Yesterday, I had the privilege of visiting Stern Pinball's production facilities in Elk Grove Village, IL, for an early hands-on session with their newest release, Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant's Eye. Officially announced on January 3rd, 2025, this game represents Stern's first cornerstone release of the year.
This also marks the third collaboration between game designer Brian Eddy and Lead Programmer Dwight Sullivan, following 2021's The Mandalorian and 2023's Venom.
First Impressions of Stern's Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant's Eye
After spending a few hours banging on all three trim levels of the game (Pro, Premium, LE) on early development code, I already find myself wondering if this new release is Eddy and Sullivan operating at the peak of their combined powers.
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This is a caveat-filled sentence for a reason - it's often hard to get a great read on a game in a demo environment like this, where excitement combines with novelty and softens edges that might be discovered in a more controlled environment with the luxury of more gameplay time.
Still, though, I think this game offers a lot for pinball fans, whether you are a Dungeons & Dragons aficionado or not. At its core is Brian Eddy's signature flow-centric design, where most every shot is relatively easy to hit and satisfying when you do.
This time he mixes up his layout, deviating from the fan-style layouts that have become associated with his work over his career (Stranger Things, Venom, Attack from Mars). Instead, he returns to a 3-flipper style layout that echoes some of his early career work like The Shadow, where Dungeons & Dragons features some similar shot geometry concepts (i.e. use of the third flipper and accompanying shots, key shot up the middle that interacts with the ball). Like The Shadow, this game also features no pop-bumpers on the playfield.
It's all a welcome change.
One other feature of the game's layout worth highlighting is the way Eddy makes use of the third flipper. The shots accessed by the upper flipper can be important to progress in the game, and while other examples of this kind of layout a player might struggle with, Dungeons & Dragons will often hold the ball just above the upper flipper with a slow release that lets the player line up their shot, making that part of the playfield much more accessible.
Eddy's design combos nicely with a codebase by Dwight Sullivan that sees the long-time pinball programmer lean into most of his signature concepts (character selection, complex, heady rulesets, upgrade mechanics, etc.) in a way that shows some restraint for newer players while providing an approachable pathway to deeper exploration and experimentation for more advanced players or those who plan on spending a long time playing the game in a home environment.
There's a lot to take in from the first plunge, so I can't say I understood it all from the get go, but by the end of the day I felt like I started to get a handle on some of the core concepts, like how to travel the map, how modes were organized around map locations, navigating a dungeon, and starting the game's enjoyable multiballs.
I mostly played as a Paladin (good against dragons) to try out the PinSave system, but later on switched things up with a Rogue (more luck/treasure). I think I would need a lot more playtime to fully appreciate the differences in gameplay that different characters provide.
Navigating the game's modes is relatively straightforward. Choose a location when you start your game. Each location has modes and wizard modes attached to it. Travel to a new location by completing shots. Complete modes and wizard modes to reach one of the game's 3 different endings with associated larger wizard modes.
The game will scale its difficulty as the player progresses and levels up -- the example provided to us was that if you're fighting some rats at a low-level character, you might fight 3 rats at a time. As you improve your character, 3 rats might turn into 5 rats.
The save state feature (PinSave) was a neat experience. I was able to play multiple games as a single character and each time I fired up a new game my progress through the map was saved. I can see this being useful for players (like myself) who aren't skilled enough to see large portions of the game on a single play but who want to see all the game's content over multiple plays without getting into wood-chopping territory.
Despite it being .80 non-production code, it's clear there's a ton of depth present in the game already and I can tell that players will really need to study up to understand all the layered choices that are available. I didn’t fully grasp the item and upgrades systems yet, when to use things like weapons or how character progression or stat upgrades (like +1 to charisma) affected game state.
I will also note that our scores were quite high in our sessions. Even though some of the people in the room with us were quite good players, it wasn't uncommon to see players putting up multiple games in the billions. We were told by Dwight that there's still some score balancing to do before the game ships to customers.
Dwight told us that, "By far, this is the most ambitious game I've ever worked on." and that's easy to see.
Touring a few of the game's other notable features, I found the game's core dragon mech, Rath the Relentless, to be one of the best mechs that Stern has released in some time, maybe since the Godzilla building mech, and this might even be better than that. On the LE and Premium models, Rath has multi-directional movement, can sense ball impacts, and shoots pinballs from its mouth for Dragon Multiball. On the Pro, you still get the Rath mech, but it only comes with vertical movement.
The inclusion of Rath provides a fun level of immersion into the world of the game, aided by Michael Dorn's callouts. Some players might find the movement to be distracting, but it didn't bother me in the slightest. The ability for the mech to shoot pinballs at the player during multiball adds a thrilling effect, but I didn't miss it much in the Pro model.
On paper, the game's other notable mech, the player-controlled shield, sounds like a neat concept, sort of a modern take on similar ball-saving features that have been used in pinball going back to the early solid-state days if not before. In practice, I struggled to get the timing right and found myself pressing the button just before draining and never hitting it quite fast enough. I talked with a few other people in the room and they did not experience the same issues, so that could be a skill problem.
I enjoyed the Gelatinous Cube mech which makes clever use of a magnet to hold a ball in the cube, and a second ball below the cube, so that players can start a 2, 3, or 4 ball multiball, depending on how you approach the mech.
The fact that both the shield, the Gelatinous Cube and a tastefully stripped-down dragon mech can all be found in the Pro model of the game makes it a great offering for locations or those looking for a full-featured game at a lower price point.
Regarding the game's callouts and notable use of voice talent (the aforementioned Michael Dorn, Kevin Smith, and various voice actors from the Critical Role series, I found these hard to evaluate in the room we were in. I'd need the game in a quiet environment with the volume turned up to really appreciate the work. I did find it interesting hearing one of the voice actors serving in the role of the Dungeon Master, who would narrate the story and the decisions made by the player as gameplay progressed.
I don't have strong opinions on the art package at this stage. I think it does its job in immersing players into the world of the game and communicating some of the game's rules, but I didn't spend a lot of time analyzing that in super detail. After seeing the LE in person, I think I do agree with some of the feedback I've seen in online forums that wish Stern had pulled through some of the red color accents used in the powder coating to the game's back box.
Overall, I'm impressed with how the game plays today, and the full-featured experience available to players across the spectrum of trims. As I stated earlier, I think this is Brian Eddy and Dwight Sullivan operating at the peak of their powers and if the game develops as I think it could, it has a chance to be a special pinball experience that players will enjoy for years to come.
Additional Odds & Ends
I had assumed that Wizards of the Coast had approached Stern to take on this project, given some of the other brand extension work they've been doing of late, however, I did learn that it was the other way around with this game.
Some community members have been concerned that with the leveling up, character saves, use of items, it could be a precursor to the long-dreaded implementation of DLC into the Insider Connected program. Well, Dwight squashed that idea pretty quickly. When asked about DLC directly, he said "never ever", and brought up a good point. Development costs for things like challenge modes are often in the 6 figure range, and DLC that could be introduced via Stern IC simply would not reach a large enough audience to ever be profitable enough to do with regularity.
Players will find homages and easter eggs within this game (no spoilers here) however, they will not find any references to the original Dungeons & Dragons game, released by Bally in 1987.
The game does have a competition mode which will start all players at level 1 on equal footing. Players will be able to choose the same characters.
The game also has local cooperative play, but I didn't get to test that out while I was at the factory.
Some people have questioned the use of 3D printing with the Rath mech, which was spotted in Stern's promotional photos for the game. It's been confirmed that the 3D printed version was only used for the promotional photos and will not be used in production.
There's only one multiplier-based scoring feature, which was humorously acknowledged at one point by Dwight, saying that he's been listening to feedback.
Colin is the chief pixel pusher at Kineticist. He's a lifetime gamer who became enamored with pinball after taking in a family copy of the 1979 classic Joker Poker (the EM version). Since then he's bought, sold and repaired many machines, competed in all kinds of tournaments, and contributes to This Week in Pinball, the New England Pinball League, and Pin-Masters of New England. Previously, Colin spent over a decade working in marketing for agencies and tech startups. He also started and ran a music blog, happy hour website, and wrote a regular craft beer review column for Central Track in Dallas. Once aspired to be an artsy film director.
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