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Open-Source 4K Dungeon Keeper Remake Spent 15 Years In the Making (pcgamer.com) 55

Posted by BeauHD from the come-to-the-rescue dept.
Rick Lane reports via PC Gamer: KeeperFX has been in the process of rescuing Dungeon Keeper for a decade and a half. The project originally started in 2008, and experienced something of a bumpy road up until 2016. Since then, though, it has gradually added support for Windows 7, 10, and 11, support for hi-res and 4k screens, modernized controls, and even additional campaigns. With this latest version, KeeperFX's developers say "all original Dungeon Keeper code has been rewritten, establishing KeeperFX as a true open-source standalone game." 1.0 also introduces some new features, such as higher framerates, AI that is better at digging and less likely to "instantly" throw its entire army at you, and "higher quality landview speeches" for the additional campaigns. That refers to the introductions and epilogues to missions which, in the game's original campaign, were voiced by Richard Ridings, aka Daddy Pig.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, KeeperFX's 1.0 adds a couple of new units to play with. First up is the Druid, a sort-of color-flipped version of the Warlock who uses ice spells rather than fire. The other unit is the excitingly named Time Mage, a recolor of the Wizard who can cast teleport and speed spells, and also turn enemy units into chickens (presumably through rapid devolution). You won't find these units in the original campaign, but you will encounter them in the custom campaigns bundled with the 1.0 version. You can download KeeperFX here, although it still requires you to own Dungeon Keeper "for copyright reasons."
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Open-Source 4K Dungeon Keeper Remake Spent 15 Years In the Making More

Open-Source 4K Dungeon Keeper Remake Spent 15 Years In the Making

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  • Or (Score:2)

    by Barny ( 103770 )

    Or you could get a more modern version of the genre that has added new ideas and moved forward.

    • Do you have any recommendations? This looks interesting unless it's pure tower defense.

      • Evil Genius. It's brilliant, it has style, it has humor. The original, though there is a new Evil Genius I have not tried it to see if it measures up. I was disappointed in Dungeon Keeper since it wasn't as engaging as Evil Genius was. If you just want to play the bad Overlord, there's always Overlord though I haven't played that.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I was disappointed in Dungeon Keeper since it wasn't as engaging as Evil Genius was.

          DK predated EG by seven years*... and as someone who played the original EG I think people are overly complimentary of it. It was buggy, had awkward controls and you spent roughly 50% of the game waiting for minions to run to and from the dock. The sequel is broadly the same as the original, but has had many QoL improvements. There were a few bugs when it was released but EG2 is pretty solid now.

          *Which was quite a lot back then. It had to use Doom-style sprites for anything that moved FFS. You could install

        • there is a new Evil Genius I have not tried it to see if it measures up.

          It doesn't. It's a dumbed-down, cellphone game version of the original.

      • Re:Or (Score:5, Interesting)

        by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Monday November 13, 2023 @11:06PM (#64003875)

        War for the Overworld is probably the best one I've seen. It takes the basic Dungeon Keeper idea and expands upon it into a campaign where you can fight with the forces of Good in the titular Overworld. It maintains all the basic mechanics and sense of humor with more modern controls. More impressively, the narrator is voiced by the original actor who did Dungeon Keeper. https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com]

        If you want something that sticks to the original formula less slavishly, Dungeons 3 is another contender.

      • Do you have any recommendations? This looks interesting unless it's pure tower defense.

        The Dungeons series. Dungeons 4 is the most recent. But it's effectively a DK clone. Same clever humor, interface, concept. Really good game

      • This [gog.com] was apparently just released. Can't comment on the quality, but there's another one.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by SendBot ( 29932 )

      This has added new units and campaigns.

      I'm curious to know what you suggest for alternatives. War for the Overworld is good, and it's a basically a sequel to DK. I forget why I stopped playing, think it was that the visuals were too hard to make out or something with the controls. But I remember DK was nigh perfect and fun, just too outdated to run well on modern systems.

    • There have been few modern versions of the DK genre with the same thematic consistency, sense of humor *and* meaningful improvements.

      I guess DK2 was consistent but that was the equivalent of XCom Terrors of the Deep to XCom so I remember it as the same game tbh. DK never got its "Firaxis reboot" and I've probably bought and abandoned halfway-through any remotely similar game I can remember. Evil Genius was meh. Overlord made an attempt I guess but fell flat. Fable promised to allow something similar in a na

      • I'm going to be giving Dungeons 3 and 4 a try; apparently they're the closest a commercial game has come to catching the DK/DK2 lightning. I've heard good things about War for the Overworld, too.

    • New ideas like a beautiful ingame currency system and waiting times of hours to days unless you spend some of those beautiful modern gems!

  • Original DK concept was PVP (Score:4, Interesting)

    by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Monday November 13, 2023 @10:15PM (#64003785)

    The published version was entertaining but what they originally announced they wanted to do was a PVP multiplayer where the evil wizard player was directly against a team of human player heroes invading his dungeon.

    Sadly, that didn't happen. I guess it was too hard with the technology available at the time.

    • I never played it. But, according to the Wikipedia page, "Multiplayer with up to four players is supported via a modem or over a local area network (LAN).[2][22] The game features twenty multiplayer levels,[9] playable as single-player levels.[2]"

      • True but different implementation. That's just multiple dungeon keepers. In the original announced plan the other players would be invading heroes doing a first person perspective dungeon crawl against the human evil wizard. Like a true real time d&d game of sorts.

  • I've played nostalgia games before (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Monday November 13, 2023 @10:20PM (#64003797)

    For me, the joy doesn't last long before it becomes obvious those games were fun because we couldn't do better yet. There's a reason we're not playing Infocom text adventures any longer.

    I'd play this updated version... if it were free. But honestly I'd rather read an article about it than pay to play it no matter how low the price.

    • Re:I've played nostalgia games before (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Monday November 13, 2023 @10:51PM (#64003857) Homepage

      There's a reason we're not playing Infocom text adventures any longer.

      Speak for yourself! The reason isn't that they're not good, the reason is that literacy rates are on the decline and we've polished animated visual distractions to a nearly exact science. But if you think stuff like ChatGPT won't bring us back full-circle there, you haven't been paying enough attention. Comparing Dungeon Keeper's shelf-life to Infocom text games is false equivalence. The truth is, DK was one of the last gasps of CRT-optimized graphics, and we couldn't do better yet, and now on modern display hardware the original code looks stale and visually muddy. Absolutely nothing about new display technology however is detracting from the experience of playing Infocom text adventures, unless you're nostalgic for waiting "1.49 minutes" to load them. Mark my words, Infocom text adventures will rise to popularity again within our lifetimes.

      • >The reason isn't that they're not good,

        The reason is they weren't good, and they didn't last long enough to get good enough to compete with graphical games before graphics could dazzle enough most wouldn't bother.

        Surely you remember the old, "that move you made for move 4, well, now you're screwed at move 112 and you can't go back, start over!". And it wasn't like you could have figured it out without playing to move 112 at least once. And it wasn't like that was the only 'gotcha' waiting for you. Th

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Narcocide ( 102829 )

          Surely you remember the old, "that move you made for move 4, well, now you're screwed at move 112 and you can't go back, start over!"

          Come on, even graphical games are guilty of this. Even many recent ones are guilty of this. The lack of unlimited backtracking isn't a technological limitation, it's just a design choice. Even Mario games lacked it until very recent versions, long after it was technically possible. Believe it or not, the influence between culture and technology goes both ways, and back then, the people who played these games just had more time on their hands and were expected to be fluent in the use of the "save game" featu

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Calydor ( 739835 )

            Depending on your definition of unlimited backtracking I think the first Mario game in which this was possible was Super Mario World on the SNES.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Planetfall was fun. Trying to crack the safe in Stationfall made me give up on the game forever.

          Modern IF games care more about their players. There's even a cruelty scale [ifwiki.org] to let players know what games are unfair.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I never played Dungeon Keeper, but what I like about older games is that the best of them offer a compelling challenge. In the late 90s a lot of games moved away from being a challenging system, with rules to learn and skills to master, to being interactive movies where you shoot in generally the right direction and watch the story play out.

        The joy of mastering something was lost.

      • Why do you think text as a medium will rise again, over more visual media? IMO, the only way that infocom text adventures could rise, is because graphics (and UIs) could be auto-generated from the stories and integrated with those games.

        • Come now, certainly you're putting me on here. With AI, a more expansive and continuing story, more interactive environments, and more verbose language interpretation abilities could all even be auto-generated now. Thinking about adding graphics to it is thinking way too small. Think about adding text.

    • The people who loved them still love them now and that is why these fan remakes get made. It is to scratch their itch, and they will loyally play this and enjoy it just as much as they did then.

    • So when I spotted this news item re: KeeperFX, I recalled my wife (whom I met in '96) LOVED playing this game back in the day... so I sent her the link. She was so chuffed I surprised her by cleaning up an old Windows 10 laptop and setting everything up. When I showed it to her I expected her to play for a few minutes, but then that stretched to an hour as she giggled and chortled at "smacking imps". Hell, even those of us who weren't fans of the game were losing it at the sound effects alone. (those CHICKE

  • Was this game good? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I remember seeing it when it came out but I never played it. Just wondering what makes it special enough to put this kind of work in to it.

    I'm surprised they "rewrote" it but there is no Linux version. That really seems to indicate the developers don't have any experience or much skill.

    When this game came out it was a transition period. 3D accelerated games were barely getting started. I believe this was before even the decent 3DFX stuff. So graphics were iffy.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      It had a very unique kind of silly-dark humor, especially for its time. You usually play the goody-two-shoes protagonist, but here you got to play the mustache-twirling evil mastermind trying to destroy the entire world for the lulz. One of the first things the game introduced you to was how to speed up your worker minions. Not by praising them, not by giving them money, but by slapping them around. Literally.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      I am sure if someone wanted to port their engine re-creation to Linux they wouldn't say no...

      They probably just don't have anyone on the team who knows enough about Linux to make the port happen.

    • That is because it was rewritten by a Windows developer so ofc he knows nothing about Linux. And apparently there have been no interest from macOS or Linux devs to port it over (which is not so strange considering just how obscure the project really is).

      • The irony is that the game extensively uses Linux-based tools for building. A lot of stuff has to be installed on a Windows machine to build it, which is why I never bothered trying. I already have enough trouble as it keeping up with dependencies for other MSVC projects I work with (mostly emulators).

        Yeah, I'm also scratching my head as to why a Linux build isn't available yet. My guess is that even though the gameplay mechanics have been rewritten, there's a lot of graphics related stuff that hasn't be

    • Yes, I don't have much experience or skill, but there's also some old dependencies that prevent a linux port at this time. DK2 was the game with the early 3d models, DK1 is all sprites and so in my view has held up quite well graphically because of that.

  • I loved that game. But the later levels were so difficult, the game was virtually impossible to complete. I hope they will do some level design fixing as well, or this will be the same limited amount of fun as the original.

    New levels could also be one more step towards truly being a free game.

    • This is not the general consensus, quite the opposite in fact. A key problem with the original dungeon keeper was a lack in content where a large part of the original campaign was tutorial and introduction levels. Most people find very little challenge in the original campaign. KeeperFX has lots of user made content bundled, and much more available for download, but most of this is a significant step up in difficulty compared to the original game, although easier stuff does exist. There's also a computer a

    • The problem with most fan-created levels is that they rely heavily on well-known bugs and limitations with the AI for completion. It's not so much strategy as memorizing all the stupid tricks.. Alas, many of those tricks break every time the KeeperFX developers change the AI model. Some of my old custom levels don't work right with KeeperFX, as imps easily get confused by specific terrain patterns.

  • Well.. I'm not going to get anything done today...

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