![]() ![]() The most common counter-argument at this point is that mobile games, more often than not, aren't designed for people who have been playing for years. Does that sounds like a good, fair experience? This is the perfect time to be stingy, good sir. The "best" Clash of Clans players in the world rise to the top rankings on the leaderboards not through skill, but through how much money they're willing to spend, as this eye-opening report from Wired describes. The most popular games on mobile, such as Supercell's Clash of Clans, EA's The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Kabam's "midcore" strategy games, all follow this model. "Friction" is created by making players wait, or by not quite giving them enough money to do something, or, in some cases, by limiting the number of actions they may take in a single day through an energy bar or lives system, and the only way to alleviate the "fun pain" that "friction" creates is by paying.ĮA's Dungeon Keeper is far from the sole offender in this regard, either. Players are not respected as people who want to have fun they're treated as resources who need to be exploited. Herein lies a serious problem with the mobile games industry as a whole right now: good game design is frequently sacrificed in the name of making something more likely to make money. Actual "strategy" is minimal it's simply a case of buying the most powerful things you can afford, giving rich players an immediate and insurmountable advantage. Once you've built your dungeon and someone invades, all you can do is hope that the game's rudimentary AI system doesn't behave like an idiot similarly, if you decide to "raid" a rival player's dungeon, all you can do is choose where to drop your troops, not command what they do or where they go. This video from NerdCubed - salty language ahead, be warned - neatly sums up the most common objections to the new game.īeneath the freemium exterior, EA's mobile version of Dungeon Keeper isn't a very good game, either. There are several key differences, however: the most minor is the fact that the game's original aesthetic has been replaced by a distinctly Zyngafied look, with bland, cartoonish characters rather than the stylized creatures of the original the most major, meanwhile, is that everything you do in the game - from digging out a single square of rock to constructing a trap - takes varying amounts of real time, and can be "rushed" by spending the game's premium currency of gems.Īnd with even the most simple tasks occasionally taking up to 24 hours of real time to complete - yes, digging out a single square can take a whole day - EA is counting on impatient players to want to spend those gems as quickly and as often as possible, and as such has provided in-app purchase options that extend all the way up to $100 at a time to facilitate the collection of said gems. They were fondly regarded for their dark sense of humor, solid gameplay and interesting take on the usual tropes of the fantasy genre - even today, it's still relatively unusual to have the opportunity to play as "the bad guy."ĮA's new mobile version is superficially similar to the original Dungeon Keeper games in that you dig out tunnels to make space for rooms, slap imps about to "motivate" them and then defend your dungeon against intruders. Dungeon Keeper isn't the first example of a business model completely destroying any semblance of gameplay or fairness from a mobile title, and I'm pretty certain it won't be the last.įor the few of you reading who might still be unfamiliar, Dungeon Keeper was originally a series of real-time strategy games developed by Peter Molyneux and his Bullfrog team for PC. This may sound like hyperbole, but sadly, we're far beyond that now. "We don't have a mobile gaming industry any more," wrote new media commentator Thomas Baekdal over the weekend in reference to EA's new mobile version of Dungeon Keeper, "we have a mobile scamming industry." Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. ![]()
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