How to Be Bad

The oft mourned developers, Bullfrog Productions, were responsible for a lot of things. A lot of very good things. Chief amongst which was an apparent ability to make Peter Molyneux’s “grand ideas” actually work. Second amongst them, though, was a nifty management sim with an RTS streak and a dirt-black humour. Dungeon Keeper.

I was ten years old and had little experience with games on PC, aside from educational stuff on old Acorns and even a BBC based text-adventure game at school. Oh, and watching my Dad and Uncle play DOOM. Essentially, what I knew about games, was Mario, Sonic and Ducktails. Happy characters, bopping around in cartoon worlds, saving the day. And I wasn’t all that good at them.

I can vaguely remember hearing my Dad explain what this new game he had bought was and feeling a gleeful grin on my face. Now, for context, I am a massive wuss. Mars Attacks gave me nightmares when I first watched it. As a young thing I was not good with the jumpy, scary things. Despite this, I remember the thrill I felt when I heard this was a game where you could be the dark and nasty things that lurk about the edges of good and right. I was intrigued and I watched. And it was beautiful.

I shouldn’t need to go into the actualities of the game by now. If you liked it, you loved it and, if you didn’t like it, you probably don’t like games that much so won’t care. Needless to say, everything about the game was superb: from the succulent purring of Richard Ridings’ malevolent PA/mentor, via the diverse and twisted creatures you lured and coerced into your force, to the depth of challenge involved in proceeding through the game, there was little that was not done just right. It was a perfectly formed, morbid assault on the senses. Like a Dark Mistress. If I could only play one game ever again, I would choose Dungeon Keeper.

This is why the last week has seen me not quite at my chipper and upbeat self. I could have been intensely happy. I could have been. But that would have relied on too much. For, you see, Bullfrog Productions are no more; lost to the great sponge of innovation that is Electronic Arts. And, along with Bullfrog went all of their amazing and diverse properties, including Dungeon Keeper. This was ten years ago and, for most of that time, I think the public were content to rest in the knowledge that there was little to hope for in terms of a new game in the series.

How I long for those days again.

There is a new Dungeon Keeper and I will never play it. There is an argument to say that no-one actually plays it, no matter how many times they may prod apathetically at their mobile devices.

Yes, that’s right, it’s a mobile game, and a “””””free””””” to play mobile game at that. There aren’t enough irony markers in the world to surround the word “”””””””free”””””””” in that sentence.

Again, I will not go into the details of these horrors here. Many others have done that far better than I. And I will also not try to attempt to unravel the mysteries of how a programmed and animated process of extorting ransoms in exchange for the promise of gameplay that never really seems to be met has become one of the most successful enterprises existing today whilst somehow avoiding countless legal disputes over its infinitely generous description of these games being “””””free.””””” That is a hopeless case I do not want to get involved in.

No, I simply want to pass on my feelings to you, in order to release the stress and heartbreak that I feel.

I have some reasons to be cheerful, though. First of all, both Dungeon Keeper and its sequel are available on GOG.com for a ridiculously low amount of money (in accurate terms, you can buy two whole games that are truly rich, entertaining and enjoyable experiences for the same price as 1200 “gems,” the equivalent of digging out a basic room, on the mobile app) and are likely to exist there forever, hopefully. You should definitely have a go on these games if you want to get into games and don’t really care about graphics (like right-minded, sensible people should).

Secondly, there are virtuous and noble developers out there in the world and, one of them are being spiffingly awesome and making Dungeon Keeper 3 themselves! by attempting to create a new, spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper and, from what there is so far (WarFor the Overworld; available through the Steam Early Access program) it looks like they might actually do very well at this.

But, and this could be a huge but, there is still the problem of this new “app for throwing money down a metaphorical toilet” version of Dungeon Keeper. Not in or of itself, mind, because such things can be cheerfully ignored (he lied), but more as a representation of a wider trend.

Microtransactions are a concern. Developers that build games roughly around a skeleton consisting purely of microtransactions are more so. Developers that will gleefully throw away good IP with a devoted following on to the trash heap of mobile “”””””””Free-to-play””””””””” are the most concerning. EA, already fairly unpopular as game publishers, will definitely have lost points for allowing this to happen whilst, at the same time, presumably refusing to allow the rights to the name “Dungeon Keeper” to anyone wanting to build a game that at least attempts to do the name justice i.e. Subterranean. EA’s attitude, quite clearly displayed in this interview by senior producer Jeff Skalski, is that this is the type of game people want and it’s not their fault if some people (traditional gamers e.g. people that have been clamouring for a DK sequel for a decade) exist behind the times. They say all this beneath a guise of admiring the game and wanting to spread it to a wider audience. I can think of a better way of doing that. But what has concerned me are the huge amount of positive reviews, both in the app and in outside journalism. They think that this (link NSFW) is not only acceptable, but in demand. They agree that this is just what games are like now, that complaints are simply unjustified bitching from uncultured heathens locked in the past behind an impenetrable wall of nostalgia. I cannot understand how everyone is not raging about this.

To go mildly off topic for a bit, I had been immensely excited around the time of the new console announcements due to a certain announcement that told the world that a new Mirror’s Edge game was on the way. Again, I had been waiting for this news for a long time.

Guess who publishes Mirror’s Edge? Guess how I now feel about the prospect of a new game in light of this sham of a Dungeon Keeper game?

Microtransactions are dangerous because people are buying into them. The more people buy into them, the more publishers feel justified in bringing them into more games; even AAA games. Gran Turismo 6, a Playstation staple, has recently bought into the microtransactions model, albeit at a much less intrusive scale but then you do pay upfront for that game. When a game is built around farming money, it abandons all chance of being any more than an unfulfilling time or money sink, and this is creepily becoming “just a thing” in games; where quality is sacrificed in exchange for mechanics intended purely to drag the money from your pocket. Sure, there are plenty of developers out there with good intents, and there will continue to be so. But, if new gamers are brought playing games that hold gameplay to ransom, how can we be certain that these Indie developers of the future will find a market enough to keep them up and running?

Sooner or later this bubble has to burst. If it doesn’t; if people keep just accepting games like (I hate to call it Dungeon Keeper) this new app, then a market that has been so rich and diverse could start to look a pretty dire prospect. We may have loved the game back as it was in the late 90s, but with a dark twist of irony we could see similar scenes play out in the video game world; this time, we could be innocent folks staring down the blood-stained scythe of Horny as he tugs on the chain-leash held in the gnarled hands of AAA publishers.