Dungeon Lords

I think I will subtitle this, "Two Strikes, and He's Out".

I think most of us long-time CRPG players credit D. W. Bradley with single-handedly revitalizing the Wizardry games, and bringing us some of the best stories in the genre.

As Sir-Tech was in trouble and the last Wizardry was finished up, he left to do his own games. His first offering, Wizards and Warriors, was a big disappointment. It had some really nasty bad UI design decisions, there were crucial objects whose artwork blended into the background so much that you could go back and forth past them many times without seeing them, but worst of all the pacing was dog-slow and the game was just so boring to play, that few players ever got far enough to see if the story was as interesting as we expected.

So I approached Bradley's new title, Dungeon Lords, with a very skeptical mindset. I tried the demo first, and found myself unable to even pick up loot from downed foes without a manual to explain the bad UI. (It turns out that you use the SHIFT key - yup, the SHIFT key - to interact with objects at the cursor.) Based on that, I was pretty sure that the UI would be just as bad as W&W. But the story started up better, the world felt more real from the get-go, so when I got to the store and my first choice of new game wasn't in stock, I figured I'd give this one a shot.

All I can say is, I now fully realize that Bradley may be a good storyteller, but it was the rest of the folks at Sir-Tech who kept the later Wizardries playable. Given my expectations, and the fact that combat is real-time (at about the Diablo level), I set the game to "easy" combat and started out. I customized the key layout a little, played some with the character generation options, and started my adventure.

The opening video was overall decently done, and the voice acting was quite decent, but the script itself was rather lamely done. A slight rework by somebody with experience at oral storytelling would have made a huge difference. But the backstory was established, and the idea that nobody, including my character, was generally supposed to expect any great destiny of him at first, was conveyed.

The initial area, as in the demo, showed that not only was the storytelling getting moved up a little to avoid the problem that outright killed W&W, but that random combat encounters (highwaymen, orc-types, ROUSes) were very plentiful. I was about 1/8 of the way to making a level from just the random encounters (about 10 of them) in the couple hundred yards from the starting point to the nearby town. Then I got into my first scripted encounter, and was massacred - flat out, overwhelmed by numbers and lack of familiarity with the controls.

And no autosave. That's OK, I understand now that I will need to pick more combat abilities and strength on my starting character to survive that fight, and maybe wander around a bit and level up. So I restart, give up on basic thieving abilities, scale back on magic, and try again - with a deliberate habit of saving often. This time the big fight goes better. Takes some work, but I prevail. I save again, and head on to the new area.

Wherein I find a trapped chest. I pull up the interface on it, and am baffled by how one is supposed to disarm the trap. Pressing the "disarm" button causes a progress bar to zip across the screen, zero to full in about 2 seconds, followed by the trap triggering and doing about 1/4 of my hit points in damage, without opening the chest. Two more tries with the same results, a heal spell, and I try the "bash" button. The EXACT same thing happens - progress bar, foom, chest is still locked. I pull out the manual (which is in Obscura 6-point font) and get absolutely no information beyond "press the disarm button if you want to disarm".

After flailing around in this sewers area for a while, I've found a total of 3 trapped chests, one of which I was able to get to open by repeated "bash"ing and use of several healing potions to supplant the healing spell for which my mana was exhausted. By comparing the graphical details of the absolutely horrid UI panel for the traps, I think I have figured out what I'm supposed to do to disarm a trap. I'm supposed to notice the two buttons with nothing but ornate 3D scrollwork on them below the progress bar area, find the matching areas in the ornate scrollwork in the progress bar area, then during that 2-second sweep across it, click each of the buttons during the split second that the progress bar is inside the indicated area of scrollwork. I am not sure my 20-year-old nephew could do that, but I know I can't. Well, OK, my character has no thief skills so maybe if I had them the bar would move slowly enough that only the fact that the tiny scrollwork details are too difficult to make out on my 1600x1200 screen would be the problem. But just to survive to get here on "easy" combat difficulty I had to push my character's fighting ability.

Ugh. I am giving up on this title, and I think on D. W. Bradley's name. Until he can find some people to build the game part of the game for him, and let them do it right while he just does the story, his name is now much more firmly associated with "unusable horrid bad UI" than "good storytelling and organic puzzles". Bleah.