War for the Overworld gets My Pet Dungeon DLC
"Heavily-inspired" by Dungeon Keeper 2's My Pet Dungeon.
War for the Overworld, the spiritual successor to the Dungeon Keeper series, has launched a DLC heavily inspired by one of the most popular modes from Bullfrog's famous strategy game.
The My Pet Dungeon update, out today priced £5.59, focuses on building and exploration and adds a new eight-mission sandbox campaign.
Dungeon Keeper fans might remember My Pet Dungeon, the single-player sandbox mode from 1999's Dungeon Keeper 2. This let you build any kind of dungeon you wanted within the physical constraints of the terrain. This is what it looked like:
War for the Overworld's My Pet Dungeon mode works similarly. Each level encourages you to build and discover at a more relaxed pace than the other modes. You score points through dungeon building, enemy slaying and smashing bonus objectives to progress to the next level.
Each level has its own twist, Josh Bishop, managing director and designer at Brightrock Games told Eurogamer.
"One you only have hero units. One there's no gateways, you have to rescue units from prisons. There's one where all the shrines are inside little chambers where you have to possess a unit, go into the little chamber and complete a puzzle, and then it unlocks everything; your gateway, your shrine or some special units. They're all very free-form, so you can play them as you want."
When you finish all eight missions you unlock God Mode, which lets you switch on wave spawning and drop in heroes.
"We've got cool debug tools in the game where you can edit the map in real-time and spawn units," Bishop explained. "We've added a user interface to that. Skirmish, My Pet Dungeon, Sandbox - turn God Mode on and basically you can do whatever you want - spawn armies to kill each other or build your map in real-time along with your dungeon."
This is what War for the Overworld's My Pet Dungeon looks like:
Bishop said Brightrock Games was spurred on to create the My Pet Dungeon DLC after previous DLC Heart of Gold "did way better than we expected".
"We took a step back and thought, what else can we do?" he said. "This is going well. My Pet Dungeon is something people kept asking for. So we thought, why not? It's cool. We like it."
After My Pet Dungeon, Brightrock Games plans one more big DLC ("that will be our biggest update yet - it'll have more single-player content"), and that's probably going to be it for War for the Overworld. "But we did originally think that about Heart of Gold," Bishop said, "so we'll see. If it does really well, perhaps we'll do more."
Brightrock Games has had an interesting journey, with the first-time developers going from a successful Kickstarter to the brutal reality of releasing on Steam. I wrote about the story behind War for the Overworld's messy development back in July 2016.