Dungeon Hero Preview

[GameBanshee News]

Eurogamer is the latest website to dish up a hands-on preview of Firefly Studios' upcoming action RPG, Dungeon Hero.

Well, for a start this is a game where you're playing for the opposition - and not in the tongue-in-cheek "be evil" sense that Dungeon Keeper introduced. Instead you play a human mercenary hired by a tribe of goblins living in an underground city - and as you might expect from a barbarian mercenary, your character is a violent sociopath whose social graces are matched only by his personal hygiene. "Hero is a loose term," says Bradbury.

More importantly, Firefly wants to use that setting to explore the whole idea of an underground world. The "dungeons" in the game are subterranean cities, living and breathing, in which the goblins live, work and fight. This is the dungeon from the point of view of goblins - not just somewhere for heroes to invade and nick treasure from, but actually a place where a whole species makes its home.

The upshot of this is that goblins actually become characters rather than brainless monsters. The Firefly team professes to be sick of games where you find a goblin, orc or whatever patrolling a room, with a Level 5 Giant Spider standing three feet away (but not attacking the goblin, for no apparent reason) and a conspicuous chest in the corner with a Helmet of Pith or whatever inside it. In a realistic fantasy world, this just wouldn't happen. It breaks the fiction. In the brief section we saw, Firefly's counter-point to this expressed itself pretty clearly.