A few months later one of the developers dismissed the resulting fan outrage, saying that people were "playing it wrong".
To be fair, he was kinda right. A lot of gamers were approaching this game with the same fervor that they approach other games; that is, getting ready to sit down for a nice long gaming session. Games like Dungeon Keeper Mobile (DKM) are games that are designed to be played in brief snippets, maybe 30 minutes tops.
(And ignoring the fact that plenty of other mobile games managed to make a profit without creating so much backlash.)
Because these other mobile games weren't using a beloved franchise, and they weren't developed by EA. If Dungeon Keeper was any-other franchise, and if Mythic was owned by any-other developer, their game would barely be a blip on the general gaming community's radar.
Disclosure: I haven't played the game personally. I'm going by the videos, screenshots, and detailed descriptions of the game provided by my colleagues. The critical appraisal of this game is pretty universal and I think it's reasonable to accept their description of the ordeal without needing to go through it myself, but I just want to make it clear that my analysis is based on the reports of people I trust and not first-hand experience. Okay? Great.
No. Not great. While I haven't read EVERY review on the game, the ones that I did read all did the exact same thing: Specifically played the game wrong just so they could rant about how terrible the game is. The equivalent of someone specifically jumping down the pits in Super Mario Bros so that they can rant about the game constantly pulls cheap deaths; and then no one else in the industry (or community) actually plays the game so that's what everyone ends-up believing, that Super Mario Bros is a terribly-made game that forces the player to die for no reason.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that DKM was necessarily "good", but as someone who's played a number of Facebook and mobile games, it certainly wasn't
terrible. The game had potential, and honestly I couldn't tell you if not meeting that potential was because of EA holding Mythic back, or because of Mythic lacking the ability to deliver (outside of an MMO that's barely a blip outside of the community that played it, what good games have they made in the past?). Granted you could argue that it's EA's fault either way, but only one of those options is directly their fault, where the other is just them having to assume the blame by way of "you're the one who assigned it to Mythic".
If you haven't guessed it already from context, yes, I've played DKM. I mostly checked it out because everyone was making a huge huff about it, and my curiosity got the better of me. I went into it expecting to be completely blown away by its terrible design, but what I got instead was a ho-hum game the likes of which I've played a number of times already. It's only failing, that I could tell, was that it didn't seem that remarkable in comparison to most other games of its ilk (games that are hard to give a term because I refuse to use the blatantly-cynical genre name that mainstream gaming has assigned them, and am too uncreative to think of my own to use). It was unique-enough though, so I kept with it. If nothing else, being able to raid other people's dungeons seemed like it might be an interesting mechanic.
The game had its faults, granted, but a lot of them didn't come along until closer to endgame. Redesigning the dungeon was a major chore since every since piece had to be moved one by one, and there was no option to throw items and rooms into a sort of "storage" so you could work from a clean slate; despite constant complaints about this, Mythic never fixed this issue. So either you got a winning dungeon as you built it, or you'd have to deal with the hassle of redesigning your dungeon time and time again until you found something that worked. There's a website that helps you redesign, but I'm not cutting a game slack for something that isn't built into the game. Aside from redesigning the dungeon becoming a pain as you got more and more traps and rooms, the other main failing was just a lack of anything to do for endgame content. There was raiding, and there was raiding, and if you sucked at raiding in the high-end dungeons you'd be raiding during endgame, then your only-other option was raiding.
Their attempts to fix the lack of incentive for raiding was a tournament system, but that just made things worse. Firstly, it was only a boon for people who were already raiding. I might have raided a little bit more, but not really enough. Another problem is that it was too frequent. One tournament would end, and then seemingly the next day BAM trials for placement on the next one. It was obvious that they were desperate to get people playing, but it worked about as effectively as coming-off as desperate for a date; your target demo could see it, and it was a major turn-off. This is about the point when the community on the forums started to really dissolve, and it wasn't long-after that Mythic was officially shut down, and my own tenuous interest in the game was snuffed-out as well.
Normally I'm right there in the mob wielding either a torch or a pitchfork (I like to mix things up) when it comes to complaining about EA, but my experience with DKM is that it's only
real crime was using an established trademark that had a lot of player sentiment behind it. The rest of the stuff that
actually made the game collapse? No one even talks about it.
Edit: And don't get me wrong, I agree that EA has a lot of shaping-up to do. I just think that DKM is unfairly singled-out by virtue of being the
only game of its genre that the general gaming community has paid any form of attention to.
