State of Play – Dungeon Keeper: Mobile
Isn’t it funny how Dungeon Keeper’s tagline “Evil is good” has taken on a whole new meaning?
So I figured I’d chime in on this whole Dungeon Keeper: Mobile debacle. In short, it’s a travesty. It represents the wholesale disregard, on the part of a large company, for it’s developers, it’s fans and one of it’s most loved franchises. To create a game so despicably narrowly focused where it’s sole aim is getting the end user to splash some dollar is a horrid indication of where the game industry is.
Dungeon Keeper: Mobile is a game in name only, unless we’re talking about EA playing Russian Roulette again to see if it can get away with more vile business practices. It robs the genre of so many core game mechanics and replaces them with bastardised copies. No longer can the player have thirty or forty imps scurrying around the map doing a host of different tasks, now they must settle for two – or for a few dollars more three. The developers have used each and every opportunity to charge the people playing their game money. It takes the tropes of mobile gaming and microtransactions, and twists them in to a hulking behemoth of moral ambiguity.
I think the designer of the original Dungeon Keeper, Peter Molyneux, puts it best. In an interview with the BBC he said “I just want to make a dungeon. I don’t want to schedule it on my alarm clock for six days to come back for a block to be chipped.'” It is also worth noting that EA have quietly safeguarded themselves against poor reviews by encouraging players with the real-money currency ‘gems’ to rate their game as 5 stars on the apple and android app stores. If this does not show the sheer gall and disrespect for their fans and the medium they’re using I don’t know what does. I know that iOS games can be a little like the wild west and we all hear horror stories about a child accruing a ten grand debt on their mother’s tablet. I feel that this tactic is something far more sinister, it is uses basic bait and switch tactics to draw unsuspecting players in with the promise of free in-game items essentially circumventing the whole reason for a rating system.
I’m not even going to talk about how the game looks like a cartoony mess and how the horned reaper now looks like he listens to Yellow Card and Parkway Drive, however that analogy seems to fit the overall theme of today’s write up. Dungeon Keeper: Mobile actively panders towards it’s perception of people who want to play their game, those who are vapid and have little or no concern for their wallets or the health of the videogames industry. I know first-hand that there are plenty of great tablet games out there, at the PocketGamer: Connects EXPO Rob White and myself met many developers who were keen to become the next big thing. Taking what I could from their pitches, none of them were this brazen, lachrymose or frankly vile. There was something of a Lord of Flies moment when I saw just how laden it was with peripheral bollocks.
If Dungeon Keeper Mobile has achieved one thing however, after playing it I reinstalled War for the Overworld. It was great to see how well that game is coming along. The game seemed much deeper than when I last visited it and… well it’s telling that I had a four hour session on it. For those who haven’t read my preview of it, you should – I put some wit and pith in there, or at least attempted to.
[GARD]