Everytime I hear "A game comming out like dungeon Keeper" it ends up being a disapointment. Like Dungeons.
I realise Dungeons didn't try to be like Dungeon Keeper but they certainly tried hard enough to be compared to it.
Yeah, sorry about that.
People keep trying to tamper with the DK formula without getting what really made DKII so good. (I prefer DKII.) People just want a really good dungeon ecosystem simulator. Not quite The Sims in a dungeon, but a well thought-out, bad guy-based dungeon building game.
Evil Genius got so close to this vision it makes me sad every time I play the game. It may not have met DKII's minions in terms of gameplay, but it understood that it's not really about the fights in game like that, it's about the day-to-day operations of your dungeon/whatever, and seeing where the quirks in your design are.
The premise is right there staring you in the face, it's kind of infuriating someone hasn't truly taken hold of it yet.
1. You're an evil wizard.
2. You need a lair to be an evil wizard in, so you construct one.
3. You need stuff in that lair to protect you from heroes. The more, the better.
4. That "stuff" needs to be taken care of and should have a life of its own.
5. Heroes come to try and kill you, and run afoul of your dungeon.
Going totally off topic here for a moment, but think about how dungeons are in games today. By and large, they're not designed to prevent adventurers and explorers from getting somewhere, they're designed to facilitate it. Dungeons aren't built defensively in your standard RPG, they're built ergonomically. They're also often not built for immersion. There are usually no "living quarters" for stuff in dungeons outside of Bethesda games. There aren't "lairs" for the denizens of the whole dungeons, usually just the big bosses. Treasure rooms are at the end of well-seen corridors and you're not ever expected to miss them. The bosses' lair isn't hidden behind 5 sets of secret passages, it's behind a massive door in a well-lit passage that the whole dungeon leads to.
Flouting that logic is what made DKII so fun to me. You could build a believable, internally consistent dungeon that was both flavorful and practical, the kind a pen and paper GM might cook up. And then you could turn the whole simulation lose, and re-tweak it. You end up with a dungeon where there are minor treasure rooms and secret mega-treasure vaults, barracks and kitchens, your spiders living in one lair over here and your ghouls living in another lair over there (probably around a cemetery) and THEN a defensive labyrinth protecting the whole thing.
And then you start to wonder why other dungeons in other games are so damn boring.
A real dungeon management sim is one of those things I'm praying Kickstarter will help bring to life, somehow, some way. One that understands how to take sim management and fantasy tropes and make them work together. I loved the personality clashes between monsters you hired in DKII. I wished that there were more in the way of specific needs that set monster types apart from each other....kind of in the way DF dwarves want tables and chairs and such. Having a bad ass zombie dragon in your dungeon would mean he needs a crypt lair to hang out in with plenty of bones, or a dark knight wants a 3x3 room with an armor stand and a torture device. Things of that nature. I want a game where, like in DKII, the heroes are a minor part of the whole thing compared to how deep the simulation is in terms of managing and constructing your dungeon.
And because I can't help but take a shot at Dungeons...it totally missed that point entirely. Even though you had a lot of dungeon management in Dungeons, the focus was ultimately on....the heroes. All the skill trees and Dungeon Lord spells couldn't cover up that fact.
It's a finite point of reasoning, but here it goes: a dungeon SHOULD exist because it's a place where an evil doer calls home, and it's in the evil-doer's interest to make their home as difficult for outsiders to get through as possible. (And as interesting for themselves to live in.)
The logic that gets presented in most video games now: dungeons exist because
heroes need a place to feel heroic. And Dungeons, the game, is basically the poster child for that mentality, and is the polar opposite of what made DKII a game for the ages.
I really enjoyed just playing the largest sandbox level on DKII over, and over and over again. I tried to make things as thematic as possible. Which usually had the unfortunate result of a dwarf tunneling through side of my dungeon at an inconvenient place. I know a friend of mine's sister built a dungeon that was basically designed as a race track for hungry monsters. She'd get them really hungry, then place a chicken on the ground in front of them and they'd all mob after it. Then she'd pick it up and drop it a few yards ahead. I don't know if she ever even turned on heroes.
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Topic: Dungeon Keeper (Read 9378 times)