AJ’s Top Tips: how to stop your game being an utterly shitty Dungeon Crawler

For starters, developers, I know that not all of you can make the next Torchlight or Diablo. I am here to say that you don’t have to be the supermodel of Dungeon Crawlers to get your audience. So from me to you here are some top tips to make sure you do:

Bedlam

1 – Licence your game out to a familiar and sensible brand. This way the name or cover will entice some (un) lucky individual to take a look in your direction.

2 – Price yourself right. 60 dollars is too much for most. Aiming for an XBLA title is a good idea but remember, unless you genuinely think you have more to offer than Torchlight (and most of you don’t) then don’t price yourself as such. Instead, try and come up with enough to make it worth approaching your title over Arkadian Warriors.

D&D Daggerdale 01

3 – Okay, so maybe you aren’t as pretty as Torchlight. That’s fine, just offer something Torchlight doesn’t: 4-player same-screen co-op.

Note: D-Crawlers live and die by their couch play; it is not enough to just have 2 players.

4 – Okay, so maybe you aren’t that pretty and maybe you struggle to have 2-player couch play. Maybe your online code sucks. In that case, at least try and maintain some sense of dignity. The way to do this is to not have performance issues. Things like framerate stuttering on a download title is inexcusable when you are streaming straight from the hard drive. The same goes for asset and texture pop-in. If you can’t look like the best your art director attempted, then you shouldn’t be flaunting your wares at all.

D&D Daggerdale 02
What she said… girlfriend.

5 – This ties into performance. Don’t rush your release if you have the kind of glaring bugs that, although not deal breaking, demonstrate poor craftsmanship. Things like dead enemies floating in mid-air, collision issues that see your character stuck or flying up the walls, or mission text not appearing. All of it screams amateur execution. This is not acceptable.

6 – Everyone knows that a Dungeon Crawler can often descend into an undisguised series of nondescript fetch quests and endless loot grinds. Take a page out of the best and try and make the motivation to do this compelling. This can be done in one of two ways (you don’t need both but it would be the best if possible):

A – Make the story at least marginally interesting, not as if every piece of text was written by the CEO’s 13 year-old son who has read too much RA Salvatore.
B – Make the loot interesting, don’t make every single drop just another thing to trade in at the store with little in the way of compelling upgrades.

7 – Failing that, try not to break the combat. Trying to introduce some kind of combo system is a nice idea but if you end up making the act of killing irritating instead of just mindless then you are doing something wrong.

D&D Daggerdale 03
Did I mention the ghost characters and glitches? I did? Awesome.

8 – Don’t get confused: you are a Dungeon Crawler. No one wants to end the game on a weak Shadow of the Colossus moment fused to a tedious quick time event.

All joking aside, D&D: Daggerdale fails miserably on all of these counts. It is an insult to Dungeon Crawlers and an insult to the franchise it is based on. I honestly had more fun playing the XBLA re-release of Gauntlet.

Avoid at all costs.


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21 responses to “AJ’s Top Tips: how to stop your game being an utterly shitty Dungeon Crawler”

  1. oddvorbis Avatar
    oddvorbis

    Played the demo 5 minutes. Starts in a cave killing something like goblins or orcs or something like that. Felt like Neverwinter Night all over again. People should just fuck off with rats, bats orcs and goblins.

    1. badgercommander Avatar
      badgercommander

      Good thing you didn't play the full game, later on they get Skeletons. Your mind would have been blown.

      1. oddvorbis Avatar
        oddvorbis

        Well to be completely honest, skeletons are some of my favorite npcs. I find them usually hilarious and sometimes pretty cool. I wish there were more games where you played with skeletons.

        I'll admit the skeleton enemy fodder has been overdone though.

        1. badgercommander Avatar
          badgercommander

          Oh these were unique because some times they were on fire (yet still received fire damage from fire damage dealing weapons), some of them were captains, some were both on fire and captains.

          Awesome.

          I forgot to mention the utterly horrific cutscenes that looked like placeholder art work and the animated ones where the characters would talk Simlish.

    2. ShaunCG Avatar

      I would play a dungeon crawler in which you literally fucked rats, bats, orcs and goblins until you got tough enough to punch a troll to death.

  2. Dylan Avatar
    Dylan

    "4-player split-screen co-op." No no no!! Dungeon Crawlers are one of the few games left that can do what they do for 2 – 4 local players without the hassle and disappointment of split screen. I don't know the word for it, but that style where the camera zooms out to accommodate all players is definitely preferable.

    *Longs to play Champions of Norrath again*

    1. badgercommander Avatar
      badgercommander

      My mistake, it has been corrected, I meant same-screen Co-Op but wrote Split Screen for some reason.

      Whoops

      1. ShaunCG Avatar

        Actually I think that was one of my edits. I shouldn't edit stuff late at night whilst sleep deprived. It makes me crazy.

  3. BeamSplashX Avatar

    Such a shame. I think there's room for a dungeon crawler with lots of complexity under the hood, and I hoped Daggerdale would hit this sweet spot. For it to be even less statistically and tactically interesting than Dungeon Siege III is nothing short of a waste.

    WANTED: Dungeon crawler with Champions Online-style character creation, Twilight Princess-inspired combat, and no money wasted on plot cruft that you're not skilled/funded enough to make us care about it.

    Or Phantasy Star Online 2.

    1. badgercommander Avatar
      badgercommander

      All I wanted was an up-rezed version of Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes. Your wanted list is good apart from the Twilight Princess thing, are you suggesting you want waggle features? I am part of the Anti-Waggle Association so I can't agree to that.

      Also careful about mention PSO2, me and Guillaume will start ranting rabbiedly if we see any talk of this sort of stuff while there is a full moon.

      Fuck me do I want to play Phantasy Star Online 2.

      1. BeamSplashX Avatar

        I meant the Gamecube version. Down with waggle!

        So… how about that PSO2?

        P.S. PSO2.

        1. badgercommander Avatar
          badgercommander

          Oh man, Guillaume showed me a bunch of videos for that game, it looks like a more fluid beautiful version of Phantasy Star Online, in short everything that PSU was not.

          At the moment they have made no indication of releasing the game on X360 in North America and I am starting to understand how the fans of Yakuza feel.

          *Looks at more pictures of PSO2 and drools*

          1. guillaumeodinduval Avatar

            Dude, check PSOW. They put up some stuff not long ago. O wait, that comment above was from 3 hours ago… so chances are you saw them.

            Can't wait. CAN'T WAIT. 2012 release PLEASE.

            Now I completely forgot what this thread I'm posting in is about. Was it PSO2? I think it is. I'll stick to that.

            (btw, I'm BWS-1 on PSOW)

            P.S.: Still playing PSO ver2 on Dreamcast. I've estimated that, with the ''fading interest'' and ''better PSO-games to come'' factors, it will be physically impossible for me to live long enough to level my character to 200. Crazy sh!t.

          2. BeamSplashX Avatar

            I just checked PSO-World and had a minorly earth-shaking nerdgasm.

            PSO Blue Burst stopped working on my computer one day. It made me quite sad. I would like to no longer be sad…

          3. guillaumeodinduval Avatar

            Can you believe I was so shaken and disdainful after the Dreamcast ver2 server shutdowns that the first game I allowed myself to play after DC ver2 was PSU? I completely missed out on BB, but I hear it was the best thus far…

            … sorta hooked on PSZ right now, but I might have to get my DSi checked. It randomly started to NOT want to come out of sleep-mode and just shuts down instead (battery is fine full charge and all). Not cool for anything involving 100 floors of enemies to kill over the span of 5~9 hours (especially around floor… 90+?) like, ya know, that thing called Eternal Tower in PSZ FOR EXAMPLE. *cough*

          4. badgercommander Avatar
            badgercommander

            I almost bought a DS to play Phantasy Star Zero. Almost, but then I spent too much money on other games.

            Guillaume, don't make me look at more pictures

  4. GordoP Avatar
    GordoP

    Youch!

    1. badgercommander Avatar
      badgercommander

      I am going to assume that exclamation had something to do with the severe pasting the game received? It deserved every bit of it.

      To think Bedlam were actually talking about making 2 sequels(the game ends on a godawful, non-sensical cliffhanger) that increased the level cap.

      1. BeamSplashX Avatar

        Now I'm thinking about how these could've been the action-RPG equivalents of the Gold Box games. GOD DAMMIT, BEDLAM.

      2. GordoP Avatar
        GordoP

        Yeesh!

  5. oddvorbis Avatar
    oddvorbis

    Also; more medieval leather skull caps.