Dungeon Keeper 2

Dungeon Keeper 2 was finished when Peter Molyneux had already left Bullfrog. Gameplay is not very different from the original Dungeon Keeper, most changes are in the graphics. This game is completely 3D, you can rotate and zoom the view at will. Still it is supposed to run on the same type of computer needed to play the original Dungeon Keeper in SVGA mode.

For the gameplay compare the Playing Guide. On the whole, Dungeon Keeper 2 is an uninspired sequel of a great game. There is actually less of everything, less creatures, less rooms, and the atmosphere cannot compare. Nevertheless it's an entertaining game in its own right, and more stable on a modern computer. Here are the most important changes in a nutshell:

• There are more single player options. Apart from playing through a campaign you can play in skirmish mode (basically, multiplayer against AI), and then there is My Pet Dungeon, a rather strange mode on often rather strange maps where there are no rival keepers, hero invasions only if you want them and winning means getting a certain number of points. It's not really a tutorial, since the conditions are very different from the main game, and it's not really a sandbox mode, since you have to win a map to get access to the next.
• There is now mana, and casting keeper spells costs mana instead of gold. Mana replenishes over time, the more tiles you have claimed the faster. Thus building a large dungeon fast is essential. Traps reduce your mana, so build them carefully and sell them when needed no more. You can drop creatures in the temple to pray, this will replenish your mana faster.
• It is now possible to breach enemy walls. It just takes a lot longer than tearing down your own fortified walls.
• There are no more hostilities between your creatures. However, your own creatures and converted heroes should have seperate facilities, or they will grow unhappy.
• The Horned Reaper can now only be summoned at a great cost of mana, and cannot be possessed.
• Creatures can only reach level 4 in the training room; a combat pit can take them to level 8, but only true fights can get them to level 10.
• Imps cannot be trained any more, instead they will gain levels by doing jobs.
• No matter what you sacrifice in the temple, it will never anger the gods. Most useful sacrifices: Two salamanders > mistress. Two skeletons > Dark Elf. Later patches introduced more sacrifice options, some of which would gain you traps or doors.

Patch 1.61 added elite creatures (they are attracted by very abstruse rooms), patch 1.70 the Maiden of the Nest (which was part of the original plan but hadn't made it into the release version), the Jack-in-the-Box trap, mercenaries, and support for EMBM (Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping, see below). Be sure to get the latest patch!

Now, is Dungeon Keeper 2 an improvement over the original game? The new gameplay option, skirmish and My Pet Dungeon, certainly are. It is one of the most annoying aspects of real-time strategies that they tend to force you to play through a given set of missions in a given order (that's why I stopped playing Warcraft II, and that's one of the reasons I like Legal Crime so much), these new features fixed the problem.

Then, while the two games have similar system requirements, Dungeon Keeper 2 performs better on faster computers. When I first played the two games, I had a Gigahertz Duron with Windows 98. There were never any problems with the sequel, but in the original game I would sometimes scroll so far out of maps that I couldn't get back, and the game would occasionally lock up so I had to simply switch off my computer.

But what is certainly missing is the atmosphere of the first game. There, dungeons were a mysterious place, I still remember how the tapping of the imps' little feet echoed off the walls, and how the treasure piles glowed. Dungeon Keeper 2 is more or less an RTS like any other, entertaining, with an uncommon theme, but not really all that different.

The Editor

In late April 2001, the official editor was leaked. Later, Bullfrog made it available for download, and you will find it on the CD of the later releases (Dungeon Keeper 2 was included in several collections). This is a very powerful editor, since information about nearly any aspect of the game can be stored within maps. You could create a map where temples can only be built on water, or where creatures have completely different stats and patterns of behavior. You even can configure the distortion of the map blocks!

Cheats

To enter cheatmode, press Ctrl-Alt-C and enter:

do not fear the reaper          Win mission
i believe its magic             All spells
fit the best                    All traps
this is my church               All rooms
feel the power                  All creatures level 10
now the rain has gone           Show map
what are you looking at         No map
show me the money               Fill treasure room
ha ha thisaway ha ha thataway   Additional 100,000 mana

It is a bit confusing that the game does not acknowledge the Ctrl-Alt-C in any way. No window pops up or anything. Furthermore, characters that are shortcuts will still work as such, i will bring up the info screen and m the map. Nevertheless it works.

Technical Stuff

On the whole, Dungeon Keeper 2 is unproblematic. I have never tested it on the low end of the hardware spectrum, according to Bullfrog a Pentium 166 is minimum, a Pentium 266 or Pentium II recommended. Hardware acceleration is optional, again I cannot say how much the graphics suffer without. The game uses Direct3D, I could not find out whether Glide is supported too. The manual and readme make no mention of it, but the 3Dfx trademark is acknowledged on the loading screen.

Note that this is rather academical. Dungeon Keeper 2 will probably run without problems on your current Windows box, unlike, for example, the contemporary Abomination or Street Wars. Due to the Safedisc copy protection there is an issue with XP, but that's easily fixed (see below). The only reason why you might want to play it on a dedicated computer is the obscure and not overly impressive Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping feature, which is supported only for Matrox cards (see below).

What more, it does not feel out of place on a new computer either. The screen resolution is fixed at 640×480, nevertheless it still looks quite good on my 21" TFT. The creatures of course have a very low polygon count and are not a pretty sight at close range. But that's a necessary consequence of the fact that there might be a hundred or more of them on a map. Those in Warcraft III, three years later, hardly looked any better. All in all, Dungeon Keeper 2 has kept well over the years.

Taking Screenshots

To take a screenshot, simply press the PrintScreen key. A screenshot will be stored as a standard Windows bitmap in the SCRSHOTS subdirectory, which will be created if it doesn't exist yet. Note that you can take screenshots only during regular gameplay, hitting the PrintScreen while a loading screen is displayed may crash the game.

Copy Protection

Dungeon Keeper 2 uses SafeDisc V1. While mainly intended to keep you from creating a disc image of the CD, and from playing the game without the CD in the drive, it also has the side effect of causing trouble under XP, since XP and SafeDisc don't go together well. The problem was fixed in the 1.70 patch.

If, for some reason, you want to play an older version under XP, just get a no-CD patch and the problem should be fixed. You'll probably want to do this anyway.

SafeDisc V1 was rather popular at the time. It is most easily recognized by the presence of a clokspl.exe in the root of the CD-ROM. The executables of SafeDisc protected games are just loaders, the actual game executable is encrypted and stored with the extension .idc. The no-CD patch is the unencrypted executable and replaces the loader. Other games to use this copy protection include Abomination, Age of Empires II, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, Grand Theft Auto 2, Thief II, System Shock 2, and Ultima IX: Ascension.

Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping

Lava without EMBM	Lava with EMBM

With patch 1.70, Dungeon Keeper 2 supports Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM), a DirectX 6 feature. A good description of this technique was given in a contemporary review of the Matrox Millennium G400, the first card to support it (and, incidentally, one of the first dual head cards):

Environment Mapped Bump Mapping is essentially a technique that allows a much higher level of detail to be added to a 3D world than could be possible with texture-mapped polygons alone. Fine details such as the pock-marked surface of bricks in a dungeon and scratches on robots and tanks can be added with ease. Special effects such as realistic water surfaces, heat shimmering off hot asphalt on a summer day and air turbulence in flight simulators can also be uniquely accomplished by using Environment Mapped Bump Mapping.

Meanwhile, of course, all the relevant chipsets support EMBM, ATI in the Radeon series, nVIDIA since the GeForce3. See NVIDIA GeForce3 benchmarking with Vulpine GLMark, further down there are some screenshots comparing EMBM on the ATI RADEON, GeForce2 Ultra, and the NVIDIA GeForce3, with the latter as the clear winner.

Older cards that support it are the SiS Xabre, and ST KYRO and KYRO2. However, in a KYRO Review from 2000, the author said he tried the Dungeon Keeper 2 patch with no results at all, the options were available, but made no change. I had the same experience with my GeForce 6800. It seems that Dungeon Keeper 2 supports only the Matrox Millennium for EMBM, no other card, though I suppose later Matrox cards should work as well.

What other games support EMBM? Not that many, it seems. Scott Sellers of 3dfx said in an interview in 1999:

It is really tough to say whether EMBM is going to take off. If you look at the number of games which support it through Matrox's efforts, it's really quite a small number. And perhaps more importantly, even those games that do support it only support it in a very limited manner. So, I think the jury is still out on whether EMBM is really going to take off…

This was, of course, long long ago, but a list Matrox kept on their website till some time in 2006 never grew very long either. Of these ganes, the only game featured on this website is, of all things, Kyodai Mah Jongg, not, of course, the old Windows 3.1 version I write about, but the new DirectX 3D one. On the whole, it seems, EMBM never really took off after all.

Links

3D Games

• A Nocturne for the Dungeon Keeper is a very good resource site for both the original game and its sequel. In other words: start here!
• Alex Perry
• The Evil One's Dungeon Keeper 2 Page
• Phil's Dungeon Keeper 2 Page
• Some Downloads
• Maps
• Epic Class Productions has a few weird maps.
• Necrobones (Ed T. Toton III, the author of Yet Another Othello) builds an all-undead dungeon: No portals and recruited creatures, just skeletons, vampires and a captured giant in the workshop. You can download the savegame.
• Horned Reaper@Everything2.com, yes, a page about Horny, including an unofficial legend about his origin. When I was googling for the Horned Reaper I found that Angband has one, too. There he is represented by a blue U.
• Running it on Linux with wine: Basically it works, but there are problems with the sound.

Reviews

• Dungeon Keeper 2 Worth the Wait, Lisa Shea decides:

  Every aspect of Dungeon Keeper 2 is an enhancement over the original. The graphics are earthier, the isometric view now adds a zooming quality as you move over the word. All of the characters—imps, warlocks, bile demons—are familiar, but the graphics are vastly improved. This is especially apparent when you possess a creature and look around your subterranean world.

• Way to go Bullfrog! Carl Salminen cheers:

  Wonderful graphics, sound, and gameplay make DK2 an almost perfectly-designed game. If it weren’t for a somewhat clunky interface and a few too many puzzle-like levels, I would have given this game a 10. Buy it, play it, love your trolls. Dungeon Keeper 2 is worth 9.2 woo-hoos! out of ten in my book, coz it is just damn fun to play, but we only give out woo-hoos in packs of 5, so this game officially earns 4.6 woo-hoos!

• Complaints amount to no more than imp gibberish, Greg Matthews, Derek Meyer and Al Wildey conclude, DK2’s excellences far outstrip its considerably minor defects:

  When all is said and done, DK2 is a game that exhibits an exquisite balance between a terrifying theme—devilish monsters and hellfire—and an ironic sense of humor—narration and characterization. Even though DK2 shares the same ESRB rating as Kingpin, it seems a real shame that a game as witty, sophisticated and beautiful as this should be restricted from as wide an audience as possible. Instead, we will leave the masses with sensationalized summer headlines and content ourselves with one of the most aesthetically and strategically satisfying games of the year.

• Winning the battle between realism and game-play, Garret and Nelson Romaine muse (review now offline):

  One thing missing is the squeal of joy (Yippie!) the imps gave out when they were dropped into a room. Other than that, DK2 is worth checking out. Some who join the party with this release will be amused, but others might wonder what the buzz is all about. There are flashier storylines and more intricate first-person games by the score. And in comparison with the hottest games on the market, this entry suffers. It was judged by some to be Game of the Year when it first came out, and the All Games Network (AGN) reviewer nominated it again this time around. But it's a good bet that a game such as, oh, Barbie Magic Hair Styler (due out just in time for Christmas) will outsell DK2 by a mile.