Dinolords is the love child of Stronghold, Valheim, and Pikmin – with dinosaurs

An intriguing genre mash-up you need to keep your eyes on

Northplay / Ghost Ship Publishing

Some games feel like a wild fever dream thanks to all the different influences from other works they incorporate and Dinolords, a strategy game currently being developed by Northplay, is one of the most feverish dreams I’ve witnessed so far – leaving my appointment with the developers behind at Gamescom 2024, my head spins with ideas for the headline of this article. There are almost too many possible comparison points for Dinolords.

On the surface, the game looks like an RTS in which you build castles and defend against the raids of – sorry, checking my notes – vikings riding dinosaurs to battle. Alright, not too unusual – I’ve played ParaWorld. But then you find out it’s not actually a pure RTS. In fact, you only have direct and active control over a single character: your settlement’s lord. Luckily, the guy is basically a Diablo character and can hack ‘n slash his way through enemy hordes, commanding his army indirectly as if they were Pikmin. When not in battle, the game turns into the latest survival-crafting hit, allowing you to help your villagers fell trees and construct buildings. Oh yeah, and you get to ride a raptor. 

Dinolords is one layer of insanity wrapped around the next one and it somehow comes together into a package that works. How? I have the mad scientists behind the project – game director Michael Flarup, lead developer Ulrik Damm, and gameplay designer Kasra Tahmasebi – help me find the answer.

The trio has worked together for around ten years by now, but Dinolords, they say, is their most ambitious game ever. “People are always like ‘Oh, it’s Age of Empires with dinosaurs,’ and we love the comparison,” Flarup says, “but we feel like we’re trying to be something a little more.”

Dinolords is such a mash-up of genres that the team has trouble categorizing its own game. “We are actually unsure of how to nail down the genre,” Flarup explains. “It’s a merger of two genres: RTS and ARPG. So is it an action RTS? We’re thinking of going with hack ‘n strat.”

It does have a ring to it, especially since action RTS is already taken by the likes of Dota, though MOBA is certainly the more common denominator for those games today.

The lore will explain why the vikings have access to dinosaurs, I'm sure. Not that it matters. / Northplay / Ghost Ship Publishing

Initially, the team wanted to have more traditional RTS elements in the game, such as the free camera and full control over all units. “We learned during development that doing the StarCraft 2 Korean-style micro just isn’t happening,” Tahmasebi says, “but we still wanted that feeling of building units and sending them to battle.”

Their current solution is something they call the warband system, which allows players to order units to follow them around, attack marked enemies, or garrison defensive buildings – that’s the Pikmin influence. “We’ve actually been calling it the Pikmin whistle during development,” Damm throws in. In addition, the lord can order units to use abilities like charge or volley fire – all while you’re in the thick of the action yourself.

Your lord can use melee or ranged weapons and has a dodge ability at his disposal. It’s a little like Mount & Blade, only from the typical Diablo camera angle.

Dinolords’ economy is fully simulated with a ‘what you see is what you get’ approach: You will find as many logs of wood in your storage as you see on your resource counter in the UI. “You can count them if you want,” Tahmasebi comments. It’s likewise for transport: Resources need to be brought from point A to B by a villager – there is no teleporting. There is a morale system in place as well, boosting the mood of your soldiers the more amenities you provide. These are systems you usually see in city-builders like Anno or The Settlers and speak of the breadth of strategy sub-genres the team is interested in.

“The reason we do all of that is because when you run around the city, you want that feeling of hustle and bustle,” Tahmasebi explains. Damm adds another practical reason: Having all goods and so on represented visually in the game helps with communication in co-op mode – people can tell at a glance what needs doing.

And of course, that’s where the survival-crafting aspect comes into play as well. You can fell trees or hunt deer and have your villagers pick up the resources, making their job easier, or you help out on a construction project by hammering along with the other builders. You don’t have to, though. Your villagers can take care of this stuff automatically, as they would in any other strategy game. Manpower is another resource to keep track of, as every villager conscripted into your warband means another pair of hands missing in the economy.

I mention that the UI feels very reminiscent of Stronghold and Flarup shares that the classic castle-builder was actually the main drive for them to make Dinolords: “That was actually how we came up with the game. We wanted to do a modern take on Stronghold. Stronghold also has a lord character and you lose if he dies. So our pitch was ‘What if you could be that guy?’”

Periods of intense action make way for some relaxed city-building. / Northplay / Ghost Ship Publishing

“That’s what we were working on,” Damm adds, “and one day Michael comes in like ‘I got it: Dinosaurs.’” 

“And they're going like ‘No, that’s a stupid idea!’ They were rolling their eyes at me,” Flarup remembers. 

According to Tahmasebi, Flarup unsuccessfully went on and on about the dinosaur idea for five months until the team had enough and built a prototype for him. “We did it just to shut him up,” Tahmasebi jokes. “Then we showed it to people and they went ‘Oh my god, dinosaurs!’ He was right.”

Aside from single-player modes, Dinolords will support co-op (for which Tahmasebi names the co-op mode of StarCraft 2 as his “guiding light”) and PvP gameplay. They strongly emphasize that they are not building this game to be “competitive or an esport,” though.

“I think there’s a lot of nostalgia in this game,” Flarup says, “and we definitely want to do right by those people [who are looking for a single-player experience].”

Tahmasebi picks up on the nostalgia comment and says that this point has actually been a bit of a struggle for the team: “We really want people to play something they love and are familiar with, but with all the genre-mixing we’re doing it’s tough.” He names box-select, a typical RTS control feature, as an example – Flarup really fought for it, saying a game with it can’t be called an RTS, but in the end, the Pikmin controls were the better choice.

“We had to make some tough choices because the two genres don’t mash that easily,” Flarup says. “My hope is that if we really do this right, something ‘Dinolords-like’ could be kind of a new genre.” 

“That’s very ambitious, Michael,” Tahmasebi jokingly admonishes his boss, signaling that this is probably a recurring topic internally.

“I know, I know,” says Flarup. “But when you don’t have a lot of other games to look at when it comes to solving certain problems, then you’re kind of treading new ground, right?”

Tahmasebi, who’s been showing off the game during all this, finally gets to the point where his lord can mount a raptor – glorious. “One of the things we’re currently thinking about is maybe having the player go out into the forest and fight mama and papa dinosaur to get an egg, which could be placed in a hatchery building to get rideable dinosaurs for combat,” Flarup describes.

I’m all for it – let’s throw in some Jurassic Park shenanigans as well.

“We’ve been very specific about which dinosaurs to put in,” he continues. “We feel like they shouldn’t just be big hunks of units. They should provide distinct strategic advantages.”

The ankylosaurus, for example, has a swinging attack against large groups of units and can easily take down walls. A raptor can ignore defenses entirely and simply jump up on a wall. Damm describes how they can throw soldiers down to the ground, causing chaos.

As Tahmasebi defends his castle, I get a better look at the combat mechanics. Indicators on the ground show where enemy arrows will impact, giving you a chance to dodge them. “It’s not a very RTS thing to do,” Tahmasebi admits, “but it feels a lot better this way when you’re in the middle of the action.”

The greatest dinosaur weapon in the vikings’ arsenal is the mighty T-Rex – capable of taking down walls and entire groups of troops alike, it is a grave threat. When this giant reptile throws its weight against Tahmasebi castle defenses, the stationed troops on top get stunned by the impact. That’s definitely how a T-Rex should feel.

You better hope that your walls are strong enough when this big boy approaches. / Northplay / Ghost Ship Publishing

“We want this to feel like a Monster Hunter boss fight,” Tahmasebi says. His lord is in the thick of things, bravely defending his holdings. Over the course of a game he can be upgraded with abilities and better equipment, but in the demo he has to face T-Rex with his starting gear.

The developers are also working on armor-piercing values and specific weak points for units to give the battles more depth. Stationary defenses like ballistae, which can be manned and fired by players, are planned as well.

“We all love strategy games dearly,” Tahmasebi says. “I love watching the tanks in Red Alert run over infantry or the missiles in StarCraft that deal bonus damage to armor, but that’s hard to get across when you’re in the middle of it.” 

The team has plenty of ideas, though, and with the game being at least a year away from Early Access release there’s a lot of time to implement them. Their focus for now is to finish with the fundamentals – everything else, they say, they want to build together with the community that’ll form around the game.

Another thing they want to get done early on is to integrate dinosaurs even more into both the military and economy, such as through the collection of dinosaur eggs. Tahmasebi says that having additional bases in the game proved difficult because running between them yourself wasn’t all that fun. But going out to explore the map and looking for dinosaur eggs, either to hatch them or use them as a tech resource of sorts, could still provide that incentive to roam the map with your troops. “We can still have a lot of the same loops that we see in other strategy games, but we have to incentivize the players differently,” he explains.

Damm points out some important aspects of the Stronghold-like base-building in the game – since you always have to walk around the castle yourself, you’ll have to place things in ways in which they’re accessible and you can easily remember them, whereas in other strategy games you’d ordinarily look for efficiency above all. He describes how they started off having a grid-based building system and quickly discarded it because they always ended up just building a box. Now, the building is modular and free from placing restrictions, but players can turn on snapping to still have things look orderly.

“We hope to win people over with nostalgia and then give that breath of fresh air,” Flarup says. “We give up a little bit of that god-like swishing around the map and gain immersion. We want to play a game you can spend hundreds of hours on – in a way we’re building a LAN game from yesteryear or a romanticization of it…” 

“... but as a properly good, 21st-century game experience,” Tahmasebi adds.

Dinolords feels like it was birthed during a brainstorming session in which the word ‘No’ was forbidden and people had to say ‘Yes, and’ instead – and that’s what’s so charming about it. It’s one of those experimentive titles that make you go ‘Man, I love video games.’

You can keep an eye on Dinolords via Steam until it comes to Early Access on PC in 2025.