Without editorializing too much, I’ll say that D. W. Bradley’s 2005 RPG Dungeon Lords was one of the biggest disappointments of my gaming life. Having come out so unfinished that the music, furniture, NPCs, and even the start menu were left undone, Dungeon Lords was considered one of the most disastrous releases of the previous decade. Perhaps rivaling that of 1997’s Descent To Undermountain in terms of fan (and industry) backlash. Which was a shame, given that Bradley’s previous work on Wizardry 5,6,7, as well as Wizards & Warriors, made him a beloved figure among hardcore CRPG fans.
A patch that added in most (but not all) of the missing features came by way of a metal-boxed “Collectors edition” that came out soon after, requiring people who purchased the game once to “re-buy” it in order to play the more complete and “fixed” variant of the game. Needless to say, this didn’t go over too well.
Then, many years later, Nordic Games bought the rights and did their own update to Dungeon Lords, called Dungeon Lords MMXII. To their credit, Nordic Games managed to polish the game enough to make it semi-presentable, though only if playing something very pre-2000s in its style is something you were fond of. With some class balancing, a new GUI, working sounds and an actual menu, the game was finally made playable. Many first-timers discovered it and, like they did with Ultima 9, a community formed around it who never knew the chaos that went on for years following its initial release. A chaos I saw firsthand on the game’s old Whirlpool forums.
Knowing all of this, it might surprise you to know that there is now a “Steam version” of Dungeon Lords that has just been made available. According to a developer’s reply to a forum user, this new Steam version is, quote, “further reworked, fixed, and improved”, though nowhere in the game’s description does it remark on exactly what has been changed. Even the MMXII version was known to be buggy and still quite incomplete, so it’s unknown at this time how different these two releases are.
Still, Dungeon Lords has a rabid fanbase that, as I mentioned before with Ultima 9, seems to enjoy the game in spite of its tumultuous development history. We’ll keep you posted if new information about the game’s changes come to light.
