To date, Faceville games have been facile clickety clicking affairs that offer FB-ites just enough entertainment to cover waiting a little longer for a friend invite acceptance from a third-grade sweetheart. Gamers of Ten Ton Hammer’s ilk have a long memory for games or game categories that waste massive amounts of time yet lack substance, so it took a fair amount of convincing from SOE’s Dave Georgeson to have us take a closer look at Dungeon Overlord.

Dungeon Overlord is a fantasy-based management and resource sim with a heady dose of territorial control and grand strategy. The massively multiplayer scope of the game is on nearly the same humongous level as games like EVE Online (we’ll get to that in a second), yet it’s also a Facebook game. If the F-word is a signal for you to click away, I initially echoed your thoughts. Yet I was a fan of Dungeon Keepers and am looking forward to Kalypso’s spiritual successor, Dungeons, also launching this month. Dungeon Overlord seeks to transform that same brand of high-level dungeon management and conquest fun into a social experience on a vast scale, and for that reason, this marks the first time Ten Ton Hammer has done a feature length article on a Facebook game.

Dungeon sim, meet MMOG. MMOG, Dungeon sim.

First off, Executive Producer Dave Georgeson should know a good social game when he sees one. Before taking on the Executive Producer role for EverQuest 2 (a role that he still holds), Dave was in the driver’s seat at the apex of Gaia Online’s popularity. Gaia still reaches over 7 million unique users a month, which, while impressive, isn’t in the same neighborhood as Mafia Wars’ reported 45.5 million active accounts. The difference is the platform, and as Dave explained, Dungeon Overlord was built to be a fully-featured, off-the-shelf game that takes advantage of Facebook’s social hooks, true grand scale PvP-enabling persistence, and immense critical mass.

That kind of scale is the difference with Dungeon Overlord, and few games take advantage of the promise of a huge, bustling online community, even ones that clearly have a critical mass. Take WoW, for instance - a game with umpteen million players, yet you can only hope to interact in a meaningful way with (or fight against) a few dozen people at once, at most.

So in this sense, Dungeon Overlord is much more of an MMOG than most games carrying the moniker. Dave illustrated this point by starting small, kicking off the demo with a look inside a single dungeon. Each dungeon has certain resources – there are 20 in the game total – and as you might expect, the newbie dungeon has only the most common base materials (such as iron and crystals) available.

Physical materials must be gathered by goblins, a predictably supernumerary creature that also functions as your scouts and, in desperation, as dungeon defense. You must manage the happiness down to the unit level, though this is usually just a function of keeping enough food available per dungeon and keeping your numbers in balance. But if that fails and resource gathering efficiency falters, you can always “shock” your goblins into greater productivity. Dave emphasized that such feats of micromanagement will be the constant passion of only a small segment of the playerbase, but it’s a nice, immersion-boosting nod to games like Overlord and the Evil Genius series.

Another core resource you’ll deal with is research, which is used to level up your units and create more advanced units (that is, in conjunction with other, rarer resources and player-built props like the orc-spawning “dirty mat”). This resource is gathered by Warlocks, a decidedly squishier creature that’s still fairly formidable in dungeon defense when leveled up. Other props, like podiums and desks, increase research gathering efficiency, as does leveling up your warlocks.

Orcs (left) and ogres make up the core of your armies.

If warlocks, goblins, and fighting units like orc grunts, thieves (who are invisible), and dark elves (who can see through invisibility) are at the atomic level of Dungeon Overlord, dungeons are molecules, and mountains akin to cells. Each mountain consists of a dozen or more single dungeons that are owned by players (outlined in red) or unowned, and each dungeon must be scouted before being raided (for resources) or pillaged (for ownership). Dave explained that every mountain has a bottommost level of “protected” dungeons (this can be raided but not pillaged) and a special dungeon called the Heart of the Mountain. Owning this dungeon allows you to set a tax rate for the other dungeons in the mountain.

It gets bigger than a mountain… much bigger. Dave dropped out to the Overland map, where Dave’s mountain was a wave in a sea of mountains, villages, walled towns, and military strongholds. Players can only raid, not own, locations outside the mountains, and each has different resources payoffs and consequences. Don’t think you can simply avoid fighting other players in a crowded mountain and plunder computer-controlled villages with impunity – doing so will invite attacks from the “good” NPC areas outside your dungeon.

Each overland map makes up a continent. To wrap up the biology metaphor, continents are the organs of Dungeon Overlord, and together they make up the body of the game. Continents can be added to the game to accommodate more players, which begged the question of how Dungeon Overlord keeps players in close contact with other players as former players come and go. In answer, Dave explained that new players will be kept on the comfortable fringes of the action, and the game can easily expand to accommodate new players. Furthermore, the nature of Dungeon Overlord abhors a vacuum – Dave anticipates that untended targets in easy reach of conquest-minded players will quickly attract a crowd.

Real Time Strategy and Fantasy Realism

Two keys to understanding the persistence of Dungeon Overlord is 1) everything happens in real time, and 2) all resources exist in the game world. This means that if you send your goblins to scout a nearby dungeon, you’ll lose their resource-gathering services for a few minutes, but if you send them to scout a dungeon halfway across the game world, they’ll be gone for dozens of hours and even days.

Furthermore, stacks of the resources that you gather will show up in your dungeon ripe for theft and pillaging until used (except for research, which cannot be stolen). Certain place-able objects, such as the ashen fireplace, allow you to place more of the resource in a single stack, taking less space in the most defensible places in your dungeon.

Since Dungeon Overlord is a persistent game, defense will be as much of a concern as resource gathering. Dungeons with better resources, like Primordial Earth (used to turn iron into steel - get it?), are tougher to defend with up to four more enemy-spawning entrances that must be alamed, trapped, and defended with units. This brings us to DO’s unique brand of combat.

Combat - more than minion managing and dice rolls

I asked Dave about combat, half expecting to be told a unit roundup and subsequent results screen was all there was to it. But while Dave assured me that you could wage warfare from such grandiose heights, you’d be better advised to jump into the dungeon battles in real time or, if you’re offline when the battles occur, watch the replays so that you can address weaknesses in your dungeon defenses. Rely too much on a single strong defender, for instance, and a succubus could charm their way to your dungeon’s doom. Forget to man the doors with dark elves, and invisible thieves could make off with a big chunk of your precious resources or the finished inventory in your workshop.

What makes combat in Dungeon Overlord unique among games of its type is to make decisions at dungeon level which impact the mountain (and even the world level), yet be able to watch it happen

Show me the microtransactions...

One big question remains: how does SOE make money on all of this? Or, if you prefer, what features aren’t they giving away for free? After Magic: The Gathering Tactics, I was afraid that SOE had entirely lost touch with what a reasonable price tag is in a free-to-play game, even an incredibly well done one like MTGT. But, as it turns out, remarkably little carries a price tag, perhaps because Facebook gaming is still struggling to monetize at scale. In any case, players will pay for boosts, such as 7-day bonuses to resource gathering, and for transmuting (turning one resource into another).

In another words, Dungeon Overlord is a free-to-play, pay-for-convenience sort of game, though if your more hostile neighbors are paying for convenience, you’ll probably find that kind of convenience convenient, too.

The future of Dungeon Overlord

On the near horizon for the game is a dungeon management system that will allow players spreadsheet-like access to manipulate (cue the EVE Online comparison again). Also planned is more special abilities for units, alliances (to allow players to band together), Heart of the Mountain functionality, and basic tweaks and fixes to decrease bugs and increase framerate. Facebook avoiders can also look forward to a browser-based version of the game sometime in the future as well.

Framerate is a big time concern for the game, which appears to tax Flash to its absolute limits. At dungeon level, during combat, there’s simply a lot happening on the screen, and despite DO’s animation-starved sprites and Austin-based developer Night Owl Games’ generally brilliant use of an Adobe-touched technology, the progressively rendered choppiness of Flash is still in full effect. That doesn’t mean that DO can’t be fun, just expect SNES rather than X360 in terms of graphical detail and overall smoothness.

Another concern is the magnificent size and scale of this game, given its platform. It’s the game people who typically hate Facebook games, like me, enjoy playing. Whether the converse is true – that people who like Facebook games will like it – remains to be seen. If Mafia Wars and Farmville equate to Candyland in terms of complexity and depth, Dungeon Overlord is one step short of the Kobayashi Maru. Even though you can only manage one additional dungeon per level, enough levels and dungeons to maintain a production workflow for high-level units could easily consume your lifestyle.

There’s no question that Dungeon Overlord has the potential to breathe new life into the grand strategy genre, the question is whether it’s accessible to get Facebook gamers off the farm. Is Facebook ready for hardcore gaming? The success of Dungeon Overlord will tell. But if you’re personally hardcore enough for DO and brave enough to defy the FB gaming stereotypes, check out the Dungeon Overlord beta on Facebook and you’ll be rewarded with the first dungeon management and conquest game on a massively multiplayer scale.