Steps to Being a Better Evil Overlord

I loved Dungeon Keeper 2 both for the play and the theme and am constantly on the lookout for games like it. I've been starry-eyed for Molyneux's approach to games since his early Bullfrog days and comedic "evil empires" with hordes of gibbering minions just appeal to me. So when Overlord was released and well-reviewed by Tycho, I put it on my list of "must plays", quietly watched as the price fell at the Game Shack and lay in wait for an opportunity to play. For the last couple years I have been spending my gaming time in persistent online worlds but I am increasingly disappointed with the play pacing of MMOGs. And my ten week old baby girl is unpredictable in her evening sleeping and insistent when needing attention. As a result my gaming in past weeks has become almost exclusively solo and - crucially - pausable.

But I have a new gaming box, and I delivered a contract yesterday and that sounded like opportunity knocking. I picked myself up a copy of Overlord and went in for a look around.

First impressions - it's beautiful to look at and feels like the lovechild of Dungeon Keeper and Fable, which appeals to my inner-Molyneux fanboy. The tutorial was charming, the voice-acting and NPC performances were engaging, and I actually laughed aloud at some of the lines. Writing MATTERS - spend the damn money. It had a nicely cinematic-feeling for a lesson and raised the pulse for the experience potential. An added notable is the sweep-gestures to direct minion pathfinding. Well conceived and executed, it is nicely satisfying and provides a great, mastermind sense of “action-by-ravaging-proxies”. Smoov moves, gj.

My largest complaint with the opening was that they used too much cut-scene for exposition and teaching – tragically like Fable, in this regard. In their defense, the cut scenes tended to be short, seamless, and well executed, my character did not act without my input, and the scenes were - on the whole, enjoyable. It's still an annoying legacy convention and I find it disruptive to immersing in the world. Wresting control from the user is a lazy way of constraining action to ensure the player is paying attention. I wish designers would opt for greater appeal to visual desire, diegetic constraint, architecture, staging, and blocking to focus player attention at necessary moments and avoid taking agency from the user. This isn't Pac-Man – it looks and sounds like the real world and you create expectations with that. You can't just put up a wall and say "can't even try to climb it" and expect that players won't be frustrated by the dissonance and arbitrariness.

As a rule I never read anything about navigating or operating in a game before playing. If it is well designed, it will leverage convention, device, character affordances, context constraints, and the action-response cycle to smoothly grow the player's immersion in the character's abilities and agency in the world. Mouse control of camera/character direction combined with WASD movement is a well accepted convention. Why the developers chose to have "S" make the avatar turn to face the 3rd-person camera rather than back up is baffling.

Virtual worlds lack a huge amount of orientation information – unique details, sounds, smells, textures, wind – so unless your world is simple and obvious in its ability to orient players, PROVIDE A MAP AND FACING/COMPASS. And I don't mean a paper-copy of a map in the disk case - that's just spiteful. Overlord tries to keep the amount of GUI apparatus to a minimum and so tried to get away with just this very thing. And, with a seeming gleeful malice, one of the quests is described as being "to the east". There are no signs, no compass, no map. I wandered around town trying to get a sense of "this way to quest". Every time I passed the quest-giving NPC he volunteered the information that it was "...to the east".

I was shouting at the monitor.

While the minions are a smooth wave of destruction flitting about the battlefield at my gesture, my own character handles like a cow in combat. Non-standard strafe and reverse, and no jump makes him feel a lumbering oaf. Mana doesn't regenerate except with potions so I either use spells not at all, or blow through them in seconds. I keep my overlord way in the rear.

Targeting in combat is great – unless there are people you wish to leave alive. It is maddeningly difficult to not kill the pedestrians. Fine, perhaps that's a point but I feel like I should be able to set rules for my minions like "DON'T KILL THAT GUY I WANT TO ROAST HIM SLOWLY OVER DAYS". Or perhaps even let him live. Call it a whim – capriciousness is one of the perks to being a villain. It could be that I simply need to practice so that I am more adept with the controls. Now that I think of it, perhaps "sweeping" rather than using targeted combat is a better control action. I'll leave who to kill to the discretion of my ravening horde rather than trust my own (in)ability to target my enemies. Something to try.

The combination of orientation challenges and lack of quest location benchmarking had me wandering around quite a bit more than I wanted to. While I hiked around, I noted that mobs respawn slowly in areas already cleared but, inexplicably, stacks of dirty dishes, clay urns, baskets, and chests reset as soon as you leave and return to an area. If you get a “load” screen, they’re back. The halls still smoked with the ruin of our last sacking, but the stacks of plates were back. Circling in search of my quest the breakables began to mock me with their persistence. Stacks of plates, tedium and increasing frustration – it felt like washing up after Christmas dinner. Sure, I made a lot of gold from looting but that just made it feel like grinding and that should never happen in a single-player game.

Rebuilding the tower is a great visual of your returning power and influence and provides ample quest hooks. Construction teams clearing debris from doorways with resulting increased access to the tower and the abilities those rooms offer is a great example of a natural diegetic constraint tied to a reward for success. Nice.

Final first impressions? WHY CAN'T I SIT IN MY BROKEN THRONE AND BROOD? WHY CAN'T I LAUGH MANIACIALLY? That's the reason for being an evil overlord. I mean, really, without that, what's the point? Also… I want to play again. Now.