![]() If League of Legends and Team Fortress 2 can get it right in the PC gaming arena, not to mention a lot of games that ARE getting it right on mobile, then generalising about the merits of this business model is the wrong reaction.īad games are bad games. First, because the latter argument lumps all free-to-play games in together, rather than trying to distinguish between good and bad examples. In its current form, new Dungeon Keeper isn’t good, but does that mean it’s evil? That’s the implication (and, in fact, the straight accusation) of many of the game’s critics: that EA has ruined Dungeon Keeper and, by extension, this awful free-to-play business model is ruining games and screwing gamers. Online outrage is one thing, but EA will be able to tell if actual players are also drifting away from Dungeon Keeper, and – in theory – try to fix the problems. ![]() That caveat is because timers can be shortened, currency costs can be reduced… Everything is tweakable in response to how people are playing the game. The interlocking system of virtual currencies – gold, rock, mana and gems – and the need to expand and upgrade your rooms is geared towards hard purchases. And the game’s place in the ancestry of Clash of Clans is clear too, which may have been one reason people like me – a fraction of the latter game’s audience, admittedly – fell for Supercell’s game.)īut yes, new Dungeon Keeper wants you to pay: its timers quickly start kicking in, as you realise if you don’t hurry up your imp-digging and room-building, you’ll be waiting for hours until you can go on a raid or fend of an attack. (As a side-note: I wonder if it was memories of the original Dungeon Keeper that first got me into Minecraft, digging out sprawling underground dwellings. You can still slap imps to make them work harder, and for the first few minutes, the thrill of creation and being the boss of your own dungeon really comes through. There are quite a few good things about new Dungeon Keeper: its sense of humour has survived the remaking process, and it’s visually polished. Having spent more time with new Dungeon Keeper now, I’d moderate that: I don’t think they’ll be offended, but I suspect they’ll have more fun with Clash of Clans and other games in the base-building attack-and-defend genre (likely not the right phrase, but you know what I mean). My view was that while I wouldn’t recommend it to fans of the original, it might appeal to that new generation of gamers – people who’ve started playing on Facebook and/or mobile devices, and aren’t primed to be offended by a much-loved game of their youth going free-to-play. When I included the new Dungeon Keeper in my best apps of January roundups for Android and for iOS, there were some cross comments, asking why The Guardian would promote this game at the expense of other, more deserving titles. Molyneux, it should be said, isn’t some old goat complaining about his baby being reimagined for a new generation: he’s making free-to-play games himself nowadays, and has been publicly enthusiastic about the potential of this business model to reach a wide audience of players. “I don’t think they got it quite right, the balance between keeping it familiar to the fans that were out there but fresh enough and understandable enough for this much bigger mobile audience.” I don’t want to schedule it on my alarm clock for six days to come back for a block to be chipped,” Molyneux told BBC News this week. “Yet what we have here is the shell of Bullfrog’s pioneering strategy game, hollowed out and filled up with what is essentially a beat-for-beat clone of Clash of Clans,” wrote Eurogamer.įormer Bullfrog boss Peter Molyneux has weighed in to the debate too: “I felt myself turning round saying, ‘What? This is ridiculous. “If you take away the fun of making weird dungeons, throw up timers longer than other games, and give less enjoyable results, what leg does this game really have left to stand on?” wrote TouchArcade. “It’s like EA saw dollar signs after the success of Clash of Clans, and wanted to clone it in the worst way possible – by using a respectable IP as its skin,” wrote Destructoid in its review. This year’s iOS and Android remake, it’s fair to say, is not – at least not in its current form. Rather than explore dungeons slaying and looting, the game put you in charge of the dungeon, digging out new rooms and populating them with monsters and traps. ![]() Developed for EA by British developer Bullfrog Productions, it was released on PC in 1997. ![]() The original Dungeon Keeper was brilliant. And while the game itself deserves a lot of that criticism, it has also become a focus point for the wider arguments around free-to-play gaming. Still, in an increasingly-crowded field of controversial freemium EA games on mobile devices (see: Real Racing 3, Plants vs Zombies 2), Dungeon Keeper is causing the biggest stink. ![]()
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