Friday 31 January 2014

EA Kills Dungeon Keeper

Do you know what Dungeon Keeper is?  Well if you don't I'm about to give you a lesson!

Dungeon Keeper was a PC game released in 1997 and developed by Bullfrog Productions.  The game was a real time strategy game where you played as a dungeon overlord, managing your dungeon, recruiting monsters and keeping heroes away from your dungeon heart with fiendish traps.

It was a really good game since you were basically free to mine out any part of the map and build something there.  Hiring monsters wasn't as simple as building a building and producing stuff, you had to do special things like torture enemies (or even your own creatures) to death or locking them in prison for a set period of time, it was an interesting take on the genre and it's a classic game.  No description I can give it will do it justice, just go and fucking play it.

So we've not had any kind of Dungeon Keeper action since Dungeon Keeper 2 which was released in 1999 but some time last year EA released Dungeon Keeper mobile.  I'm late to the party here but I'm sort of glad because this game is a fucking disgrace.

Dungeon Keeper mobile is a free to play game for phones and tablets and I guess is an attempt to bring Dungeon Keeper back.  I've not played it and I never will, so why am I so mad about it? 

Well, the way I understand is that when you try to mine out blocks of the dungeon, a timer appears.  Let me show you what I mean with a picture I got off the internet.

So as you can see it takes time to mine out a block, which I guess is fine for a mobile game, having to wait for things is kind of common.  But hold the phone, look at that fucking wait time! 24 goddamn hours to mine ONE! FUCKING ONE! block of the dungeon.  But wait, the bullshit gets even worse than this.

You can speed up the process of things in the game by spending green gems.  As far as I'm aware it IS possible to get green gems through mining, but it takes so fucking long to mine anything that it's not even worth it.  So of course, the game has micro transactions for these gems, take a look.

OVER $100 FOR GEMS! HOLY FUCKIN' SHIT.

Now you may look at that and think "oh, 14,000 gems is a lot, I could do a lot of mining with that surely?"  Well no, you're wrong.  Some guy on YouTube worked it out and 14k gems let's you mine FIFTY SIX fucking blocks.  Back when I played Dungeon Keeper on PC I'd mine 56 blocks in the first two or three minutes of the map just so I had space to put shit.

So yeah, surprise surprise, EA is being a bunch of money grubbing dickholes.  If you have ever bought gems for this game, please seek professional medical attention, because there is clearly something wrong with your brain. 

For people who want to experience some REAL Dungeon Keeper, head over to Good Old Games and buy the damn thing for like $5, and play for as long as you want without having to spend any extra.

Fuck this game, fuck EA and fuck anybody who supports this bullshit.

No comments:

Post a Comment