reviews on both ios and android? Every written review is 1 star and negative looking at the first hundred or so.

Either this is a horribly blatant example of vote rigging or most people are silent morons who voted 5 stars for anything with pretty graphics... ah that'll be it then.

I have heard that this is because of dodgy behaviour on the developer's part. Apparently if you try to vote from within the app, it only takes you to that page if you vote "5". If you vote 1-4, it takes you to their own page, ostensibly because they want to know what you didn't like about it.

[InsaneTD]

So ice it's on the Google page you can change what your vote is anyway.

[Steel]

Wow voting from within app shouldn't be allowed, or at least it should be secure and your score should be untraceable by the developer. User scores are one of the two objective bits of information (the other being downloads) you get on an apps page.

How can app stores defend allowing apps to reward high ratings? Ratings yes, scores no.

[TheFeniX]

There are some decent ones. Though almost all are pay to win.

This isn't even P2W (not that you were insinuating it was), it's Pay to Play:

You can pay to get around this block, and are rewarding with nothing else but…the ability to continue playing until you hit a new roadblock.

“We’re huge fans of the PC game, and like everyone on the Internet who’s commented on our mobile version, we’ve played the original version and we get pretty nostalgic about it. By the same token, we all play a lot of mobile games ourselves so our primary goal was figuring out how to make the game free-to-download so as many people could try it as possible.”

At least they're making it easy for everyone to know for certain they hate the game. It's not out on Windows Phone, so I can't try it myself. I'm not exactly broken up about it though.

“It’s important to emphasize that we designed a game that is built around the typical mobile play patterns. This means Dungeon Keeper is meant to be played on the go multiple times a day with a few minutes here or there. This way of playing allows fans to naturally progress as a free player.”

And this is why mobile gaming is shit. Angry Birds doesn't have this problem (except some versions, but the Windows Star Wars ones are great). But there are so few games I've seen with any "depth" where the depth isn't locked behind "wait 24 hours or pay us monies." If your game is designed to be put down/not played for X amount of time: you need to do us a favor and stop making video games. You're a blight on the industry.

There's a huge difference between "pay $10 for a super-gun to kill this boss" and "pay us $10 so you don't have to wait 2 weeks to kill this boss with a super-gun." Both are kind of "meh," but at least with the former you aren't dumping money just to play the fucking game.

Skalski says they’re looking at fan feedback, and reading all the negative articles, including this one, presumably. I think the main problem here is that really, their “intended audience” are the millions of people who have made Candy Crush and Flappy Bird a hit, the type who have likely never even heard of the original Dungeon Keeper, much less played it. If the “intended audience” was actual Dungeon Keeper fans, they would have had to know altering the game to be this reliant on time and effort-saving “gems” would be universally viewed as terrible by those who loved the original.

The gist of the entire interview is not that Dungeon Keeper has done something wrong, it’s simply adapted to the new rules of mobile scene while fans haven’t. The problem isn’t with the title itself, it’s with you, the dumb masses who don’t get that this is how game design works now. I’m not expecting Skalski to break down in tears and repent, but the tone of this interview is really disingenuous and condescending. The take-away message seems clear: if you’re complaining, this game is not for you. These are the rules now. Accept them or get lost.

Read the whole article, but these two paragraphs stand on their own. They are pandering to morons and can't understand fan backlash. They could have avoided all of this by naming the game "Kungeon Deeper," but they would have had to spend 10 minutes coming up with a few new character models.

I have heard that this is because of dodgy behaviour on the developer's part. Apparently if you try to vote from within the app, it only takes you to that page if you vote "5". If you vote 1-4, it takes you to their own page, ostensibly because they want to know what you didn't like about it.

That's.... pretty damned clever. Showing that EA has more sense in the marketing department than in game development. Go figure.

[Oskuro]

Lo and behold, confirmation:

From Gamasutra:

Update: As confirmed by Gamasutra, EA has employed a rather sneaky system for rating the game. As spotted by Mike Robinson on Twitter, when Dungeon Keeper asks you to rate the game on Android and you choose to give it less than 5 stars, the game doesn't allow you to do so, and instead asks you to message the company with your feedback.

Note that when you choose 5-stars, the game takes you to the Google Play store, so you can potentially still choose a different rating -- and you can, of course, still rate the game less than 5 stars via Google Play.

Gamasutra has contacted EA regarding the move, and contacted Google to find out whether this is against the rules of the Google Play store.

As TheFeniX said, and I've been arguing elsewhere, this is a blatant attempt from EA to "have their cake and eat it too" by using a recognizable brand to boost sales, but not making the effort to meet the expectations of the brand's pre-existing audience.

I'd say the final result will be that the brand will be tarnished and possibly end up shelved. Another win for short term planning!

[Terralthra]

My experience of F2P gaming has forever been ruined by TeamFortress 2, where weapons (the only real gameplay difference maker) drop randomly over time, as well as being given for achievement milestones, and the vast majority of things you can pay for are entirely cosmetic (weapons that count kills, weapons that count killstreaks, special effects for hats, etc.). You can play the entire game, multiplayer, coop, etc., for zero dollars. The weapons (which you could pay for, if you really want one right now) aren't even essential to gameplay, as practically zero of them are "upgrades" in the sense most games use them. Over time, they've even removed some of the gameplay "upgrades" (e.g. set bonuses) to make sure there's no incentive to pay-to-win.

As a result, I play the game a lot, and have spent dollars I would've spent on buying more games on buying stuff in TF2, because it is fun and lets me look cool in a game I enjoy and play for free.

[Zaune]

I think the key difference is that Valve tell their developers to make really good video games and let the Sales and Marketing staff worry about the rest, whereas EA (and probably most of the bigger studios) tell their developers to make money.

[Vendetta]

No, the difference is that Valve don't give a single fuck about monetising Team Fortress 2 items because in order to have Team Fortress 2 you need to have Steam, and when you have Steam they can sell you games you'll never even download for a dollar a go.

TF2 items might make them money, but nothing compared to what they rake from Steam for services they literally do not have to deliver in about 50% of cases because people don't play half the games they buy on Steam.


Anyway, it looks like this new game was designed using a Facebook model, the Facebook model of "a couple of minutes of interaction then leave it alone for three hours" works for Facebook games because it synchronises with the regularity with which people check their Facebook. It's important in that situation to have short bursts of activity because the idea is to become part of the existing routine of going to Facebook which people don't spend a lot of time on but do it regularly throughout a day.

[TheFeniX]

My experience of F2P gaming has forever been ruined by TeamFortress 2,

So has mine, in a more literal sense. I paid money for TF2 and played it regularly. And then the achievement whoring started for unlocks, then it went F2P, then there were demo men flying around with claymores.

Even with the Crits and other shenanigans, TF2 was a solid TBO FPS. Now it's a huge joke and valve could have made Hat Fortress with any other IP. Coming from a guy who played TFC (never bothered with the Quake version) and Unreal Fortress, what the game turned into was a pretty big insult.

They targeted another group of people and that's fine, but it really smacks the same of what EA did with DK... and pretty much everything else they get their hands on.

[Terralthra]

"What the game turned into" = ?

It's a team-based multiplayer FPS. Was when it started, is now. The gameplay has...not changed. If you liked the gameplay when it launched, you should still like it, because it's pretty much the same. Achievement-whoring for unlocks was mostly deprecated when the drop system was implemented, and is the main reason for the drop system in the first place.

If you're bitching about newbies playing shittily and running around with stupid weapons, that's known as the Jedi Knight II problem, where 90% of MP servers could be described accurately as a bunch of 10 year-olds running around waving lightsabres like whiffle ball bats and spamming force choke and force lightning. That's the fault of newbies trying what looks cool. If you don't want to play with them, you don't have to, but it requires more work on your part, because you can't expect people you dislike to voluntarily leave you alone, because they don't give a shit about you.

And yes, Vendetta, I'm aware there are other externalities that allowed Valve to try to monetize TF2 the way it did, and not care overmuch about the revenue stream, but it remains a money-maker for Valve under the current model.

[TheFeniX]

The gameplay has...not changed.

Are you serious? Or are you just fucking with me? At what point in the original TF2 release could a demoman charge you, then one-shot you from full health when you're a medic. They've changed the game into a load-out style system with unlocks, as opposed to the original being about classes being the defining trait of a player's abilities. That's pretty much the definition of gameplay changes.

If you're bitching about newbies playing shittily and running around with stupid weapons, that's known as the Jedi Knight II problem, where 90% of MP servers could be described accurately as a bunch of 10 year-olds running around waving lightsabres like whiffle ball bats and spamming force choke and force lightning. That's the fault of newbies trying what looks cool. If you don't want to play with them, you don't have to, but it requires more work on your part, because you can't expect people you dislike to voluntarily leave you alone, because they don't give a shit about you.

I don't need a lecture on how to find a good server because I did that years ago. However, the start of the shennanigans was when, even on our server that enforced "play the game," we had to deal with all kinds of bullshit achievement whoring because Medic unlocks gave access to "better" gear as did many other updates.

So, gameplay was shot to shit for days after every new class update. It got tiresome. And if I wanted to deal with doing inane shit to unlock new stuff, I'd just go play CoD. In TF2, I'd have to go to an "Achievement Server" and grind stupid shit like it's an MMO. Just give everyone access to the weapons because I don't play fucking Team Fortress for progression.

I admit, it's been years: but is the way to get unlocks still a combination of "time played" and "whore achievements?" If yes, then fuck that.

[Zaune]

If we might return briefly to the actual topic...



I suspect (read: sincerely and devoutly hope) that sarcasm is being employed.

[TheFeniX]

The good news is, with that $700, EA made back their development budget.

Haha, seriously though, provided this isn't a troll or marketing shill, people like that scare the shit out of me. My nephew racked up over $100 in the plants/zombies game because his parents didn't lock the purchase account with a password. But he's 6, he doesn't know any better.

Still, it's actually easy to get sucked into these types of games. I recall sitting on the can clicking my animals in that Ice Age game. Through sheer boredom, I had locked out most of the achievements as it's tied to your XBLive account, but the drop rate on acorns was hella low (and random) and I found myself doing the math: "If I just spent $5, I could lock out the achievements for this game and put it down." I remember being so pissed at myself for even considering it because I was almost willing to spend money so I could stop playing the game.

The human brain is a weird thing.

[Terralthra]

The gameplay has...not changed.

Are you serious? Or are you just fucking with me? At what point in the original TF2 release could a demoman charge you, then one-shot you from full health when you're a medic.

Sticky-jump, pipe to the face. Nearly a one-hit kill with a normal grenade, one-hit kill even with full overheal if it's a crit. Also, sticky-jumping has greater range, higher speed, and is more difficult to evade. The charging shields change the style of the ridiculously fast movement from "arc through the air" to "straight forward along the ground", but that's it.

They've changed the game into a load-out style system with unlocks, as opposed to the original being about classes being the defining trait of a player's abilities. That's pretty much the definition of gameplay changes.

The shield is the closest thing to a "gameplay change" and all it does is change the vector of the demoman's rapid movement ability (and guarantee a crit, instead of just hoping for one). Maybe put milk and jarate on that list too. Pretty much everything else is a little +/- or conditional marginal advantage/disadvantage, without significantly changing the class's role.

If you're bitching about newbies playing shittily and running around with stupid weapons, that's known as the Jedi Knight II problem, where 90% of MP servers could be described accurately as a bunch of 10 year-olds running around waving lightsabres like whiffle ball bats and spamming force choke and force lightning. That's the fault of newbies trying what looks cool. If you don't want to play with them, you don't have to, but it requires more work on your part, because you can't expect people you dislike to voluntarily leave you alone, because they don't give a shit about you.

I don't need a lecture on how to find a good server because I did that years ago. However, the start of the shennanigans was when, even on our server that enforced "play the game," we had to deal with all kinds of bullshit achievement whoring because Medic unlocks gave access to "better" gear as did many other updates.

So, gameplay was shot to shit for days after every new class update. It got tiresome. And if I wanted to deal with doing inane shit to unlock new stuff, I'd just go play CoD. In TF2, I'd have to go to an "Achievement Server" and grind stupid shit like it's an MMO. Just give everyone access to the weapons because I don't play fucking Team Fortress for progression.

I admit, it's been years: but is the way to get unlocks still a combination of "time played" and "whore achievements?" If yes, then fuck that.

The way to get weapons is "play more", and they drop randomly.

Three weapons out of many per class will be given for achievements, but in my experience, people get the weapons through the drop system well before they get them from achievements, even if you go out and try to get achievements. Random drops are frequent.

Oh, and you can get free access to any weapon for a day from the store.

As for "progression", I think you're just trolling at this point. The unlockable weapons, in overwhelming proportion, aren't better*, they're different. You don't get "gold-plated grenade launchers" that are exactly the same as a regular grenade launcher except they do more damage. You don't progress from a flame thrower to a backburner, you choose one or the other because you like the benefits over the drawbacks more than the other. One variant may suit your playstyle more, but it's not better, just more suited to you/your team/the current situation.

*If you play on no-random-crit servers, there are a few weapons that are a slight upgrade from stock, but they are few and far between, and generally only competitive servers run nocrit. If you're playing in a league, I'd expect you already have a wide array of weapons. And there are actually gold-plated grenade launchers, but they are strictly cosmetic, with zero gameplay impact.