Darkest Dungeon

[Jaimas]

im not sure how to get someone to see when ive made a response so im hoping that this works.(i joined two days ago)

I don't know how this got backlisted, but hey, better late than never.

The Leper is an intentionally overspecialized hero that does two things: Do damage, and tank like an asshole. When he can grant himself an all-battle-long +30% PROT, heal himself 12 HP (and 7 stress) a round, and boasts both the highest damage output and highest HP of any hero, that's sort of self-evident, but the TL;DR is that he's designed to HP tank the front line and smash the hell out of anyone in front. That is literally his whole purpose. He's not bad for having that specialized role, he's just not as efficient as other classes that can do more. With good party configuration taking advantage of him he's fantastic.

Ironically, he used to be more about the big numbers than anything else back when his abilities worked round-by-round. When people talked about the ability to kill the Heart of Darkness without losing anyone, The Leper was the one making it happen. Red Hook has since nerfed that tactic (while ironically leaving open a few routes to still do it without losing anyone, but we'll discuss that in another thread), but the changes made him a bit less of a stick in the ass.

Threads been pretty dead, but with the ongoing development of DD2 are there any features you guys are holding out for? I heard the Nomad Wagon was going to be balanced out more, and I hope that characters from the first games DLC (like Flag) carry over.

One thing I find interesting is that DD2 basically gives the finger to DD1's ending, and good riddance.

The problem with Darkest Dungeon's ending is not the tone, or dark outcome. That's fittingly Lovecraftian. The problem is that it pulls a "lol, shouldn't have bothered" thing after the game spent however many hours you just spent playing the game, trying to foster you caring about your heroes, and the way the ending is handled makes the game ring hollow. I brought it up during the Let's Sperg, but you can potentially go above and beyond, kick the eldritch ass of the estate's horrors, lose no one, and the still get a speech that you accomplished nothing.

That's fucking stupid for a game with otherwise pretty goddamn good writing, and the fact that DD2 intends to do something better is awesome.

Personally, I hope a lot of characters from the first game wind up in interesting positions in DD2. Maybe DD1's Highwayman running a shop or Crusader being the training NPC.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The problem with Darkest Dungeon's ending is not the tone, or dark outcome. That's fittingly Lovecraftian. The problem is that it pulls a "lol, shouldn't have bothered" thing after the game spent however many hours you just spent playing the game, trying to foster you caring about your heroes, and the way the ending is handled makes the game ring hollow. I brought it up during the Let's Sperg, but you can potentially go above and beyond, kick the eldritch ass of the estate's horrors, lose no one, and the still get a speech that you accomplished nothing.

That's fucking stupid for a game with otherwise pretty goddamn good writing, and the fact that DD2 intends to do something better is awesome.

Personally, I hope a lot of characters from the first game wind up in interesting positions in DD2. Maybe DD1's Highwayman running a shop or Crusader being the training NPC.

Wasn't the point that the actions in the game delayed the apocalypse? It's still something.

 

[Jaimas]

Wasn't the point that the actions in the game delayed the apocalypse? It's still something.

No, it was literally that your actions accomplished nothing. The hamlet returned to ruin, the enemies you slaughter revived, and NG+ is the same thing all over again. That's why on NG+ there's a ghost that will auto-stress break (or virtue) any character that interacts with it. It's supposed to be you all over again trying to warn yourself of the pointlessness of what may be some kind of temporal loop.

 

[WULULULULU]

If there is anyone who cares about the game, the sequel just released in early access in EGS and my goodness did they butcher it so hard.

• EGS should already be a big red flag. As a result, the game is clunky and very buggy at release.
• Essentially its Slay the Spire in DD-3D form, no longer is it a hybrid roguelike but a full-blown StS copycat.
• No town management, instead its a linear path. You cannot pick missions either, so no "runs".
• Afflictions are gone. In place are relationships one can have over the other. (This includes GAY and NONBINARY relationships, I shit you not 4chan is shitting over the entire relationship mechanic)
• Dodge, prot, acc are no longer stats.
• No retreat, so you cannot live to fight another day.
• Narrator actually sounds generic compared to the bombastic and memorable quotes from the first game.
• According to a friend of mine, the devs are intentionally ignoring the "can we mod" question, dodging it in the interviews in discord.
• It is way too different to the original game. It feels like a Darkest Street.

We had a good run but its fair to say Red Hook went full re'tard.

 

[Mooger Meng]

If there is anyone who cares about the game, the sequel just released in early access in EGS and my goodness did they butcher it so hard.

• EGS should already be a big red flag. As a result, the game is clunky and very buggy at release.
• Essentially its Slay the Spire in DD-3D form, no longer is it a hybrid roguelike but a full-blown StS copycat.
• No town management, instead its a linear path. You cannot pick missions either, so no "runs".
• Afflictions are gone. In place are relationships one can have over the other. (This includes GAY and NONBINARY relationships, I shit you not 4chan is shitting over the entire relationship mechanic)
• Dodge, prot, acc are no longer stats.
• No retreat, so you cannot live to fight another day.
• Narrator actually sounds generic compared to the bombastic and memorable quotes from the first game.
• According to a friend of mine, the devs are intentionally ignoring the "can we mod" question, dodging it in the interviews in discord.
• It is way too different to the original game. It feels like a Darkest Street.

We had a good run but its fair to say Red Hook went full re'tard.

Ruin has come to our family...

 

[WULULULULU]

No, it was literally that your actions accomplished nothing. The hamlet returned to ruin, the enemies you slaughter revived, and NG+ is the same thing all over again. That's why on NG+ there's a ghost that will auto-stress break (or virtue) any character that interacts with it. It's supposed to be you all over again trying to warn yourself of the pointlessness of what may be some kind of temporal loop.

One thing I find interesting is that DD2 basically gives the finger to DD1's ending, and good riddance.

The problem with Darkest Dungeon's ending is not the tone, or dark outcome. That's fittingly Lovecraftian. The problem is that it pulls a "lol, shouldn't have bothered" thing after the game spent however many hours you just spent playing the game, trying to foster you caring about your heroes, and the way the ending is handled makes the game ring hollow. I brought it up during the Let's Sperg, but you can potentially go above and beyond, kick the eldritch ass of the estate's horrors, lose no one, and the still get a speech that you accomplished nothing.

That's fucking stupid for a game with otherwise pretty goddamn good writing, and the fact that DD2 intends to do something better is awesome.

Personally, I hope a lot of characters from the first game wind up in interesting positions in DD2. Maybe DD1's Highwayman running a shop or Crusader being the training NPC.

Well you got your wish and we got the sequel.

Spoiler: It's dogshit. No amount of "muh early access and beta" crap will defend the first impressions it had.

 

[Agarathium1066]

I knew this game was starting on a poor note when a huge supporter of the game from the about mid of its first EA period ended up complaining about it. He's the sort who will defend literally anything so it must be quite a stinker.

Non-binary relationships though, really? Pretty sure that just means a friendship.

 

[WULULULULU]

I knew this game was starting on a poor note when a huge supporter of the game from the about mid of its first EA period ended up complaining about it. He's the sort who will defend literally anything so it must be quite a stinker.

Non-binary relationships though, really? Pretty sure that just means a friendship.

I never knew why the game needed a sequel. The game ended on a right note, this just feels like trying to demystify everything the first game did. Like what happened with the last encounter with the Heart? What about the Farmstead's Miasma and the Sleeper, or even the Crimson Court? Too many questions for a sequel to even answer.

I'm tired of retards trying too damn hard to unravel whatever mystery they have so that the spastics have some form of validation of what is the power of x over y. Just leave things mysterious as they are.

 

[Jaimas]

If there is anyone who cares about the game, the sequel just released in early access in EGS and my goodness did they butcher it so hard.

• EGS should already be a big red flag. As a result, the game is clunky and very buggy at release.
• Essentially its Slay the Spire in DD-3D form, no longer is it a hybrid roguelike but a full-blown StS copycat.
• No town management, instead its a linear path. You cannot pick missions either, so no "runs".
• Afflictions are gone. In place are relationships one can have over the other. (This includes GAY and NONBINARY relationships, I shit you not 4chan is shitting over the entire relationship mechanic)
• Dodge, prot, acc are no longer stats.
• No retreat, so you cannot live to fight another day.
• Narrator actually sounds generic compared to the bombastic and memorable quotes from the first game.
• According to a friend of mine, the devs are intentionally ignoring the "can we mod" question, dodging it in the interviews in discord.
• It is way too different to the original game. It feels like a Darkest Street.

We had a good run but its fair to say Red Hook went full re'tard.

I was always of the belief of it being an EGS is an immediate "into the trash it goes" from me, but everything else just is fucking surreal.

The fact that they're ignoring the mod question means they're going to stick to EGS' paradigm and not allow them. Calling it now.

 

[Articles and Nudes]

Its petty but I hated the sequel the moment it shifted to 3D. Something about that felt so unnecessary, and at odds with the art.

 

[Ihavetinyweewee]

If there is anyone who cares about the game, the sequel just released in early access in EGS and my goodness did they butcher it so hard.

• EGS should already be a big red flag. As a result, the game is clunky and very buggy at release.
• Essentially its Slay the Spire in DD-3D form, no longer is it a hybrid roguelike but a full-blown StS copycat.
• No town management, instead its a linear path. You cannot pick missions either, so no "runs".
• Afflictions are gone. In place are relationships one can have over the other. (This includes GAY and NONBINARY relationships, I shit you not 4chan is shitting over the entire relationship mechanic)
• Dodge, prot, acc are no longer stats.
• No retreat, so you cannot live to fight another day.
• Narrator actually sounds generic compared to the bombastic and memorable quotes from the first game.
• According to a friend of mine, the devs are intentionally ignoring the "can we mod" question, dodging it in the interviews in discord.
• It is way too different to the original game. It feels like a Darkest Street.

We had a good run but its fair to say Red Hook went full re'tard.

Man, thats dissapointing. I guess the only hope is that they listen to feedback.

Not a good start though. Think they were trying to streamline the mechanics to make it more accessible? Looks like it backfired.

We always have the original.

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

I was always of the belief of it being an EGS is an immediate "into the trash it goes" from me, but everything else just is fucking surreal.

The fact that they're ignoring the mod question means they're going to stick to EGS' paradigm and not allow them. Calling it now.

To be fair Hades turned out fine, but I have no idea if that’s an outlier or not.

 

[WULULULULU]

Devs """apology""" letter. Apparently they wanted to make it different from the original game and are trying to justify their shit decisions on the sequel.

Tl;dr "We tried"

Oh the Russian translation was rushed.

 

[HumanHive]

One of the things that nobody is talking about in depth is how shit the story is.

Spoiler

• To start, Wayne June is no longer playing the Ancestor. This is why he sounds so generic. Instead, he's playing a new character that only appears in the opening cinematic that is the PC's Teacher/Mentor. It's ambiguous overall as to whether the events of DD1 happened, or if the PC is in any way connected to the Heir. The line "you were bold once, be bold again" implies SOMETHING, but ultimately never elaborates on it.
• You are given "Hope" in literal form, but you never actually end up doing anything with it. Why you are traveling with it to the Mountain is never explained.
• Instead of Bosses being given backstory, the individual heroes are. And it flat out doesn't work. Imagine if every character got a dream sequence like the Shieldbreaker, and there you go. "By the way did I ever mention I was in a prison break? No? Okay, let's move on." Bosses, on the other hand, just kind of exist. The end result is that while there are many good ideas in the new "dungeons", they receive zero backstory and no explanation as to where the madness that overtook them came from or what exactly it did. And not in a "nothing is scarier than not knowing" sort of way, but in a "okay, that weird baby was scary! let's move on" way.
• The Mountain itself has no rhyme or reason to it. Why are you going there? WHO KNOWS! Seemingly the purpose of your quest was to go to the Mountain to fight a giant brain's padlocks and then free it; which does... uhhhh something. Oh what's that? What about "Hope", the Flame you carry? Huh? Never heard of it. Let's start another run!

Overall it feels like Red Hook learned nothing from what made DD1 successful and seek to abandon the Lovecraftian atmosphere for something extremely generic. It feels like a completely different dev team made this game, one that had only vaguely heard of Lovecraft and had ADHD to the extreme.
You can claim this is "only early access", but I guarantee you none of what I listed will be fixed or changed.

 

[RJ MacReady]

According to a friend of mine, the devs are intentionally ignoring the "can we mod" question, dodging it in the interviews in discord.

I had a feeling there'd be little or no modding support the second I saw gameplay because those pretty 3D models can't be replicated by modders the way DD1's flat stubby sprites can. Going to EGS first was just another layer of confirmation.

But yeah this game is just Slay the Spire. It also looks way easier than DD1 and I've heard that a few people have already finished no-death runs.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Wasn't the original DD dev was infamous for making the original game autistically difficult? What happened? Is it a case of the dev taking his girlfriend to work on the game and changing it according to her demands?

 

[Dr. Pasquale]

I had a feeling there'd be little or no modding support the second I saw gameplay because those pretty 3D models can't be replicated by modders the way DD1's flat stubby sprites can. Going to EGS first was just another layer of confirmation.

But yeah this game is just Slay the Spire. It also looks way easier than DD1 and I've heard that a few people have already finished no-death runs.

I've already seen 6 hour completed runs on YT.

Don't know if thats because the game is lacking a lot of content in its early acess form or if its just because its piss easy now. Saw a clip of a guy fighting the final boss and none of the characters got even close to dying.

 

[RJ MacReady]

I've already seen 6 hour completed runs on YT.

Don't know if thats because the game is lacking a lot of content in its early acess form or if its just because its piss easy now. Saw a clip of a guy fighting the final boss and none of the characters got even close to dying.

It looks short on purpose because they're shooting for low commitment/high replayability a la Slay the Spire, which is sharply different from DD1 where runs were high commitment/high replayability because they could take dozens of hours and still fail.

The more I think about it the more it looks like DD2's ultimate purpose is to be a mobile game. It's disingenuous to tell people that they're "taking a new direction" when the game's core design is almost entirely cloned from an established competitor.

 

[Xanax and Wine]

I've completed a DD2 run on my second attempt because the game is extremely easy if you know how to manage your parties stress level. I do like the game as a killing time while watching streams or listening to podcasts kinda way (and I enjoy the Slay the Spire-like gamestyle in general) but as a Darkest Dungeon sequel it fails somewhat. Got it on a discount so fine by me. Also the OST is great.