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[hemmingjay]

I'm going to get it. I am unsure of how well the game will be patched but things look good. Most importantly though, I am buying it so that games like this are once again viable for publishers.

[King Cow]

That is one huge patch 

thnking about it it, seems like they used Germans again to BETA test this game and make them pay for it at the same time?

[Virtz]

I wonder if German customers are feeling a little bit like guinea pigs at this point.

That sort of tends to happen with European games. We get it first, but it's essentially a beta that takes a considerable while (usually until the international release) to fix. And we don't get 24-hour patches a la Magicka either.

[subject name here]

this looks like a dwarf fortress clone, it has goblins in it.

[Frumple]

Man, Der Ring des Nibelungen totally ripped off Toady's idea*. It had dwarves and artifact jewelery!

*Well over 100 years before Toady was born. Ain't that a hat-trick?

Seriously though, it's good to see Dungeon Keeper inspiring anything, even if apparently not terribly much. Every little bit helps.

[umiman]

Apparently this game is not only terrible, it's more like a puzzle game than a strategy game. Any truth to that?

[nenjin]

No more so than DKII. There are scripted events that require you to go somewhere, do something, build something.

Honestly, I knew the fact the game wasn't DKII wasn't going to go over well with some people. But reading the Steam forums, the Dungeons forums, some people are so outrageously butthurt the game wasn't what they wanted, they just immediately dump on it. It's starting to piss me off. These guys put a lot of love and polish into the game and barely half the people that try even give them a fair shake before going "it's not DKII, you should rot in hell!"

[Shades]

No more so than DKII. There are scripted events that require you to go somewhere, do something, build something.

Honestly, I knew the fact the game wasn't DKII wasn't going to go over well with some people. But reading the Steam forums, the Dungeons forums, some people are so outrageously butthurt the game wasn't what they wanted, they just immediately dump on it. It's starting to piss me off. These guys put a lot of love and polish into the game and barely half the people that try even give them a fair shake before going "it's not DKII, you should rot in hell!"

To be fair it was heavily pushed as a spiritual successor to DK so what did they expect?

I'll try to withhold judgement until I play the demo but I have to say how people have talked about it seems like it won't be my kinda game. Too much mud tv influence I guess.

[nenjin]

Honestly, to me, it's DKII without all the monster baby sitting. Instead of spending 10 minutes laying out your master design for personalized training rooms or whatever, you add visual details and try to find the best way to game the hero AI. Instead of going to kill heroes and dropping 14,000,000 heals on your monsters so they don't die, you just focus on the results...dead heroes or not.

And having been on the forums for a long, long time....I can honestly say it's the FANS who have built it up as a successor to DKII. They've always been pretty careful about making that exact connection....but fans were more than happy to go there for them.

[burningpet]

Well, Id say its more strategy than puzzle in its natue, but the strategies are limited because the game has a pretty much straight forward solution.
If Tower Defence games as a sort of mix between puzzle and strategy, then Dungeons is pretty much in the same genre. the monsters really are just towers you place around, the prestige gimmicks are a pretty much a limited way of defining the path of the "waves" and the rooms and gold loot are pretty much the things that the tower defence enemies always try to steal from you, only that in dungeons case, you must have the enemies succeed in stealing those things and you kill them before they can escape with them. the wandering nature of the heroes may conceal that tower defence nature of the game, but its only aesthetic.

id say alot of the "depth" of the strategy game remain on the cosmetic side of things.

[nenjin]

And really what was DKII in the sandbox? "Spend 30 minutes getting everything the way you want it, open the hero gates, precede to get bored in 10 minutes watching them die to your traps, or run into waves of monsters you tediously scooped up from the map to drop directly on the heroes."

Both games are strategy-lite. We've just convinced ourselves that DKII had more control. It really doesn't. It has a few more options for arranging base defense, but not that many. There are more tedium-inducing design features of DKII than Dungeons, like trying to get JUST the right monsters you want.

Especially the whole "Dungeon Lord harvesting" thing. I've found it's just as easy to only gank heroes occasionally and do just fine. You don't need to literally get every hero to full then go hunt them down. Babysitting monsters in DKII is nothing like satisfying heroes in Dungeons. The heroes in Dungeons actually do what they're supposed to do, without your involvement. Not like "Oh waaahhh, your treasure room is 4 tiles too far away for my liking, I QUIT unless you pick me up and pay me right now!" "Oh I'm huuuunnnggrrrrryyyyy. Never mind you have 4 chicken coops within walking distance, I'm hunnnngrrrrryyyy nnnaaaaoooowwww."

DKII may have been a better life sim. But I think it being a better strategic game is highly debatable.

[Viken]

While Dungeons may have come off as some sort of DK/DK2 rip-off or advent, the dev team repeatedly said that there is very little in common with the DK series.  After playing through the German demo (with very little success, sense my German is all but non-existant), I can say one thing for sure: the game has enough good points for those that want to build their own dungeon, and enough difference from DK to stand on its own.

Just looking at the game is awesome, and playing around with the bits and peices of it is a blast, especially as you try to figure out what parts do what and how they affect the heroes.  I wouldn't say that the game is 'puzzle' based, but it does have scripted bits that  require a response as soon as you can get to it.  I'm still waiting for the US release and my copy of the full game before giving my final verdict though.

[nenjin]

I know enough German, and can figure out enough, that I've decided I think I'll enjoy Dungeons once I get my copy. About the only thing I can't decipher is what exactly abilities do.

For those people who don't thrive on atmosphere and the whole imagination thing, Dungeons probably won't satisfy you.

For me though, the game mechanics are enough to support what I really enjoy: creating a thematic dungeon. I love all the visual details, personally, and that's a big draw DKII didn't have for me. I could dig a dungeon and put cool rooms in it...but that was it.

Dungeons actually lets me build a dungeon that looks creepy and operates by quasi-D&D rules. Maybe it's just because I've spent so many years creating PnP dungeons, and sticking treasure rooms where they have no earthly business being, that I enjoy a game that gives me some reasons and some mechanics for designing like that. Everyone is so super insulted that you're designing a dungeon that is "pleasing" to heroes....and frankly I think the entire concept went over their heads the minute they read it.

True to my normal style as well, I'm hammering the devs for improvements that will make the game a hell of a lot better, in my mind. I've suggested being able to buy up your pentagram cap, purchasable wandering monsters, positive/negative/passive effects for prestige objects, a few other things. So hopefully they're aren't so in love with their design they refuse to make changes. (They definitely sound like they're open to making some.) One thing I've noticed about their design is they're a little too focused on the campaign mission....a lot of mechanics are there to ensure the campaign is challenging and can't be so easily cheesed. When those mechanics carry over into sand box, people see them as limitations. So I'm trying to convince them to get away from so many mechanical limitations on our design. (Like fixed monster caps, for one.)

[burningpet]

I never said Dungeon keeper was a much better strategic game, and i think that it also never lived up to its own full potential. trust me when i say this, me finding Dungeons rather boring after a really short while has nothing to do with Dungeon Keeper 2.

If you wanna talk about atmosphere, and because the overall mechanics are different, which pretty much leave the atmospheric value of the game to be the shared factor of the two with both dealling with building undergound dungeons, then both games kinda tries to answer why dungeons in DnD and fantasy games look the way they look, or what happens in them when the heroes arent around.

DK2 took the whole "eco system" or "life sim" approach, which is a more naturalistic way of looking at the dungeons and basically saying, dungeons really are just homes for monsters, while "Dungeons" approached it directly as an answer to why dungeons looks the way they do in the mechanical way of things: why monsters are so weak early on, why is there a gradual advancement in the dungeon and so on, "Dungeons" pretty much answers directly to why dungeons built the way they are in video games.

so for me, atmospheric wise, disregarding all the visual goodies you can easily produce 12 years later (which, in my opinion, arent that great either), the mechanical way of looking at things in "Dungeons" prevent it from conveying real atmosphere, something which dungeon keeper 2 succeeded doing.

[nenjin]

I let go of the hopes this would be a real dungeon sim a while ago. It was already sounding mechanical in the reviews, and having talked a bit with the devs, I was sort of prepared for this. I agree the mechanical nature gets in the way of some stuff....or at the very least doesn't offer up enough mechanical goodness to make you love the design in spite of how transparent it is. That's the kind of stuff I (and a lot of their German players who are playing the full game) are suggesting they work on.

why is there a gradual advancement in the dungeon and so on, "Dungeons" pretty much answers directly to why dungeons built the way they are in video games.

I dunno about you, but I started playing D&D when I was 12. Most of my first years (and hell, even now) playing D&D ect.... were really just glorified video games, with dungeons designed exactly like this. So for ME, the atmosphere is fun. It's a little silly/WoWish for my taste, but I can look past that.

So overall, it's doing good things in my book because I like tycoon-esqe games and the video-gamey dungeon. Less than I like good sims (or a hard-boiled dungeon sim) but I still like 'em. I've easily killed 2 hours maxing out the demo content, only understanding half of what the stated mechanics are. With the full feature set, I'm sure it will eat up a few dozen more.

I'm not SHOCKED that everyone isn't wild about it. In playing Dungeons and thinking of Tropico and MudTV, I've realized Kalypso backs a very particular kind of game, and they're not to everyone's taste.

But I'm hoping people are at least even-handed with it at the end of the day, because I enjoy it and I think with improvement the game could get a lot better. Kalypso from the beginning has kind of hinged further Dungeon development on its sales performance.