I am far from an expert player (since all of my experience is on "easy mode") but I didn't notice any real difference in difficulty between patched DK and KeeperFX; there's quite a bit of variability in where the DK AI will get to once I'm ready to expand and all the FX games I played were within that range. Great work on the remake/expansion, by the way. It works great, strikes a nice balance between QoL updates and authentic feel, and was super stable all the games I played.
@@TimberwolfK Thanks. And happy to hear it. As for patches, although I did have internet at the time I would not have considered looking for a patch. I did get it though, because the patch was distributed in other ways too, I got it on the demo-disk that got bundled with a PC-gaming magazine. Most people who play the game these days will not use their disk though, but get it from GOG or Steam, which come pre-patched already. And indeed, KeeperFX is based on the patch and we try to retain the difficulty of the patched version.
I never had a problem with Tickle, but I followed the "cheat" strategy. First, don't click out of the previous level until I get a level 10 reaper/mistress/dragon. Transfer said creature with a special. Possess said creature to absolutely wreck the opposing keeper. Transfer said creature to the next level. Basically, turn a management sim into an FPS for many levels. That's the ticket.
I love that they did this - there's a straight-up way to play the levels but you often have a "cheese" strategy (like grabbing the hellhounds and attacking Blue's dungeon heart immediately) or the option to explore the previous level thoroughly and bring across a strong creature to help turn the odds in your favour.
Tbh, it made me actually enjoy the dk1 even more. Its truly a game which never stops surprizing me, and fanmade content truly tributes all different sides of the game, which might not all be fun for casual players, but still interesting to look at.
Wait, what the hell? 2.3k views in a day??? This is better and more concise than the overwhelming majority of video essayists, I'd've expected at least 100k before youtube reccomends it to me lol.
This is life as a small channel... you keep working at it and paying your dues and learning how to do it better, and then every once in a while you hit the magic combination that puts a video in the "is being shown to a wider audience" category. I remember when I'd be overjoyed with 23 views in a day!
You just say at child me straight in his face that he was in fact not good at the game but the AI was being stupid. Oh Lord, time to set that right here and now if I say so. It is gonna be a BREEZE, right? English is not much of a problem to me now.
It's all fun and games until you run into 'totally not the Avatar from Ultima' or enter the expansion levels that are torture implements of their own. (and highly puzzle like IIRC)
Oh my god I had this exact bug! Some levels were okay, it'd be a 20% chance of getting a proper AI, but a lot of the time the AI was so passive! Never knew this was the case, but it definitely explains why KeeperFX is so much more difficult (and more fun tbh)
@loobinex5518 it wasn't a different team. Peter Molyneux and had already left, but many of the original team worked on Keeper 2, including the lead level designer, and two lead programmers for the original game. A good number of people joined Peter at Lionhead eventually.
I remember, back when i was a kid playing Dungeon Keeper, the possession spell blew my mind. Being able to explore my own dungeon in first person was so awesome.
Ahhh that AI bug you mentioned explains a - bizarrely lingering - memory I have where on one level I could not win because the enemy Keeper's base was completely impenetrable . I forget the map exactly but the Enemy Keeper starts with some rooms (lair, gold, training etc) that is surrounded by fortified walls where the AI would, presumably, knock them down when they start digging outwards. I had no means of destroying their fortifications (don't think the spell is on that level) so after spending a good 40 minutes to an hour clearing the rest of the map out, all I could do was wistfully look on at their base-turned-panic room before loading a save.
If you're fast enough with moving imps around ahead of the party of invaders, you can deadlock the very first tutorial level in this way. (Admittedly, you also have the power to break down the walls once you get bored)
If you have a fast enough creature, you can dig out the corner wall so that your dungeon and his dungeon are touching on the diagonal and clip into his dungeon in symbiosis.
You can use a creature that has the wind spell, like a warlock or witch, to blow all your creatures into such a dungeon, at places where there are angles. Once his/her/its dungeon heart is destroyed, walls without a room behind it, can be dug out. Call to Arms spell also works in a dungeon, where the creatures were blown in by a warlock.
That actually happened to me a couple years back when i played Eventually they did open up leading to me running a very grumpy siege (my minions were upset as I could not find any more gold on the map)
as a kid growing up in the early 2010s, i remember finding the mobile dungeon keeper, and my dad seeing that and promptly setting me up with a copy of proper keeper
I did the exact same thing as you. Downloaded KeeperFX and was blown away by the AI. No more turtling like a did as a kid with a buggy original copy of the game. I had to really learn all the mechanics to beat the game. All of them.
Oh...I am German. The German version most definitely suffered from the same bug you have mentioned. I clearly remember digging happily away for gold with no real threat until I was content and breezed through the level.
For some reason I thought this would be pretty isolated (despite the obvious implication that there must be a vast number of identical CDs to mine out there, and not everyone would have found the patch online or on a magazine disc) so it's good to hear I wasn't alone.
In Dungeon Keeper 1 back in the day, I wouldn't bother progressing past level 3 because it had infinite money gem mining and I could train my dudes to my heart content, and as long as I expanded early so my imps could fortify the walls, the heroes would never get in until I fancied stomping them into the ground. Mostly you've just gotta be aggressive as hell in the first one and I am just not aggressive, I wanna vibe and slap my creatures so they work faster! Dungeon Keeper 2 had the pet dungeons and that was my shit.
I'm very much of the "turtle strategy" approach. When I play Total Annihilation, I end up building a massive high-tech base fortified to the gills and slowly creeping across the map with long-range artillery. (And now I think of it, my Factorio factories and outposts are inevitably a solidly walled-off "nothing gets in, nothing gets out" affair)
@@TimberwolfK Me too! I turtled for years! But once you start raiding you can no longer stop! And a tank or turret creep can do wonder for the long term peace of your factory! PS; if you like the TA world you should check Spring and the games ZeroK and Beyond All Reason!
You touched on having memories of the original flawed version of the game. This is why video game preservation is so important but complex. Even for the games that we can archive, which version is correct? People's nostalgic experience of a game is tied to the patch version they played on, not just the game itself.
Yep - I understand fully that GOG et al. just want to host a ready-wrapped version that the vast majority of users can just install and play without needing too much technical knowledge, but I'd love it if they could host images of the original CDs and patch disks for people who're able to emulate (or even have the correct physical) appropriate hardware and get the full 'original' experience. Of course, there's always the option of eXo and Internet Archive once you've bought your copy.
Yes this is an issue of a few old games. But even without bug-fixes making ai no longer randomly fail and become too easy. Some game coders end up unintentionally making the primitive ai as fast+good as possible, without limits to resulting primitive ai performance. A common code issue is "try to solve this complex task, that you may not solve within the given time limit. if (you failed to solve the maze/problem within a time limit) do to a simpler method of trial and error" This unironically and secretly makes ai-factions significantly more difficult on faster PCs with more multi-cores. such an ai may also suddenly be able to perform more commands per time, more micromanagement.
Great video, Memories of kicking down the walls of enemy dungeons with an army of level 10 dragons to face the starved flies and beetles they had, only to play a Gold version of the game years later and get stomped in the expansion pack levels
I must admit, the times I tried a rush strategy I tended to stop short of winning outright, for the joy of absolutely stomping the map at the end with an enormous army.
I'm going to start muttering this whilst walking past my boss. Followed by "Your minions are annoyed; you cannot pay them." Followed by "Your minions are vandalising your dungeon."
I know it's truism by this point but I really miss the times, when developers just went full ham with creativity and created these weird titles that actually felt innovative.
I played the gold version when I was young, I remember there being a massive difficulty spike from an early level so tickle on FX isn't out of the ordinary for me or having to adopt unorthodox strategies on to deal with specific Keepers or Lords, to its part of what makes dungeon keeper well dungeon keeper.
So I love Dungeon Keeper 2 for 2 main reasons. 1: It is by itself a really solid game that has stood the test of time. 2: It is the only non-swedish game where I think the Swedish translation is better.
This is one of my favourite games, honestly, i love it. Keeper FX being an amazing expansion/fix. And Dark Mistresses are unironically my favourite creatures even if they are an absolute *nightmare* to keep focused once they're able to teleport (Priestess casts Whirlwhind, Mistresses lose interest in fighting). Still love the mentor saying "You have an excess of Mistresses, there's a word for keepers like you" . The Horned Reaper also became a game changer once I learned how to keep it from going into PSYCHOMADANGRY mode (that's actually either the actual name in the code for when they act like a crazy ex girlfriend or something close to it.) (For the one person who doesn’t know: Just keep them camped on a guard post when they aren't training or fighting)
Really, the trick is simply to keep Horny busy. Ideally with something he likes doing. They'll overlook having to house with the rest of the rabble as long as they don't get bored. I think i just threw them in the temple, that would usually keep them content.
@@Llortnerof doesn't putting him in the temple *also* make him angry? It's been a while since I played so might be confusing him with Vampires. But yeah, as long as he's busy he's happy. I just found the guard post method to be the most effective since I could build a little forwards outpost with a hatchery, treasury, and lair then stick him on a nearby guard post where he was generally very successful in holding off anything short of a full scale invasion
I'm kind of glad to hear that I wasn't the only one who did the whole "2 players playing one 3D game" thing back then. I did not do that with dungeon keeper (I just did not possess creatures), but did that with Magic Carpet. I don't understand how I was able to remain friends with the person I played with because we were awful at communicating!
I had/have the gold edition, and one of the better things about that is if you put the CD in a regular player, and skip track 1 (game data), you get several music tracks to enjoy.
I had the demo from somewhere, and like with demo of ps1 euro disk of Populous: the Beginning I was able to hack or cheat in both. PS1 must have cheat code, or some other overflow bug that opened the spells and missing training and construction huts, but DK had it so that I could go and change the simple level code and introduce the monsters that weren't supposed to be in demo version in the game, but they didn't have textures, and were just dots that moved around the level. Later on through some friend of a friend, who was adult and I wasn't or didn't trust in my english skills yet pirated me both of these games. I bought Black & White. Both games, then I heard there was Fable, but after Minecraft came out so I was late on Fable, but yeah... I got to play DK, DK2 and Populous: the Beginning in the end. I must have got the game with floppy disk, or the pc I first got. It was a gift of some sorts... Windows 95 was on it. Big chunk of a display, and the pc was "solid" also...
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought "What have they done?!?!" when experiencing "new" tickle. I had no idea it was an AI bug.... one of the big draws for 'god' games for me was pottering rather than efficiency so I think I prefer it bugged 😅
Oooooh! Pizza Tycoon! (Which wasn't really a Tycoon-game, but anyway.) I play it still every once in a while. It's one of those games with a strong personality I just love.
I have a similar story with Warcraft III. I stomped the game as it shipped with Huntress rush before I had good internet. Got good internet, thought "Oh wow I should play against real people" and suddenly my huntress rush as night elves didn't work so well because they got nerfed early on. Took me a while to figure it out.
My only beef with Dungeon Keeper was that the last few levels seemed to be designed as such that the only way to win was to train up a high level monster, poses it, and then head-shot the enemy dungeon heart. And that's just a cheap way to play IMHO... I want to train all my creatures, and then have a massive fight on the doorstep of my enemy, pushing deeper into their dungeon, taking it room by room. But that just doesn't seem possible in the late-game, and people tell me I'm playing it wrong. I appreciate the reason why gold is limited, and you need to get on with it, but also I'd love a version where you can play a long-game.
That was a fun video, good job. I played DK2 as a kid, never the original. Also, I have no idea why this video got recommended to me since I have never once looked up anything dungeon keeper related. My only guess is that I have been looking up a lot of Battletech stuff recently, and the ever so lovable UA-cam algorithm picked up "Timberwolf" as a word often associated with Battletech. For those not familiar with the setting, it is one of the names for what may well be the most iconic mech they have. The other name for it is the Mad Cat, which may be why UA-cam keeps suggesting reviews of Mad Catz controllers...
Ah yes, back in the days when it was still in recent memory I had people asking me if the name came from playing Mechwarrior 2. (Sad reality: I hit an IRC nick collision and the first thing which happened to catch my eye while searching for a new name was a poster of some wolves that was hanging in our student house. Good thing it wasn't anything more lewd, really.)
I tried to play Dugeon Keeper as a kid but found it too difficult to make much progress. I wonder if I'd had the bugged version would I have enjoyed it more? Maybe it was a feature rather than a bug
My shop bought copy of R-type repeats level seven twice instead of playing level eight due to a copy protection bug. Technically, I still haven't beaten the game.
Honestly this is something i've seen happen over and over and over again, people not realizing they are playing very bugged games because we were kids. There are alot of great classic games like this that have versions that are terrible broken or have one or two very major bugs and we just all never realized at the time lol
Maybe I should give Dungoen Keeper a swing.. I remember playing it on Windows XP - which did not like to run it... And I got halfway through the game before it just didnt want to run anymore.
Ah yes, I didn't go anywhere near Keeper95 - those early "we'll give you both a DOS executable and a Windows one" never seemed to like running on anything more modern. (I think The Need For Speed SE even gives up if you have too modern a DirectX on Windows 98! At least, I had some weird DirectX-related issue preventing me from running it)
You are one of two youtubers that I have notifications turned on for. I get them when the other one uploads but not you for some reason. I have just been watching your last few videos because I thought 'timberwolf hasn't uploaded in a while I should check out his channel' and lo and behold there were 3 videos I got no notification for... As always, love the videos. I will just have to manually check your channel more often for new uploads.
Ah yes, the joy that since everybody asks you to subscribe and set notifications, UA-cam then assumes that you don't actually want notifications, so instead tries to generate them algorithmically with varying levels of success.
the game I am making is a mixture of black and white and dungeon keeper. Currently you can build cities, dig tunnels, pick up and throw your minions, and possess a minion
I completely adored Black & White as a small child. I didn't mind the clunkieness as it was all so mysterious and magical, and I had a big evil cow. I could name the people after my bullies and feed them to my cow.
I've noticed you older Brits love the original DK over DK2 and you guys usually are critical of Black and White as well, but for me DK2 is the best one, it's the one I played first, and the "war for the overworld" trailer they packaged into the 2nd game for me was half-delivered in the form of Black and White. It's clearly the next game in the series, and it's clearly what came from them trying to make DK3 WFRTO. Like I mentioned, the game I am making, while 2D, attempts to incorporate gameplay from both series.
I do feel like I should give B&W another chance at some point. I saw someone describe it as more of a "Zen game" - that it was best to slow down and just let it flow at its own pace.
@@TimberwolfK Not if you're trying to win! It's a magical game, that's the only way to explain it. The second game is less magical because of all the menus and sliders. The best way to win the first game is to use dancing rocks, but they are never tutorialised ever, and they are almost an easter egg. If you managed to finish the game as a child you most likely became a dev later in life (all those logic puzzels!)
@@TimberwolfK I would love to actually talk to you more but I suppose I should just make a video about it. Yes the tutorial for B&W is awfully long and boring but it makes sense that they were concerned as the control system is beyond the average person. Literally, just to control the camera you need to be in the top 40th percentile for visual-spatial intelligence, just to move around the world comfortably. Why do you think no other game uses this camera system? It's the best camera system from any RTS game ever made, but they will never use it again because it immediately alienates 60% of your player base. The best dev conference talk in the world is the one entitled "honest game design", where he makes the point that as a dev you have to choose between making money and making a good game, between making a game for low intelligence people or a game that the dev himself would enjoy.
Old brit here. I played both Keeper 1 and 2 as a child, and I believe Keeper 2 is superior. The gameplay was more refined in Keeper 2; in the original game, magic costing gold is a big hinderance to the use of magic, and the spells are so expensive. The movement to Mana in DK2 as the currency for magic not only encourages magic use, rather than punishes it, but the cost of spells this much better balanced. Some creatures are completely useless once the player has access to more powerful creatures in DK1 and the power balance between the strongest and weakest creatures is huge. In DK2, almost every creature has a useful job they will perform outside of battle, and combat is more nuanced. Creatures have a bunch of different fighing styles that give them an edge against certain other types of enemies, this is true to an extent in DK1, but it is for more enhanced in DK2. DK1 does have a little different style than DK2, and some people will prefer one to the other.
I do see DK2 get a lot of hate. I didn't play it back when it first released, but only much later from GoG, and I was surprised by how good it was. It really does feel like a natural extension of DK1. It isn't just more Dungeon Keeper, but it is also *better* Dungeon Keeper in a lot of ways. I wonder if DK2 released in a really buggy state, so if you played it back in the day it left you with a bad impression? As for B&W, I can't imagine anybody not loving that game. B&W 2 had a lot of very cool ideas (the military stuff could get kind of epic and fun), but to me it was like they streamlined out a lot of the charm of the original game. The creature felt really organic in the first game. It was rewarding just to take it out on a walk and play fetch with it. It was charming to get distracted doing something else, then return to my creature to find it had picked up some quirky habit while I wasn't looking. In B&W 2 the creature feels more gamey. You more explicitly set the behaviors of your creature, so the creature just feels like just something you min-max to win the level. I'd still play the hell out of both of those games if they ever got a digital distribution release (EA, please).
One of my favorite and most played games. I cannot stand to play it anymore. I did a nostalgia playthrough 2 years ago and decided that it was enough. Rounded the game atleast 25 times, both original, patched and fx version.
I didn't expect to see a dungeon keeper video on my feed, wow. I remember playing this as a child and having so much fun building the best dungeon until I had all the resources. I even got dungeon keeper 2 a few years ago and I had so much nostalgia for it. I wasn't great at it, but it was good fun :)
I always thought the person who i got the game from had it modified. This is seriously the first time, i've seen other people complain about enemy keepers not mining for gold.
I wonder how many, like me, just didn't know how it was supposed to be. Ineffective AI and opponents who never seemed to get much done weren't uncommon at the time.
I've worked for people like that and I do feel that for a company the size and situation of Bullfrog to have the impact they did in the '90s, it *needed* someone like Peter. Someone who said "yes" and worried about the consequences later, and could spin a story on top of anything. He had a gift for coming up with lines that sounded great in previews, like "we're having to censor some of the sounds because they're too realistic" for Syndicate or "each guest has their own personality" for Theme Park, and with those older games your imagination often filled in the gaps the code left.
Mostly thinking I was great at Dungeon Keeper and could breeze through the game without thinking, rather than the reality of me being catastrophically slow, and useless at running rooms efficiently :D
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You really had me worried I still failed with balancing Tickle there. Glad to see the extensive research done.
I am far from an expert player (since all of my experience is on "easy mode") but I didn't notice any real difference in difficulty between patched DK and KeeperFX; there's quite a bit of variability in where the DK AI will get to once I'm ready to expand and all the FX games I played were within that range.
Great work on the remake/expansion, by the way. It works great, strikes a nice balance between QoL updates and authentic feel, and was super stable all the games I played.
@@TimberwolfK Thanks. And happy to hear it.
As for patches, although I did have internet at the time I would not have considered looking for a patch. I did get it though, because the patch was distributed in other ways too, I got it on the demo-disk that got bundled with a PC-gaming magazine.
Most people who play the game these days will not use their disk though, but get it from GOG or Steam, which come pre-patched already. And indeed, KeeperFX is based on the patch and we try to retain the difficulty of the patched version.
Did you get anyone to "test tickle"?
I never had a problem with Tickle, but I followed the "cheat" strategy. First, don't click out of the previous level until I get a level 10 reaper/mistress/dragon. Transfer said creature with a special. Possess said creature to absolutely wreck the opposing keeper. Transfer said creature to the next level. Basically, turn a management sim into an FPS for many levels. That's the ticket.
I love that they did this - there's a straight-up way to play the levels but you often have a "cheese" strategy (like grabbing the hellhounds and attacking Blue's dungeon heart immediately) or the option to explore the previous level thoroughly and bring across a strong creature to help turn the odds in your favour.
Tbh, it made me actually enjoy the dk1 even more. Its truly a game which never stops surprizing me, and fanmade content truly tributes all different sides of the game, which might not all be fun for casual players, but still interesting to look at.
Wait, what the hell? 2.3k views in a day???
This is better and more concise than the overwhelming majority of video essayists, I'd've expected at least 100k before youtube reccomends it to me lol.
This is life as a small channel... you keep working at it and paying your dues and learning how to do it better, and then every once in a while you hit the magic combination that puts a video in the "is being shown to a wider audience" category. I remember when I'd be overjoyed with 23 views in a day!
You just say at child me straight in his face that he was in fact not good at the game but the AI was being stupid. Oh Lord, time to set that right here and now if I say so. It is gonna be a BREEZE, right? English is not much of a problem to me now.
It's all fun and games until you run into 'totally not the Avatar from Ultima' or enter the expansion levels that are torture implements of their own. (and highly puzzle like IIRC)
Oh my god I had this exact bug! Some levels were okay, it'd be a 20% chance of getting a proper AI, but a lot of the time the AI was so passive! Never knew this was the case, but it definitely explains why KeeperFX is so much more difficult (and more fun tbh)
I've got a feeling that the version I had was also the same one that you had... and now I'm curious.
I loved Dungeon Keeper as a kid, and DK2 as well.
One of those days I pray for someone to make a remake of first dungeon keeper game with better balancing.
How did this game do commercially?
Good enough that they made Dungeon Keeper 2
It was a big hit, totally against E.A. expectations. It's why they rushed out a sequel with a different team of people.
@loobinex5518 it wasn't a different team. Peter Molyneux and had already left, but many of the original team worked on Keeper 2, including the lead level designer, and two lead programmers for the original game.
A good number of people joined Peter at Lionhead eventually.
@@jgomo3877 The core team did not. Beyond Peter M, the Carter brothers and Mark Healey were gone. Which 'lead programmer' worked on both games?
i am afraid you have to reload and redo your childhood
Real life needs savestates.
The death of Bullfrog is one of EA's greatest crimes.
what about how they’re handling the plants vs zombies franchise?
@@masonasaro2118still a crime just far lesser
I stopped buying EA games when they axed Lionhead. It's been a while...
I stopped buying EA games when they axed Lionhead. It's been a while...
Bullfrog, Westwood, Visceral, Popcap, Bioware, Maxis, ...
EA has a looong streak of ruining studios
I remember, back when i was a kid playing Dungeon Keeper, the possession spell blew my mind.
Being able to explore my own dungeon in first person was so awesome.
Ahhh that AI bug you mentioned explains a - bizarrely lingering - memory I have where on one level I could not win because the enemy Keeper's base was completely impenetrable . I forget the map exactly but the Enemy Keeper starts with some rooms (lair, gold, training etc) that is surrounded by fortified walls where the AI would, presumably, knock them down when they start digging outwards. I had no means of destroying their fortifications (don't think the spell is on that level) so after spending a good 40 minutes to an hour clearing the rest of the map out, all I could do was wistfully look on at their base-turned-panic room before loading a save.
If you're fast enough with moving imps around ahead of the party of invaders, you can deadlock the very first tutorial level in this way.
(Admittedly, you also have the power to break down the walls once you get bored)
If you have a fast enough creature, you can dig out the corner wall so that your dungeon and his dungeon are touching on the diagonal and clip into his dungeon in symbiosis.
You can use a creature that has the wind spell, like a warlock or witch, to blow all your creatures into such a dungeon, at places where there are angles. Once his/her/its dungeon heart is destroyed, walls without a room behind it, can be dug out. Call to Arms spell also works in a dungeon, where the creatures were blown in by a warlock.
That actually happened to me a couple years back when i played
Eventually they did open up leading to me running a very grumpy siege (my minions were upset as I could not find any more gold on the map)
@@k96man Well, at least they now had somebody to complain to.
as a kid growing up in the early 2010s, i remember finding the mobile dungeon keeper, and my dad seeing that and promptly setting me up with a copy of proper keeper
Dungeon Keeper mobile was a crime, and your dad is a good egg.
I did the exact same thing as you. Downloaded KeeperFX and was blown away by the AI. No more turtling like a did as a kid with a buggy original copy of the game. I had to really learn all the mechanics to beat the game. All of them.
Damn, it was a good name and they had to drag its name through the dirt a few years ago with that disgrace of FTP mobile piece of schlock.
Oh...I am German. The German version most definitely suffered from the same bug you have mentioned. I clearly remember digging happily away for gold with no real threat until I was content and breezed through the level.
For some reason I thought this would be pretty isolated (despite the obvious implication that there must be a vast number of identical CDs to mine out there, and not everyone would have found the patch online or on a magazine disc) so it's good to hear I wasn't alone.
same
In Dungeon Keeper 1 back in the day, I wouldn't bother progressing past level 3 because it had infinite money gem mining and I could train my dudes to my heart content, and as long as I expanded early so my imps could fortify the walls, the heroes would never get in until I fancied stomping them into the ground. Mostly you've just gotta be aggressive as hell in the first one and I am just not aggressive, I wanna vibe and slap my creatures so they work faster! Dungeon Keeper 2 had the pet dungeons and that was my shit.
I'm very much of the "turtle strategy" approach. When I play Total Annihilation, I end up building a massive high-tech base fortified to the gills and slowly creeping across the map with long-range artillery. (And now I think of it, my Factorio factories and outposts are inevitably a solidly walled-off "nothing gets in, nothing gets out" affair)
@@TimberwolfK Me too! I turtled for years! But once you start raiding you can no longer stop! And a tank or turret creep can do wonder for the long term peace of your factory!
PS; if you like the TA world you should check Spring and the games ZeroK and Beyond All Reason!
You touched on having memories of the original flawed version of the game. This is why video game preservation is so important but complex. Even for the games that we can archive, which version is correct? People's nostalgic experience of a game is tied to the patch version they played on, not just the game itself.
Yep - I understand fully that GOG et al. just want to host a ready-wrapped version that the vast majority of users can just install and play without needing too much technical knowledge, but I'd love it if they could host images of the original CDs and patch disks for people who're able to emulate (or even have the correct physical) appropriate hardware and get the full 'original' experience.
Of course, there's always the option of eXo and Internet Archive once you've bought your copy.
Yes this is an issue of a few old games.
But even without bug-fixes making ai no longer randomly fail and become too easy.
Some game coders end up unintentionally making the primitive ai as fast+good as possible, without limits to resulting primitive ai performance.
A common code issue is "try to solve this complex task, that you may not solve within the given time limit. if (you failed to solve the maze/problem within a time limit) do to a simpler method of trial and error"
This unironically and secretly makes ai-factions significantly more difficult on faster PCs with more multi-cores.
such an ai may also suddenly be able to perform more commands per time, more micromanagement.
Great video, Memories of kicking down the walls of enemy dungeons with an army of level 10 dragons to face the starved flies and beetles they had, only to play a Gold version of the game years later and get stomped in the expansion pack levels
I must admit, the times I tried a rush strategy I tended to stop short of winning outright, for the joy of absolutely stomping the map at the end with an enormous army.
I still sometimes say "You cannot aforrrrrrd, to train creatures" at passers-by. Or i do in my mind at any rate.
Well, I know what's going to be in my head the next time I'm trying to get the dogs to do something and realise I've just used my last treat.
I'm going to start muttering this whilst walking past my boss. Followed by "Your minions are annoyed; you cannot pay them." Followed by "Your minions are vandalising your dungeon."
Oh god, I can hear it. Even the drawn out "aforrrd".
A trap has been manufactured! Your workshop is not big enough!
"A vampire has risen in your graveyard!" "Your pants are too tight!"
Timberwolf wonderfully outstandingly magnificent splendidly remarkably glorious
I know it's truism by this point but I really miss the times, when developers just went full ham with creativity and created these weird titles that actually felt innovative.
Outside the innovative part that is still true in the Indie scene. A lot of them are just passion projects people are doing in their free time.
I played the gold version when I was young, I remember there being a massive difficulty spike from an early level so tickle on FX isn't out of the ordinary for me or having to adopt unorthodox strategies on to deal with specific Keepers or Lords, to its part of what makes dungeon keeper well dungeon keeper.
"being exiled to his home office --"
lollll god.
I didn't really play Molyneux games after this, so as far as I'm concerned he's pretty much the greatest game designer that's ever lived :D
So I love Dungeon Keeper 2 for 2 main reasons.
1: It is by itself a really solid game that has stood the test of time.
2: It is the only non-swedish game where I think the Swedish translation is better.
I absolutely love your narration. Thank you so much for this video!
I did not know about KeeperFX and now I want to play DK again. Thanks for the video.
This is one of my favourite games, honestly, i love it. Keeper FX being an amazing expansion/fix.
And Dark Mistresses are unironically my favourite creatures even if they are an absolute *nightmare* to keep focused once they're able to teleport (Priestess casts Whirlwhind, Mistresses lose interest in fighting).
Still love the mentor saying "You have an excess of Mistresses, there's a word for keepers like you" .
The Horned Reaper also became a game changer once I learned how to keep it from going into PSYCHOMADANGRY mode (that's actually either the actual name in the code for when they act like a crazy ex girlfriend or something close to it.) (For the one person who doesn’t know: Just keep them camped on a guard post when they aren't training or fighting)
Really, the trick is simply to keep Horny busy. Ideally with something he likes doing. They'll overlook having to house with the rest of the rabble as long as they don't get bored. I think i just threw them in the temple, that would usually keep them content.
@@Llortnerof doesn't putting him in the temple *also* make him angry? It's been a while since I played so might be confusing him with Vampires.
But yeah, as long as he's busy he's happy. I just found the guard post method to be the most effective since I could build a little forwards outpost with a hatchery, treasury, and lair then stick him on a nearby guard post where he was generally very successful in holding off anything short of a full scale invasion
Huh, I guess I also had that bug haha.
I sucked anyhow lol!!! Couldn't beat tickle ever anyhow.
I'm kind of glad to hear that I wasn't the only one who did the whole "2 players playing one 3D game" thing back then. I did not do that with dungeon keeper (I just did not possess creatures), but did that with Magic Carpet. I don't understand how I was able to remain friends with the person I played with because we were awful at communicating!
I had/have the gold edition, and one of the better things about that is if you put the CD in a regular player, and skip track 1 (game data), you get several music tracks to enjoy.
The only thing i got from this video was "go reinstall Black & White".
The fan patches make it run pretty well on Windows 10/11, too!
I had the demo from somewhere, and like with demo of ps1 euro disk of Populous: the Beginning I was able to hack or cheat in both. PS1 must have cheat code, or some other overflow bug that opened the spells and missing training and construction huts, but DK had it so that I could go and change the simple level code and introduce the monsters that weren't supposed to be in demo version in the game, but they didn't have textures, and were just dots that moved around the level.
Later on through some friend of a friend, who was adult and I wasn't or didn't trust in my english skills yet pirated me both of these games. I bought Black & White. Both games, then I heard there was Fable, but after Minecraft came out so I was late on Fable, but yeah... I got to play DK, DK2 and Populous: the Beginning in the end.
I must have got the game with floppy disk, or the pc I first got. It was a gift of some sorts... Windows 95 was on it. Big chunk of a display, and the pc was "solid" also...
Most definitely still seems Modern SOMEHOW and imo looks a ton better than DK2
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought "What have they done?!?!" when experiencing "new" tickle. I had no idea it was an AI bug.... one of the big draws for 'god' games for me was pottering rather than efficiency so I think I prefer it bugged 😅
Oooooh! Pizza Tycoon! (Which wasn't really a Tycoon-game, but anyway.) I play it still every once in a while. It's one of those games with a strong personality I just love.
I have a similar story with Warcraft III. I stomped the game as it shipped with Huntress rush before I had good internet. Got good internet, thought "Oh wow I should play against real people" and suddenly my huntress rush as night elves didn't work so well because they got nerfed early on. Took me a while to figure it out.
My only beef with Dungeon Keeper was that the last few levels seemed to be designed as such that the only way to win was to train up a high level monster, poses it, and then head-shot the enemy dungeon heart.
And that's just a cheap way to play IMHO... I want to train all my creatures, and then have a massive fight on the doorstep of my enemy, pushing deeper into their dungeon, taking it room by room. But that just doesn't seem possible in the late-game, and people tell me I'm playing it wrong.
I appreciate the reason why gold is limited, and you need to get on with it, but also I'd love a version where you can play a long-game.
That was a fun video, good job. I played DK2 as a kid, never the original. Also, I have no idea why this video got recommended to me since I have never once looked up anything dungeon keeper related. My only guess is that I have been looking up a lot of Battletech stuff recently, and the ever so lovable UA-cam algorithm picked up "Timberwolf" as a word often associated with Battletech. For those not familiar with the setting, it is one of the names for what may well be the most iconic mech they have. The other name for it is the Mad Cat, which may be why UA-cam keeps suggesting reviews of Mad Catz controllers...
Ah yes, back in the days when it was still in recent memory I had people asking me if the name came from playing Mechwarrior 2. (Sad reality: I hit an IRC nick collision and the first thing which happened to catch my eye while searching for a new name was a poster of some wolves that was hanging in our student house. Good thing it wasn't anything more lewd, really.)
I tried to play Dugeon Keeper as a kid but found it too difficult to make much progress. I wonder if I'd had the bugged version would I have enjoyed it more? Maybe it was a feature rather than a bug
My shop bought copy of R-type repeats level seven twice instead of playing level eight due to a copy protection bug. Technically, I still haven't beaten the game.
Yes! I have the same problem with age of empires II! I played on the very original vanilla without patches or expansions!
What are you doing? The training room is built facing the water where blue comes from. Then iIt doubles as a guard post.
I miss the game concept of Black and White D:
Haven't found anything coming even close to that up to now :/
Honestly this is something i've seen happen over and over and over again, people not realizing they are playing very bugged games because we were kids. There are alot of great classic games like this that have versions that are terrible broken or have one or two very major bugs and we just all never realized at the time lol
Nothing earns a sub from me faster than a joke about Peter Molyneux's living arrangements.
No I bought the Gold Version on GOG years ago and the enemy AI does play the game I played the no enemy competition version too.
I never played dungeon keeper despite being of the right age. But I heavily play dungeon keeper 2.
The Commolyneuxne sounds both brilliant and hellish at the same time. o.o
mice. i mean, nice.
I love this game. But I played the sequel more than the original.
Dungeon Keeper content in 2024? We eating good tonight boys
Maybe I should give Dungoen Keeper a swing.. I remember playing it on Windows XP - which did not like to run it... And I got halfway through the game before it just didnt want to run anymore.
Ah yes, I didn't go anywhere near Keeper95 - those early "we'll give you both a DOS executable and a Windows one" never seemed to like running on anything more modern. (I think The Need For Speed SE even gives up if you have too modern a DirectX on Windows 98! At least, I had some weird DirectX-related issue preventing me from running it)
Still one of my fave games of all time. In the top 100 it is in the top 20.
You are one of two youtubers that I have notifications turned on for. I get them when the other one uploads but not you for some reason. I have just been watching your last few videos because I thought 'timberwolf hasn't uploaded in a while I should check out his channel' and lo and behold there were 3 videos I got no notification for...
As always, love the videos. I will just have to manually check your channel more often for new uploads.
Ah yes, the joy that since everybody asks you to subscribe and set notifications, UA-cam then assumes that you don't actually want notifications, so instead tries to generate them algorithmically with varying levels of success.
Ahh yes... the glory days of magic carpet....
How can you call the threathening printer messages a BAD idea?! Its absolutely hilarious and needs to be implemented in more games.
It perhaps needed some way of detecting if the game was being run at EA corporate...
Another triumph, sir!
I'd watch a live stream of you playing Dungeon Keeper Mobile
The part of me that likes utterly HORRIBLE ideas is fascinated, it must be said...
man , what a laugh. Thank you , Timberwolf
the game I am making is a mixture of black and white and dungeon keeper. Currently you can build cities, dig tunnels, pick up and throw your minions, and possess a minion
What I mostly learned from Dungeon Keeper is that my library is too small.
I completely adored Black & White as a small child. I didn't mind the clunkieness as it was all so mysterious and magical, and I had a big evil cow. I could name the people after my bullies and feed them to my cow.
I've noticed you older Brits love the original DK over DK2 and you guys usually are critical of Black and White as well, but for me DK2 is the best one, it's the one I played first, and the "war for the overworld" trailer they packaged into the 2nd game for me was half-delivered in the form of Black and White. It's clearly the next game in the series, and it's clearly what came from them trying to make DK3 WFRTO. Like I mentioned, the game I am making, while 2D, attempts to incorporate gameplay from both series.
I do feel like I should give B&W another chance at some point. I saw someone describe it as more of a "Zen game" - that it was best to slow down and just let it flow at its own pace.
@@TimberwolfK Not if you're trying to win! It's a magical game, that's the only way to explain it. The second game is less magical because of all the menus and sliders.
The best way to win the first game is to use dancing rocks, but they are never tutorialised ever, and they are almost an easter egg. If you managed to finish the game as a child you most likely became a dev later in life (all those logic puzzels!)
@@TimberwolfK I would love to actually talk to you more but I suppose I should just make a video about it.
Yes the tutorial for B&W is awfully long and boring but it makes sense that they were concerned as the control system is beyond the average person. Literally, just to control the camera you need to be in the top 40th percentile for visual-spatial intelligence, just to move around the world comfortably.
Why do you think no other game uses this camera system? It's the best camera system from any RTS game ever made, but they will never use it again because it immediately alienates 60% of your player base.
The best dev conference talk in the world is the one entitled "honest game design", where he makes the point that as a dev you have to choose between making money and making a good game, between making a game for low intelligence people or a game that the dev himself would enjoy.
Old brit here. I played both Keeper 1 and 2 as a child, and I believe Keeper 2 is superior.
The gameplay was more refined in Keeper 2; in the original game, magic costing gold is a big hinderance to the use of magic, and the spells are so expensive. The movement to Mana in DK2 as the currency for magic not only encourages magic use, rather than punishes it, but the cost of spells this much better balanced.
Some creatures are completely useless once the player has access to more powerful creatures in DK1 and the power balance between the strongest and weakest creatures is huge. In DK2, almost every creature has a useful job they will perform outside of battle, and combat is more nuanced.
Creatures have a bunch of different fighing styles that give them an edge against certain other types of enemies, this is true to an extent in DK1, but it is for more enhanced in DK2.
DK1 does have a little different style than DK2, and some people will prefer one to the other.
I do see DK2 get a lot of hate. I didn't play it back when it first released, but only much later from GoG, and I was surprised by how good it was. It really does feel like a natural extension of DK1. It isn't just more Dungeon Keeper, but it is also *better* Dungeon Keeper in a lot of ways. I wonder if DK2 released in a really buggy state, so if you played it back in the day it left you with a bad impression?
As for B&W, I can't imagine anybody not loving that game. B&W 2 had a lot of very cool ideas (the military stuff could get kind of epic and fun), but to me it was like they streamlined out a lot of the charm of the original game. The creature felt really organic in the first game. It was rewarding just to take it out on a walk and play fetch with it. It was charming to get distracted doing something else, then return to my creature to find it had picked up some quirky habit while I wasn't looking. In B&W 2 the creature feels more gamey. You more explicitly set the behaviors of your creature, so the creature just feels like just something you min-max to win the level.
I'd still play the hell out of both of those games if they ever got a digital distribution release (EA, please).
The least timberwolf looking guy online
2,338,612,911th, actually.
One of my favorite and most played games. I cannot stand to play it anymore. I did a nostalgia playthrough 2 years ago and decided that it was enough. Rounded the game atleast 25 times, both original, patched and fx version.
I love alot of games of that era... Loved dungeon keeper and böack and white
You know, you remind me a little bit of Rowan Atkinson, and I say that as the highest form of compliment.
I didn't expect to see a dungeon keeper video on my feed, wow. I remember playing this as a child and having so much fun building the best dungeon until I had all the resources. I even got dungeon keeper 2 a few years ago and I had so much nostalgia for it. I wasn't great at it, but it was good fun :)
I still remember late nights of being told to go to bed in Dungeon Keeper 2.
Yeah, I played it recently patched and level 7 is hard
Your creatures are fighting amongst themselves.
No one has ever been more British
I always thought the person who i got the game from had it modified. This is seriously the first time, i've seen other people complain about enemy keepers not mining for gold.
I wonder how many, like me, just didn't know how it was supposed to be. Ineffective AI and opponents who never seemed to get much done weren't uncommon at the time.
Kick out any creature that isn't an orc or a warlock - I like to call it, 'Purple Peril'.
Cool video, great memories.
Ah yes, the "back you go" as rubbish creatures come through the portal :D
Thank you for not screaming at me for engagement
Looks like a crack house
486 for the win
I think Peter Molyneux promised what he actually wanted, then developers, budget, and reality let him down.
I've worked for people like that and I do feel that for a company the size and situation of Bullfrog to have the impact they did in the '90s, it *needed* someone like Peter. Someone who said "yes" and worried about the consequences later, and could spin a story on top of anything. He had a gift for coming up with lines that sounded great in previews, like "we're having to censor some of the sounds because they're too realistic" for Syndicate or "each guest has their own personality" for Theme Park, and with those older games your imagination often filled in the gaps the code left.
Nice
I do wonder though what it was you thought you knew :p
Mostly thinking I was great at Dungeon Keeper and could breeze through the game without thinking, rather than the reality of me being catastrophically slow, and useless at running rooms efficiently :D
@@TimberwolfK "Yes, my army of level 10 dragons is once against victorious against these untrained angry insects". :p
Loved the video :)
Shout out to your awesome profile picture. I love The Neverhood!
@@dollors1 Good taste, it's always cool when people notice it
For anyone wanting a modern-ish (It came out almost 10 years ago) dungeon keeper game, check out War for the Overworld