A huge area for the team is putting focus on a ”solid - and working - multiplayer component.” This game is ”definitely” a spiritual successor. Nobody has ”done it right since” those Keeper days.
Most recently the Kickstarter campaign has achieved half its goal, raising £75k. They’ve also released a gameplay demo and have War for the Overworld on Steam Greenlight.
The plan for this new underground dwelling of evil is basically bringing the Dungeon Keeper formula ”to a modern audience,” with quite a few new bells and whistles, like a multiplayer experience don’t hampered by the game’s traditionally single player design. This is a big area of concern for the Brighton development team.
”We are putting a lot of emphasis on a solid - and working - multiplayer component. This is something that Dungeon Keeper didn’t really have due to some of the design decision they made,” explained Josh Bishop.
”So we are hopefully trying to bring some functionality and depth to the multiplayer - such as removing abusable tactics and problems that exist in other god games, for instance in Dungeon Keeper, if you engaged the enemy there was no way to disengage because of the way the AI worked.”
”Also there were only a small number of workable strategies and so on - we aim to fix that. We are essentially adding a whole bunch of things along with a huge amount of choice on how to play the game.”
War for the Overworld is in safe hands when it comes to being ‘faithful’ to Dungeon Keeper. ”…a decent portion of the dev team are from a site called Keeper Klan which is probably the last remaining Dungeon Keeper fan site. A lot of us have being playing the Bullfrog Games for a decade, so this is something we have been wanting to do for a long time.”
”We all love Dungeon Keeper, and nobody has done it right since. Evil Genius was good, but some have been quite far out and we want to create a good, solid successor,” continued Bishop.
Evil Genius from Elixir Studios was released back in late 2004 and was a retro spy themed God game where we, as an Evil Genius, unleashed diabolical schemes upon the world and its super spies. It shared a great deal with Dungeon Keeper in minion management and carving out a lair bristling with deadly traps and world dominating facilities.
”The core team is about 10 to 15 - but this is a game born out of a big community so there’s a lot of collaboration.” Subterranean have strong ties with the modding community and are planning to let fans use the very same tools they do to make new content. At launch there’ll be a short campaign, multiplayer and sandbox.
”It’s something we took from Dungeon Keeper feedback in that there was no mode for people just to play with whatever dungeon they felt like creating. As for the narrative, there will be an overarching story, and we want to expand upon it in the future but we haven’t figured that bit out yet.” Dungeon Keeper 2 introduced ‘My Pet Dungeon’ which was as close to sandbox as you could get, but it still set challenges to be completed and other gameplay constraints.
”We want it on Steam, and we are going to be submitting it to Steam Greenlight when we are able - but contrary to what their sites says, it’s a little more complicated to submit a project, it was changed recently. So we’ve had a little trouble going past the concept stage and to an actual game,” revealed Bishop.
The project is doing well on Kickstarter. ”It’s been overwhelmingly positive. The only problems has been some slow burning press, beyond that the community response has been overwhelming and we’re already half way to our goal.”
War for the Overworld should release a ‘bedrock beta’ March 30th next year, with a full version August 30th.
”If you ever played Dungeon Keeper, then you need to play this game. That’s the bottom line.” Check out our full interview with Josh Bishop as we wax nostaglic and slap a few imps. The Kickstarter campaign has 15 days to go and a gameplay demo has been released via the official website.
