Do you remember Dungeon Hero?  Our last newsbit in July had the project on hold as Firefly concentrated on Stronghold: Kingdoms and they struggled with publisher issues.  Now GameBanshee has noticed an interview with Firefly's Simon Bradbury at The Big Download that suggest the game isn't dead.  It's one brief line among the Stronghold discussion:

Is Dungeon Hero still on hold or will we be hearing about that game at some point?

I think that you will hear something on Dungeon Hero in the first half of 2011!

Gamestar.de posted an article about 5 missing games in 2009. They give short updates on Dungeon Hero, Jagged Alliance 3, Arkane Studios' The Crossing, Aliens: Colonial Marines and Stargate: Worlds.
Firefly Studios confirmed Dungeon Hero is on hold. They'll concentrate on Stronghold: Kingdoms for now.

There hasn't been much information available recently on Dungeon Hero, the dungeon crawler from Firefly Studios and the now defunct developer Gamecock Media, but Firefly fills us in on the current state of the game in this update:

Thank you to the many people who have contacted us recently asking for news on Dungeon Hero and when it will be released. Well its going to take a little longer than we first thought!

The demise of Gamecock Media, who were the publisher of Dungeon Hero has created a number of challenges for us over the past weeks and months and as a consequence we have had to take the painful step of delaying Dungeon Hero whilst we reorganize and plan the next stage for Firefly.

Rest assured that Dungeon Hero lives on and we have a couple of exciting projects built around the Dungeon Hero universe that we will be talking about soon. We would also like to thank the many people who have encouraged us with suggestions, questions and enthusiasm for the world of Dungeon Hero, as ever – this has given us a lot of energy and we really do appreciate the support.

Nothing new here but IGN has a short recap of Dungeon Hero from a Leipzig viewing:

We took a short tour of the goblin community where its inhabitants were working, playing, and wandering about. Dungeon Hero is trying to do away with the cluttered user interface of most games in the genre. There's no area map or quest text, instead players receive their info from conversations with goblins and contextual clues in the environment. If someone seems confused a friend might run up to them with instructions.

Grab five new Dungeon Hero screens at Worthplaying.

CVG has a Dungeon Hero preview courtesy of PC Zone UK:

Take a defensive stance when surrounded by enemies and you can counter-attack in four directions, slamming your shield into a guy's face, or kicking him in the stomach with your tree trunk legs.

While this is a visceral style of melee, at this point in development it's not all that weighty with no feeling that blows are connecting with foes - at least not to the degree shown in early gameplay footage, and (a cruel comparison I know), certainly not with Diablo III's cinematic aplomb.

And that's potentially a problem for Dungeon Hero, as its RPG leanings aren't ready to back up any slack in the combat. There are no tenuous stats to worry about, instead you'll work your way through a skill tree, the combat component of which comprises of new forms of violence.

Firefly's Dungeon Hero has been previewed at GameSpot.  They acknowledge the game as a linear adventure but the goblin dungeon life does sound cool:

As the barge passed serenely through the green, murky water, we watched with delight as the canalside docks revealed a slice of everyday goblin life. Porters walked hither and yon with boxes of varying shapes and sizes, drunks got sick over the side of the wharves, and neighbors casually conversed. Though the goblin speech audio wasn't in the build we saw, we were told these conversations are one of the key ways you will find out what's going on in the world. Dungeon Hero is an action game, so you won't be running up to goblin citizens and asking them what's new. You might overhear news about enemy forces or hear about an invasion in one of the mines, and it's up to you to process this information and decide what to do next. Though it will be a fairly linear adventure, there will be side quests that you'll be able to pick up by keeping your ears open.

gameSlave has an overview preview of Dungeon Hero, based on a presentation from designer Simon Bradbury:

There will be no RPG-like distribution of attribute points. Instead, you are given 'skill points' that you can use to improve your offensive and defensive moves.

Another key point for Bradbury is story, as it will be here that team really try and hit home their 'anti-dungeon' motif. Firefly will be using a mix of comic-style sections that look like they're from a Frank Miller novel, and in-game hints via NPCs in order to drive the narrative. The story itself is being written by none other than Terry Pratchett, acclaimed author of the Discworld novels.

Worthplaying has eleven screens from Dungeon Hero.

Eurogamer's Rob Fahey has a preview up of Dungeon Hero.

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.

You're recruited by the goblins to fight in a battle against their enemies, another goblin tribe who reside in a city across a stretch of desert that has become a battlefield - and rather than showing us the goblin home city, Goldstar, the developers decided to show off a zone called the Back Trenches. These are the tunnels which lead from Goldstar up to the battlefield - and as such, they're filled goblin soldiers who are off-duty and waiting to return to the fray, as well as the wounded and the dying who have been stretchered off the field. It looks and feels like a World War I scenario.

Simon Bradbury from Firefly is doing the rounds promoting Dungeon Hero and a new preview is up at VideoGamer:

While we haven't quite wrapped our head around how Dungeon Hero's combat system will work, we're enthusiastic that it's a game that won't force us to learn another 20 multi-string combos just to get through it. It's an RPG for sure, with levelling up, but it's described as "RPG lite". Firefly is hell bent on making the game as accessible as it possibly can, a far cry from its super hardcore PC RTS strategy heritage with the Stronghold series. And we're glad.

For us the combat system and the game's main character are thoroughly overshadowed by the compelling "living, breathing world" Firefly is developing. This is what interests us most about Dungeon Hero - seeing a dungeon from another point of view. Exploring underground tunnels and overground trenches and discovering that, actually, goblins aren't all that bad after all. That and the promise of a side by side co-op mode.

...and a two-page interview, which focuses on the development and surrounding issues like the death of the PC:

VideoGamer.com: I wanted to ask you about the feeling that PC gaming is dead, and how we're seeing a lot of games previously PC exclusive coming to console because of piracy, which is a big issue.

SB: It is. It always has been in some ways and it always will be. I guess Steam does OK. But for us, clearly a third person game would have to be multiplatform, absolutely no bones about it. But a first person shooter game, Crysis? That game was a very expensive big game and piracy hits them quite hard. It's a short shelf life title that flies off the shelf. Strategy games are probably the last bastion of the PC because they're games that suit the PC really well. The mouse and keyboard control, the fact that you load and save half a dozen billion of them. You can patch them, they're involved games, they need a lot of patching and things like that, upgrades, DLC, the Internet, all of those things still work well on PC. Strategy games have never been brilliant, RTS for example, on consoles. It's just not suited to it. Especially builder games. We're safe. God only knows if we'll still be safe five years down the line, but right now strategy games are safe, partly through the interface and partly through the people who like to play them and the nature of the game. Anything else beyond that I think you're right, it's a bit scarier and you've got to really put it on consoles.

Gamasutra discusses two of Firefly Studios titles in development with designer Simon Bradbury, one of which is the action rpg Dungeon Hero, which focuses on a view of dungeon crawling that is a bit different from the traditional approach:

With Dungeon Hero, the concept of him [the hero] in a way being the monster in this world, as they're orcs, being the natural denizens of these places, and he's the one coming in and hacking everything - it's an interesting concept. Was it built around that as a design principle, or was that just something that evolved as you realized what it was?

SB: I would say it evolved from it. You put it in there and you start to show it to people, and they're, "He's kind of mean, isn't he?" and we're, "Well, yes he is." It's like you're doing a demo to the press and half the time you're formulating ideas when you're doing it.

Someone will ask you a question and you go, "Yeah, that's right, he's going to do that." It's a great time, actually, to get your ideas straight and, in the early days, to evolve the design. But definitely, he became more psychotic in the first six months as we talked to people about it.

In terms of the NPCs, you will eventually, I guess, be able to murder all of them if you so choose?

SB: Yes.

Is there any consequence for that?

SB: No, I think we'll leave that one to Fable. If you feel good about chopping a goblin's head off, it's a moral decision in the real world, I think. If you attack too many of them, we will put out a couple of guards that will try to arrest you, but then you'll just kill them quite easily anyway.

Can you just kill the whole town and will they respawn or will they just be gone forever?

SB: Not in the town itself - we had to make the decision, because you need to get information from there quite a lot of the time, that you can't. So in the town you're not allowed to carry a weapon, so we just take the weapons off you, and if you try to button-mash in the town, you just end up waving at people, "Hey, how're you doing?" You won't be able to fight.

That's probably a good way to do it.

SB: It's simple, and we like simplicity.

Taken from Edge magazine, Next Gen has a look at Firefly's Dungeon Hero with input from lead Simon Bradbury:

There are two main aspects to this: the setting, and the inhabitants. The setting shown was a network of trenches slightly behind the front-lines of an ongoing goblin battle: part of extrapolating what a dungeon would realistically need to operate. The hero begins walking through a hospital, full of screams and silent casualties pulled back from the front. One poor soul is having his leg amputated with a saw, while further down the hall a morgue is full of corpses, the air around them fat with flies. Moving through the brightly illuminated wooden trenches, an oblivious goblin gibbers in the corner, while others sit at a table quietly drinking soup, reading or idly strumming away at a guitar. Blacksmiths potter back and forth between forges and benches. This isn’t a corridor – it’s a place where goblins, eat, sleep, live and die.

Those goblins are the real stars – if for nothing else than the reappraisal the game brings. “Goblins are poor and they make crap weapons,” says Bradbury. “When you kill them you don’t get a little bag of gold and an item. You wouldn’t want their amour – it barely protects them.” The hero simply doesn’t need anything the goblins have, and the gulf between them is obvious - most of all during combat.

Computerandvideogames.com has posted a preview for Gamecock's and Firefly's atypical action RPG outing, Dungeon Hero, and takes a look at some of the framework and gameplay:

Dungeon Hero is about what a dungeon would actually be like. Not just having a room where demons can punch posts to level up their attack rating - as in Dungeon Keeper - but a convincing simulation of the grubby existences these subterranean minions would live...

But you don't play some middle-management overlord, requisitioning funds for the fungal cheese harvest. You're the enemy, barging into this society and messing everything up.

Along with the dungeon realism is an emphasis on combat:

Believe it or not, obsessive modelling of goblin life isn't the most exciting thing about Dungeon Hero. What really impressed me about the early demo was the combat. Firefly call it an 'action RPG', but it's very light on the latter: levelling up is limited to learning new moves, and you don't gain new weapons or armour from fallen foes.

"When you kill them," explains lead designer Andrew Parsons, "you don't pick up a nice little bag of gold and some broccoli. And you wouldn't want to pick up their armour, because it's crap. It barely protects them." At heart this is a fighting game, and it's shaping up to be a vicious one.

Dungeon Hero is about the realities of combat: if an enemy's standing on your toes, you simply don't have room to swing a two-metre length of steel. If he's three metres away, no amount of special move fanciness is going to hit him. If enemies surround you, they won't take turns, they'll skewer you from all sides at once.

Still not a lot of information out there about Firefly's Dungeon Hero but German readers might be able to get a little more out of this preview at GameStar.

Thanks, Alrik.

1Up is the next to post a preview of the upcoming action rpg from FireFly and Gamecock Media, Dungeon Hero. They talk with Simon Bradbury, game designer.

Going into the combat aspects:

You have realistic sword-swinging abilities.
Bradbury describes Dungeon Hero's combat as "very gritty, very real, and a bit different." By that, he means you won't see blades on chains à la God of War, but up-close fighting that depends a lot on spacing. "It's about switching tactically at the right time," he says, "between close combat -- which is a blocking-based combat [where you push] people away to give you space -- and then releasing the left trigger [on the Xbox 360 version] to go back into normal combat to kill stuff."

Gametrailers also has several videos up here. Thanks for the heads up, r3dshift. 

Gamersinfo.net has also put up a short preview of Firefly's and Gamecock Media's Dungeon Hero, with several embedded screens:

Developer Firefly Studios would have us believe that dungeons are actually communities where said monsters live! Hah! They have families and businesses; politics and petty squabbles; and we, the intrepid hero in search of the ever elusive gold is actually disturbing their peace with constant invasion...

Entering the dungeon is entering a living breathing world - it's just populated by goblins. Smashing barrels and opening chests isn't going to find you new armor and gold, it's going to give you smashed barrels with destroyed contents and goblin keepsakes...

There is ample opportunity to improve your character. With a branching skill tree of 250-300 skills your hero will be unlike most others. Don't worry, you don't have to hot key them and then try and determine how to get to them all. It is less twitch-skill and more character management.

FireFly's Dungeon Hero has been previewed at IGN:

The build that we saw was understandably early -- the game doesn't ship until March 2009 -- but the combat already showed some promise. When a group of six enemy goblins approached our unwilling hero he performed a series of spins and lunges that did a good job of repelling one goblin at a time while still keeping the main character in the center of the action. There was a solid amount of chaos going on around us as the friendly faction -- there are four in all with Gold Star (friendly) and Red Eye being the only two shown to us -- bombarded an enemy stronghold with cannon shots.

Worthplaying has a video developer diary (43Mb) for  Firefly's Dungeon Hero.

CVG has a new preview of Firefly's Dungeon Hero:

But what of the hack and the slash? That's getting a revamp from the dungeon masters too - with a studied attempt to remove the button-mashing ethos so entrenched within the genre. There'll be melee and ranged attacks, obviously, but with up to 50 critters swarming around you, the emphasis is on close combat. 

Games Radar takes a look at Firefly's Dungeon Hero in this preview:

Fantasy often has a few holes in it. Take Mordor's representation at the close of the cinematic Rings jaunt - a dusty, arid surface with a bunch of orcs just standing around shouting at each other. Where was the infrastructure? Where did the green-skins do their shopping? Where were the basic sanitation facilities? Great as Peter Jackson's vision was, it's doubtful he'd ever get a job as a town planner. The same is true of your average dungeon: who, honestly, leaves a big chest full of treasure just lying around next to a badly concealed pit trap?

"Why has someone left that gold?" continues a concerned Simon Bradbury of Firefly studios. "Why hasn't that spider eaten those goblins? Why are they just standing there waiting for me to kill them? I mean, ours is a dungeon with toilets in…"

More previews of Firefly's Dungeon Hero with GameSpot and IGN offering impressions.  From GameSpot:

Firefly's biggest problem with dungeons in most games is that they don't make sense. Think about it. You'll delve down into a dungeon and encounter monsters whose sole purpose in life is to stand around in the dark until an adventurer comes to kill them. Dungeon Hero looks to solve that problem by creating an underground city and society that makes sense. The main goblin city in the game is divided into four districts, each of which has a distinct purpose and role in the game. And while the goblins are at the heart of the game, you won't play as one. Instead, you'll play as a human mercenary who the goblins hire to save them after a goblin miner manages to dig a bit too deep and opens a fissure to someplace he shouldn't have. So now the goblins need, well, a hero.

...and IGN:

You learn these as you level up, and FireFly wanted to make sure you learn an even spread across the different types of skills. They don't want someone specializing so much in something like magic to the point where they'll break their hand if they even slap an enemy. They're also trying to minimize artificial RPG events, like glowing arrows on maps. If you want to find an entrance to the mines, FireFly wants you to follow someone in the city with a mining cart, not head toward a glowing exclamation point. Directly in contrast to that, the game will have different types of monster generators in the fighting sections, like necromancers churning out minions or doors that spew out enemies until they're closed. FireFly believes this will keep the player mobile and moving through and engaged with the content.

A short preview of Firefly's Dungeon Hero can be found at 1Up, although nothing particularly new is revealed:

The narrative point of view is an intriguing flip from what you usually see in the genre. It's a new take without being over-the-top camp. So, yes, it has some dark humor, but that isn't the main goal. What's new to the action-RPG table gameplaywise is a frosty game engine that shows off a complex, detailed world. Or at least that's what we've been told. Y'see, the game is a ways off -- we're talking 2009, here -- and Firefly showed very little actual gameplay. But the premise that the developer is selling sounds compelling. The general idea is that this dungeon is a living, breathing underground goblin society. They have the same problems we do aboveground (but they also happen to get universal health care -- someone needs to help a limbless goblin soldier suffering from poison inhalation). And they are waging a losing war against an evil force moving into the dungeon.

An E3 trailer for Firefly's Dungeon Hero is available at Worthplaying (75Mb).

In the grand tradition of generic names comes the news that Firefly's Hero has been renamed Dungeon Hero.  Here's the press release Gamecock sent over:

Gamecock Media Group And Firefly Studios Bringing “Dungeon Hero” To PC And Xbox 360™ World’s First Authentic Dungeon Crawler Set For Early 2009

Cockpit, Austin, Texas – June 7, 2007 – Today Gamecock Media Group announced Firefly Studios’ Dungeon Hero will be releasing on the PC and Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system from Microsoft. The first dungeon-based game to realistically depict underground life, Dungeon Hero promises all the danger, intrigue and daily routine of an actual subterranean community. Combining HD graphics with incredibly detailed environments completely immerses players in their newfound surroundings, complete with goblin cheese merchants, jailed troll miners and helpful imps just looking for peace.

“Dungeon Hero sets itself apart from every dungeon game that has come before it,” said Rick Stults, Console Chief for Gamecock Media Group. “We love the realism that the game portrays, the living breathing dungeon aspect is something unique that hasn’t been done anywhere before and that’s the key to the innovation we’re looking to promote.”

Dungeon Hero provides players with a fresh take on the classic dungeon based game. The in-game world is a totally functional, living, breathing community in every way. Eat, sleep, chat, socialize, trade and travel as you would in any civilized place – after all dungeon creatures are people too! Fierce adrenaline pumping close quarters combat against a multitude of enemies drives the player deep into their heroic role. The battle system is intense with savage encounters that will leave enemies wondering where they went wrong. Dark times call for one to stand against many, will you be the one strong enough to become the Hero of the Dungeon?

About Firefly Studios

Firefly Studios was formed in 1999, and is recognized worldwide for the depth and attention to detail it gives its games. The company has produced a number of high profile and commercially successful strategy games, including the Stronghold series.

You may recall the announcement a few weeks ago of a new publisher named Gamecock, formed from ex Gathering of Developers staff.  One of their first projects is Hero from Firefly (Stronghold) and FiringSquad has the first interview.  It's a little early in the development for detailed answers but here's the opening question:

FiringSquad: First, how did the idea for Hero come about?

Simon Bradbury: We decided that there wasn’t a game out there like it, something that explored the possibility of what a real dungeon might be like! For example we wanted to know what the goblins did when they weren’t hanging around waiting to fight the player in some dank cold room. Do they go for a cup of tea? Maybe they play the hobgoblins in an underground soccer league? That kind of thing… We wanted to place the player in a fresh take on the dungeon crawl genre…

3D Gamers has a trailer for Firefly's new action/RPG Hero, which was announced yesterday.  The footage may well be the same as that embedded at the Hero site but I haven't had the chance to compare.

Newly formed publisher Gamecock (who is just asking for their press releases to get caught by every spam filter) sent us an announcement of a new action/RPG from Firefly Studios (Stronghold) called simply Hero:

LONDON, ENGLAND – FEBRUARY 12, 2007 – Gamecock Media Group is pleased to announce they have joined forces with Firefly Studios to launch their next game – Hero. Gamecock founders Mike Wilson and Harry Miller first started working with Firefly while running Gathering of Developers. At that time, the two companies brought the original Stronghold games to market.

“When we discussed working with them again, they asked if we wanted the next Stronghold or an original title. The team was insanely passionate and committed to the new original title, so it was a no-brainer for us, we choose that,” said Mike Wilson, CEO and Head of Marketing for Gamecock Media Group. “They understand that consumers want something more than another sequel and we plan to support that vision.”

“Having worked with Mike and Harry in the past, we know we have a publisher that is exciting and creative in outlook, but also supremely capable in having fresh ideas and titles such as Hero break out,” said Simon Bradbury, CEO of Firefly Studios. “They are a very artist driven and flexible company and we think, perfectly placed to take on ‘the establishment’ in the shifting sands of the publishing landscape!”

Hero is the first game to take you into a real dungeon, one where a shadowy evil has come to feed on despair. This a dungeon at war - not a place with bags of gold just lying around! This action RPG uses Firefly's dazzling new HD engine, allowing the player to storm heroically through underground halls while taking in the detail and complexity of a world previously unseen. Master melee, ranged and magic skills and 'Close combat' a totally new, brutal mode of fighting as you battle your way through vast crowds of monsters. Fight alone or have a friend drop in to survive - and maybe even save - the darkest society imaginable!

Hero is slated for a Spring 2009 release on a PC and a next-gen platform. To see more about Hero please visit www.heroherohero.com.

A video clip can be found at the site.  At a glance, the single dungeon setting is perhaps reminiscent of Arx Fatalis.