A bit sad they decided to dumb the game down

[Athena]

From what I can read and see on the game, it seems to be a less interesting dungeon 3.
It has some wonderful quality of life improvements that dungeons 3 could have used.

But when it comes down to it, I feel kinda sad that dungeon creation and management has been removed in large parts.
Your monsters no longer have jobs they and they alone can preform, making it important that you strategize before sending everyone out in case you need stuff to build.

I am especially sad to see that traps are now only made with 1 room, meaning planning ahead on how you wish to make your dungeon is now more or less pointless, as less and fewer rooms work directly together.

I understand this all may be nice for casual players, but I was hoping to see the game focus more on having people really consider how they wish to plan their dungeon out, as some rooms may need materials from another room or some monsters may want to live close to a certain room.

I had hoped for the player to be empowered with more stuff to consider and micromanage in the dungeon while giving combat in the dungeon and upgrade, but sadly it does not seem to have this.

In all respects, this does look like a good game, but when it comes down to it, I am not sure the pros it has can turn me into one who finds dungeons 4 to be better than dungeons 3.

I sure hope the devs will consider the fans of the original dungeon keeper games in the future, as making the game basic and easy to understand is good, but leaving out complexity and giving less rooms and control over upgrades just seem like a useless change that hurt the game more, and failed to replace them with something equally fun and exciting.

[intenselygoodtime]

It gets better about halfway through, but yes -- it's the simplest of any of the related series (DK, WFtOW, and Dungeons itself). ...on the bright side, THIS is the game to tell non-strategy gamers to play first. If they like it, they can work in reverse order through all the series.

If we hop over to Orcs Must Die 3, they did something clever here: The higher levels play ABSOLUTELY DIFFERENTLY than normal/easy skill levels. You have to fully understand the symbiosis options at your disposal across all of your build choices -- and they have the "unlimited respec to try completely different approaches" angle present as well. Consider that D3 had a healthy DLC lifetime; perhaps D4 will lean into some new variations & challenges too.

[TheoreticalString]

I personally like it. There were so many reasons that spiders were the way to go in Dungeons 3 (seriously, build spiders, you can beat everything) and one of them was what a mess the tech trees were. Like to raise Horde creatures you needed to research really deep into... undead. Want to build good traps? Gotta wander around the horde tree. Want to do everything? Demon tree does everything!

Now that we've got some variety every tree feels viable and it doesn't feel like you're trying to build undead because you want to go horde and all the while knowing what you really should be doing is building a dozens arachnids and wiping the map with them.

Now if I want good traps and mining, I go deep dungeon, if I want good horde I go deep horde, etc. Horde now has unique utility (potions) that means that you don't just feel stupid for going there, demons now have a reasonably balanced lineup and a cost for dying, undead... well, undead are super strong but stupid expensive and a bit slow.

[tomorrowandtomorrow]

You say dumbed down, I say streamlined.

D3's tech tree is a mess, and creatures doing jobs is the kind of thing that sounds cool on paper, but mostly gets annoying in execution IMO. It probably would have worked better if you didn't have the overworld, like in Dungeons 2, but you end up getting bogged down in the mundanity of having to periodically let your creatures sit around and do stuff around the dungeon. I like D3 a lot and still play it, but I do find the more passive style of gameplay is harder to go back to.

D4 does a much better job of making your dungeon a staging ground from which you can launch rapidfire strikes at the overworld. It's meant to be played aggressively, and the dungeon streamlining greatly cuts down on the amount of time you spend ensuring that your room that only makes boxes has those boxes being sent to your other room that only makes traps and doors, but only when you have a horde creature with nothing better to do. It's a different experience, and I like it.

[prostoe_bydlo]

This game is often compared to dk. Dunno why, cuz dungeon theme and stuff, I guess. It's way different for me. Wfto is more close to dk. In both dk and esp in wfto I hate that zerg'rush style to play - build fast, attack first, minimum resources spend and always limited income, etc like friggin' starcraft. Dk is less prone to that style tho. I like building stronghold with unstopable army to destroy everything on sight and 10 miles ahead. Sadly rts is always favor to zerg'rushes.

[Celery]

Originally posted by prostoe_bydlo:

This game is often compared to dk. Dunno why, cuz dungeon theme and stuff, I guess. It's way different for me. Wfto is more close to dk. In both dk and esp in wfto I hate that zerg'rush style to play - build fast, attack first, minimum resources spend and always limited income, etc like friggin' starcraft. Dk is less prone to that style tho. I like building stronghold with unstopable army to destroy everything on sight and 10 miles ahead. Sadly rts is always favor to zerg'rushes.

Because a lot of people don't find it fun to sit around for 60 minutes with nothing happening to then attack-move the opposite side of the map and wait until the victory screen pops up.

Which is likely why this game has 500 active players and 46k sales after 2 months.

Dungeons 4 plays like a mobile auto-battler that's so slow I'm waiting for the game to ask me to purchase some diamonds with IRL money to time skip.

[Enker-Zan]

OP should play the game all the way through, most of the complaints mentioned are only really present in the first half of the game, after that it gets significantly harder.

[intenselygoodtime]

Addendum to my previous comment: I absolutely enjoyed Dungeons 4. I particularly liked how responsive the devs were; the two times I stopped playing after encountering bugs, upon return a couple weeks later those bugs were squashed. I ended up replaying some missions to chase the optional objectives, most of which were fun variations.

So yeah -- having paid full price on the launch weekend, I'm satisfied with what I got out of it. (We so often forget to mention the things we LIKED, or that we actually enjoyed & complete the game, despite the nit-picking.)

By comparison, I also liked D3, and played all the DLCs (on console / the big screen).

...and just as a "science experiment," I've reinstalled D1, D2, and even WftOW. It'll be interesting to approach D1 after so many other Theme Park-style games are mainstream now, and frankly I just don't recall how much of D2 I played. IIRC, a video driver bug stopped me on WftOW years ago on an ancient system, but I just recently tested it and it ran beautifully on my current system. ("Evil Daddy Pig" was just Richard back then...)

[Dent]

Originally posted by tomorrowandtomorrow:

You say dumbed down, I say streamlined.

D3's tech tree is a mess, and creatures doing jobs is the kind of thing that sounds cool on paper, but mostly gets annoying in execution IMO. It probably would have worked better if you didn't have the overworld, like in Dungeons 2, but you end up getting bogged down in the mundanity of having to periodically let your creatures sit around and do stuff around the dungeon. I like D3 a lot and still play it, but I do find the more passive style of gameplay is harder to go back to.

D4 does a much better job of making your dungeon a staging ground from which you can launch rapidfire strikes at the overworld. It's meant to be played aggressively, and the dungeon streamlining greatly cuts down on the amount of time you spend ensuring that your room that only makes boxes has those boxes being sent to your other room that only makes traps and doors, but only when you have a horde creature with nothing better to do. It's a different experience, and I like it.

I agree. In any case, having in Dungeons 3 to hire a couple of banshees and imps just to produce magic toolboxes as horde wasn't particularly deep or engaging gameplay, especially when all the banshees did was run a silly treadmill. Don't particularly miss that mechanic. Now the equivalent to magic toolboxes (mana batteries) are completely optional, while mixing factions now actually multiplies their effectiveness (horde grants training, powerful buffs, and perks, demons spells and breaking the level cap, undead increased evilness gain and free corrupted hero units). You can get level 30 Undead striking across the map from a demon portal while gaining 80 percent increased attack and movement speed from a speed potion and another 65 to 90 percent bonus to damage/armor/health from perk potions, while any heroes they kill can be turned into ghosts that don't require any salary or population cap (only CPU power).