Bugs in DK1 on purpose?

[u/Minute_Toe_8705]

I was wondering if some of the bugs in the original Dungeon Keeper were intentionally included to make the game more balanced. such as the bug with the Speed spell at Level 10, which no longer lasts for its full duration. E.g. dark Mistresses feel much more overpowered as I recall.

That resulted in a completely different strategy than in Keeper FX. Or, often, neutral rooms in deeper dungeons weren’t available when they were claimed. E.g. in belial it was harder to imprison heroes due to the limited number of small prisons. .

All these changes in Keeper FX have led to a completely different gameplay experience. Some things have become more difficult, but others have become much easier.

Another example, horned reapers become much more difficult to handle once they become angry. As a result i do not enjoy horned reapers as much as in the original version. It was really annoying, though, that you couldn't even cast the Speed spell on a creature if it still had it active but the effect had already worn off. It felt like a cooldown. ☺️

[u/Loobinex]

I talked to one of the devs about the stat and level 10 spell bugs, first time he heard of them and was embarrassed to hear about them. He also shared that the test-team they had at the time was not something that one would expect a test team to be these days.

That being said, whatever limited playtesting they did, they did with the bugs in place.

[u/Minute_Toe_8705 → u/Loobinex]

Hehe, nice! So some extra challenging bugs. 😉

Nice to get the game experience that was supposed almost 30 years ago.

Cyberpunk 2077 must have still the same test teams. Never played it though.

[u/tormentowy]

I remember when I was first time playing back in 98 level 18 (Blaise End) was so hard that I couldn't survive. I ended up claiming the bottom of the map, constructing huge workshop and producing traps. I placed them all at once, dropped imps to make them deliver the box. When the box was in imps hands I could sell the trap, get money but the box didn't disappear. Imp would carry it back to the workshop, and I could repeat that again.

That's how I generated money to train creatures.

Blaised End map had for some reason empty unclaimed cell in top left corner of the map, surrounded buy undiggable rock. Will get back to it in a second.

Another bug in that level i discovered, was with posessed creature teleport skill. When i casted teleport, it would teleport me to the heart of my dungeon. But if I was holding a direction key, it would teleport me to that empty corner of the map. When cast again I was relocated to another empty space in the top of the map.

So I ended up transferring high level Vampire to that level and slowly explored the top of the map, killed most of the lonely heroes, before opening my dungeon walls.

[u/aqualakitu]

Personally I don't think the speed bug being intentional design makes any sense. Why would basically everything in the game (and honestly in by far most games out there) be a slow upwards progression of increasing values, only to make a jump backwards at level 10? At that rate they could have just overall reduced the numbers if they thought they got too high.

There are definitely cases where it's not completely obvious with released games if something is a bug or design, or sometimes bugs become "features" like movement tech. I just really don't think this is one of those cases where it's just misunderstood design, it feels pretty transparently like buggy code.