By Jim Rossignol on April 11th, 2012 at 10:00 am.
Fresh from their reworking of fantasy tabletopper Confrontation, Cyanide have announced they are working on Dungeonbowl - a fantasy sports game – which is the version of Blood Bowl set inside a shoe dungeon. The screenshot above looks remarkably like a place I visited in Second Life, but we have assurances that the game is based firmly on the Games Workshop original. Quoth Cyanide: “Dungeonbowl continues Cyanide’s successful collaboration with Games Workshop and their rich and varied Blood Bowl world. The gameplay should therefore delight existing Blood Bowl fans as well as offer a gateway to this zany parody of Warhammer and American Football for fans of tactical sports gaming.”
Zany. There’s a word. Dungeonbowl will reportedly arrive in the middle of 2012.
11/04/2012 at 10:07 caddyB says:
Cyanide. Eh.
11/04/2012 at 10:10 Duffin says:
Sigh-a-nide.
11/04/2012 at 10:12 Lars Westergren says:
Cyanide seems to be an amazingly prolific studio, and I like the genres they work with. But I’ve yet to be completely immersed in any of their games. I wish they spent a little more resources on plot, dialogue and voice acting.
Of Orcs and Men looks really promising though.
11/04/2012 at 10:56 Alexander Norris says:
They should probably spend more resources on QA and QC first. :P
11/04/2012 at 18:01 The Aquacharger says:
For real. I still feel ripped off after buying Dark Elves edition and then Legendary edition. Both of which are riddled with bugs.
11/04/2012 at 11:30 RegisteredUser says:
Chaos League was great and the realtime mode is vastly superior to and tons more enjoyable than Blood Bowl’s(i.e. BB was apparently more geared towards Boardgame porting as opposed to non-TBS fun).
11/04/2012 at 10:12 Drake Sigar says:
Eh. I really wanted to play through a proper Dungeonbowl in a season of Blood Bowl, but can you really make an entire game around it? Cyanide seem to think so.
11/04/2012 at 10:13 Yachmenev says:
If you do an interview or something like that with these guys/girls, can you please ask them why they insist on putting extra DRM on the steam versions of their game, and what they think they actually accomplish with that?
11/04/2012 at 10:34 Teovald says:
If I had to guess, I would say small dev that does not sell has many copies of its games that it would like to. The niche genre is probably the real culprit here, but being hysterical about piracy seems to be the natural reactions in such cases.
Bulletstorm on pc is a bad port of an average console shooter. It did not sell well, and again piracy is cited as the main reason, I guess it is easier than taking the blame yourself.
13/04/2012 at 16:16 deadfolk says:
Seconded. It’s the only reason I’ve never tried Blood Bowl.
11/04/2012 at 10:14 Skeletor68 says:
Ooh more Bloodbowl ish things! I’ve got about 40 hours logged in the game now. All single player because I’m a scaredy cat. Mostly been playing bashy Orcs and winning 2-0 by playing like Millwall’s Old Firm got on the pitch instead of the players.
I’ve been having some fun with a newly started Skaven team too but they’re just so squishy!
Any plans for any new game diaries from RPS? The Bloodbowl and Solimnium Infernum ones were amazing.
Edit: details of the game sound a little crazy to me. I don’t know the game in a tabletop sense. From the forums:
‘A match is still played between two teams, but each side is composed of three races. For example, the roster of a Rainbow Wizards team contains Wood Elves, Halflings and Humans. The second difference is that the first team to score a touchdown wins the match. This task is made significantly more difficult by the fact that the ball is hidden in one of six treasure chests, five of which are booby-trapped with an explosive spell. Last, but by no means least, movement within the dungeon is both facilitated and complicated by teleporter pads. These allow players to magically zap from one position to another; a mishap, however, can lead to a player being zapped out of the match. As with Blood Bowl, the game is driven by dice and each player plays in turn.’
11/04/2012 at 10:49 ninjapirate says:
This makes me want to quote Drake Sigar:
“Eh. I really wanted to play through a proper Dungeonbowl in a season of Blood Bowl, but can you really make an entire game around it? Cyanide seem to think so.”
I do, however, very much look forward to playing teams with mixed races!
11/04/2012 at 11:02 President Weasel says:
Multiplayer is better, human beings being sneakier and better conversationalists than the AI.
In fact, if you want to play blood bowl with humans, the new season of the RPS Divisions of Death is just about to kick off over on the RPS Forums.
Join us!
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/forums/showthread.php?54-RPS-Blood-Bowl-League-The-many-many-Divisions-of-Death!
11/04/2012 at 10:15 Uglycat says:
I thought this was going to be Dungeon Keeper from the piccy :(
11/04/2012 at 10:22 LilDeamon says:
This looked like Dungeon Keeper II at first, got my hopes up for a remake or sequel. :C
11/04/2012 at 10:34 Cheese says:
And I quote: “Quoth”
11/04/2012 at 10:50 Jams O'Donnell says:
Ooh, Dungeonbowl was a fun modification.
Look here, the Games Workshop of old giving away content! http://www.games-workshop.com/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m1340001_Dungeon_Bowl.pdf
11/04/2012 at 10:58 ninjapirate says:
With all the tabs that I had open in Firefox, this article’s title was truncated to: “There’s Blood In My: Dung…”
11/04/2012 at 11:10 sneetch says:
Jim should get that checked asap!
11/04/2012 at 11:39 Jim Rossignol says:
Heh.
11/04/2012 at 12:17 Jams O'Donnell says:
I like how the colon suggests that there’s going to be a list.
11/04/2012 at 12:21 lhzr says:
a couple more screens: http://worthplaying.com/article/2012/4/10/news/85750/
(spoiler: they look awful)
11/04/2012 at 12:55 bill says:
Dungeon bowl was a fun diversion, like Bloodbowl meets heroquest, but i’m also not sure it’s up to a full game.
Cyanide seem to be milking the franchise into multiple player-base-splitting games instead of sensibly milking it with DLC…
11/04/2012 at 13:21 frenz0rz says:
608 hours of Blood Bowl played says that I will probably buy this. Unless its shit.
Theres always the rumoured Chaos Edition, eh? Supposedly it will have 3 new teams, new star players and a new stadium. I’m suprised RPS hasnt mentioned it to be honest.
11/04/2012 at 17:37 SkittleDiddler says:
If the Chaos Edition is anything like the previous Blood Bowl Editions, it will be a standalone, segregated full-priced purchase that forces owners of previous versions to upgrade in order to play online with others. It will also have locked content that will be discovered by enterprising players, forcing Cyanide to make that locked content usable only in the next standalone, segregated full-priced Edition.
Please don’t support that type of behavior.
11/04/2012 at 18:08 The Aquacharger says:
what’s this locked content? I’ve never heard about it. Not trying to sound defensive. I just really want to know about it to see what was locked.
11/04/2012 at 19:13 frenz0rz says:
(Whoops, meant to reply to SkittleDiddler. Silly nested comments.)
Im not quite sure what you mean by locked content, since there has never been any Blood Bowl DLC of any sort. I appreciate your point – I had a number of friends who didnt buy Legendary when it came out, and I consequently stopped playing with them. Thats not to mention the usual bugs, glitches and shoddy interfaces that seem to have become synonymous with Cyanide, at least when it comes to Blood Bowl.
However, I thoroughly enjoy BB, and have no qualms whatsoever about spending another £15-20 or so for a few new races, and (hopefully) a mass of UI tweaks, league-related changes and bugfixes.
Despite Cyanide’s reputation, I wont criticise it until its released. Then we’ll see.
11/04/2012 at 20:05 SkittleDiddler says:
The locked content was in the original Blood Bowl code – it was the material that subsequently appeared in the later Dark Elves Edition after Cyanide caught wind of the fact that 1st Edition users had found out how to unlock that hidden material and use it in campaign/online play. Cyanide reacted by releasing a sneak-patch that relocked the code and deleted all the hacked material from current owners’ computers. All of that material was subsequently released as the “Dark Elf Edition”, at full price of course.
Ethically, that’s a pretty lousy thing for a company to pull on its customers.
11/04/2012 at 20:30 frenz0rz says:
Eh? Dark Elf Edition was a free download for anyone who owned the original game.
11/04/2012 at 23:00 SkittleDiddler says:
Not for everyone that owned the original game — a lot of people missed out on that because, as far as I am aware, that offer was for a very limited time. And let’s not forget that owners of the Dark Elf edition were never offered a free download (or a paid expansion, for that matter) of the Legendary edition. Cyanide have just handled the entire IP poorly.
Oh yeah, now would be a good time to mention that Cyanide are still selling the Dark Elves Edition and the Legendary Edition side-by-side at some e-tailers like Gamers Gate and Amazon. Go buy the D.E. Ed. right now and try to get a proper replacement copy of the latest working edition and see what happens.
11/04/2012 at 14:02 Sparkasaurusmex says:
Love the idea of mixing races so the teams can have more diverse characteristics.
Hopefully they have the same voice actors for commentary.
11/04/2012 at 14:09 tmargul says:
This sounds like it would have been a fantastic DLC/Expansion for the original. As a stand alone product though, you are basically getting a few new environments to play in. Doesn’t really sound worth it, at least at full price.
I guess we’ll see if they come up with anything else interesting to add.
11/04/2012 at 15:03 Lord Custard Smingleigh says:
I trust nothing “zany”. The only word worse is “madcap”. I suspect that “hijinks” will “ensue”.
11/04/2012 at 17:01 Bfox says:
Aw… hope they will get around to making a Space Hulk game, SO MUCH POTENTIAL.
11/04/2012 at 18:00 Tei says:
That screenshot looks like a 90′s cd-rom softcore porn title.
12/04/2012 at 11:33 ffs_jay says:
Here’s hoping they actually put some passable AI in there this time. And maybe an interface/tutorial that’s at least a little better than “entirely useless, impenetrable and/or alienating” for newcomers. There was a great game under all that garbage, but let’s be honest, they’d have to have fucked up shockingly badly for there NOT to be.
Coming from someone who’d played a lot of GW games but never got around to BB, they did a horrific job explaining how to play the thing, especially as it’s really not that hard a game to explain to begin with. The idea that you were generally expected to check the LRB to get your head around stuff that could be easily explained ingame was just rubbish. It’s not like it’s much to ask for. The tiniest indie devs generally do a perfectly fine job of this these days, why not Cyanide?
Gah, it’s just frustrating as I could easily see something like BB picking up a much broader audience with just a little TLC in a few key areas.