You’re welcome.
Did you mean to post three reviews up? I only see two links, one duplicated!
So I read Sterling’s review and after all that I’m none the wiser about how it differs from the Dungeon Keeper games. I mean, when I spoke to one of the developers there were quite a few differences that made it sound a lot better mechanically than the originals (I hinted at these in my post above). There’s no mention of these things and, I’ve got to say, after getting frustrated with Dungeon Keeper’s combat recently they’re kind of important to me now! A remake is great, but let’s not forget to mention any improvements.
I sure hope they improve the mechanics. Ill be quite dissapointed if it is just a DK game with better graphics. I would like it to be true to its name, War of for the Overworld, which involves taking over the overworld hopefully involving whole new game mechanics.
Yep, and now I have the proper third link. They haven’t posted any other reviews and metacritic only has the first.
They’re putting out hotfixes every couple of hours, which is a bit crazy.
These are seven dudes living and working in the same house. They’ll kill each other eventually (one will get a girlfriend, probably), but for now there’s no better coding environment than that.
We haven’t even got a decent copy of dungeon keeper (before this) though. Just absolutely shit ones like dungeons and the mobile dungeon keeper.
About the closest i can think of is Evil Genius, but i consider that a different (but similar) animal personally.
Man… this looks fucking amazing. Once they iron out the bigger bugs, I’m going to be hard pressed not to jump on it.
Video on Steam looks almost identical to DK. And the reviews are all very positive. Very intriguing…
I watched a Let’s Play and… it’s Dungeon Keeper. Even shares a ton of the UI and visuals.
But it’s very rough atm. Tooltips and whatnot are often file names and the like. Plenty of strange glitches and bugs as well.
If they sort most of that out though… it’s basically DK3.
This is DK3. It is wonderful. If is also unfinished and full of bugs. That being said, I was practically tittering to myself during the first three missions last night.
God dammit, I was secretly hoping it would suck so I could avoid buying it.
They really have something with great potential here. It’s buggy and needs work but they really did nail the DK feel here. I’m enjoying it so far through the first four or five campaign maps. But damn they don’t pull any punches with the difficulty here. I haven’t played DK or DK2 in ages but so far this feels more frantic compared to my memories. The NPC factions don’t wait until you’re ready, they like to attack and keep on attacking until you manage to take them down or they roll over whats left of your dungeon. All in all I’m really happy with my purchase so far.
I’d hold off. I have it and “unfinished and full of bugs” isn’t a joke. There are a bunch of things that still say stuff like “GOLD_REF_PLACEHOLDER” in the tooltips and menus. It’s glitchy. There are main menu selections that have been rolled back due to stuff not working correctly.
Also, and this is a matter of taste, but the VO work is inconsistent. The main narrator is great since they got the original DK actor, but the “performers” for some of the units are reaaaaallly terrible. For example, the Warlock unit is voiced by a semi-famous MOBA player that’s apparently a buddy of one of the designers. And it sounds like it.
This is a dev’s commenton TB’s critical video:
As you can imagine, those of us here at our office, (5 of us consisting of the whole code team, myself and my boss the CEO and Creative Director for the project) were just gathered around a single computer watching TB’s Video; to which we must thank him for his critical and entirely fair review. We are deeply sorry to everyone who has been disappointed by our game upon it’s launch; It should have been ready, we were convinced we could make it ready.
Ultimately we were unprepared for how colossal a game like this could be, something that may have been better as a second, third or even fourth title from an upcoming studio rather than their first title. As neophytes to the industry we were overly confident that we could make our dream and the dreams of others come true, on time, within budget and without significant feature creep.
Naturally development of a video game is never simple and we entirely underestimated how complicated a game of this genre could be, while we have the skills and dedication of the incredible people on our team there’s only so much that a small team spread across the world can do, we’ve made mistakes, big ones, which have cost us crucial time and resources and that we have been trying to catch up and deal with ever since.
They go on to say they will dedicate their time to fixing the issues, but I’d hold off. They really launched too early.
That’s actually one of the big concerns that’s posted a lot on the forums – DK2 could be almost contemplative at times, allowing one to build up a nice, sprawling dungeon before having the dogs turned loose on it. WftO, on the other hand, has an almost RTS pace. I don’t like that much either. I wonder if this is a deliberate design decision or if it’s the result of being created by folks who played the original DK2 too much and found it too easy.
One other thing that really makes a difference here too is that you can’t pause and issue orders or even look around the map, the game is always going and these maps can be pretty damn big.
Thanks for this! Wishlisting for now.
I’ve got it wishlisted for now as well. I get the troubles of a small and inexperienced team biting off more than they can chew so I wouldn’t be completely opposed to throwing some money their way right now, but there’s so many other great games to play right now that I might as well wait while they get the ship righted.
What a great time for PC gaming. I’ve got so many good games occupying my time that I still haven’t touched Pillars of Eternity or Cities: Skylines yet. Then there’s expansions for Age of Wonders 3 and Endless Legend and GTA5 coming out next week as well. Meanwhile, I’m trying to find the time for more Star Ruler 2, VoidExpanse… I’m drowning in riches here!
With this and Scharmers comment, it really sounds like they heavily biased the gameplay to competitive multiplayer. The RPS interview addresses this same concern. With enough feedback, maybe they’ll try to address this some, after all the bug fixing.