Darkest Dungeon

I remember Holla Forums liked this in EA and then it was shat on when it released.
What did they change that made it not as good?
Is there any options for the gameplay I can tick off to make it more like the early access version?

The devs autistically nerfing every viable strategy into the ground because MUH DIFFICULTY MUH STRESS NO FUN ALLOWED.
The core is still good, but it pissed a lot of people off. I imagine a fresh take on the final release won't have you affected by this though.

I played only the final version. The only issue I had was when you lose a level 5/6 character. But at least now Radiant mode makes that less of a slog. The game is fun, the stress has its own charm, I still find a lot of decent strategies, and the narrator is good.

It just ended up being shallow
No real difference in dungeons and painful RNG along with the devs going "no fun allowed"

It was a lot of little things. Nerfs and removals that kept certain builds or parties from being too effective. Mostly because their ultimate goal was not to make a difficult RPG that you have to learn and master to overcome and eventually steel yourself against the stresses and difficulties. Instead, they wanted a game where you were constantly on your back foot, constantly struggling, constantly unable to play effectively because you are pissing away resources on recovery.

I guess this is supposed to be the Lovecraft influence on their work. Nothing ever ends well for characters in Lovecraft's stories. Even if they escape, they realize that they were followed or that they could never really escape.

Either way, it's a shitty, unsatisfying way to make a game. Their answer to the constant struggle is allowing you to slowly upgrade the town so it's a little easier each time, but even that is just artificially padding the game out so you have to constantly grind up and then lose a party, just so you can work your way up to that same point in a slightly quicker time, the next time you put together a party of disposable mooks.

Radiant Mode? What's that?

The one thing you have to commend them on is their determination to keep true to Lovecraft. I know the end game became shite, but it's this sort of determination that makes games shine in the end, when they happen to be good.

During EA there was a skeleton of a fun game, people liked messing with the mechanics and finding new strategies, but as the development went on it became clear that the dev's idea of 'balance' is to make everything equally useless and ensure that you can never have fun with the game. They made it into a long grind you can't escape were you're constantly getting fucked by the RNG.

Search Joseph Anderson's review on youtube, it's an autistically in-depth look at the endless flavors of bullshit the game turned into.

I wish they had been more determined in trying to make the game fun and challenging instead of a simplistic slog. The atmosphere goes to shit once you figure out all you're doing is grinding against an RNG slot machine that is deliberately gamed to fuck you over.

The devs added a ton of options that can remove grind, remove corpse piles, expanded the town, etc.

It's actually quite playable with said options.

haha no.

It shortens the amount of time it takes to finish the game by modifying some things.

OP here
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST THE RNG

"going really well" =/= "enough stress to wipe your party with heart attacks"

Gee, I don't know. Maybe I'm not interested in putting 200 hours into some autistic unfun powerslog timesink, I'd rather play, you know, real video games.

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It was never good tbh fam.
When it was in early access it had more potential.
It was grind heavy and random but you could find a good strategy to mitigate the importance of grinding and you could hope that future updates introduce more interesting dungeon crawls to make grinding more varied, but all it got is:
1)Fight all battles
2)Explore 90% of rooms(and likely fight all battles)
3)Interact with 3 things(and fight most battles)
Instead they just nerfed all the fun strats and added more grind. After you completed a couple of runs you've seen 80% of things the game has to offer with the only real incentive to keep going being the boss fights (which they also reuse 3 fucking times because why not?) and the final dungeon.
And if you actually stick with the game and get to the final dungeon you'll find that each successful mission there permanently locks your characters from entering it so you need to spend a couple of hours mindlessly grinding up another batch if you want to keep going.
fuck this game

I had 2 rooms left to have the quest complete

you chose poorly

How quickly the tide turns.

Note for future reference. In scouting missions, if you enter a room and that room has a battle, retreating will count as that room still being explored. If it's one of the last two rooms you have to do, you might be able to save your team from doing too much.

>Hundreds of hours in Darkest Dungeon, according to Steam.
Yeah, the devs are shit.
They went massively overboard with completely random bullshit. Would not buy the game in its current state. Too bad that I can't refund it anymore. If you want to have fun with this game, go watch a stream on twitch because atleast then you can laugh at the streamer when he smashes his keyboard to bits when he rips his party.

In Radiant Mode characters are no longer locked out of the Darkest Dungeon after completing it, in addition to faster hero xp gain and the ability to upgrade your stagecoach to recruit up to resolve lv 4.

I only played it after final release, I like it and have had fun breaking the minds of brave fools for profit.

I forgot to mention the importance of scouting,which is why you should bring more torches than you need.

I love me a hard game, i like them as hard as diamonds, just something about grinding away at stuff to achieve something is satisfying, i've even got a soft spot for "unfair" games like IWBTG and kaizo games because they're not /unfair/ they just require muscle memory of stuff

but when you add in random bullfuckery that is 100% out of your control and results in the total decimation of your party / best characters, im done.

Darkest dungeons is a bullshit game full of bullshit random events and a trash-as-fuck RNG combat system. its a garbage game that has killer aesthetics and concept that get ruined by an artificial difficulty.

games that require memorization of movement patters, or require you to study stat mechanics, or even games that just require enemy mechanics to be understood - THOSE are fun

games that require the things mentioned above, but add in RNG things that can fuck you over - those are trash.

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>"Oh boy I sure hope I don't get yet another fucking blee-"
>Bleed

I am starting a game now. Is that thing of four antiquarians giving absurd amounts of money still working?

Determination to make story more important than gameplay has never made a game shine.

I've never been so disappointed with a game in my life - - At least the porn mod is hilarious.

I managed to beat the apprentice Necromancer.
After a couple of hours of gameplay I can competently say they wanted to go for D&D style damage values without the players having the chance to dish / heal out an appropriate amount.


Please elaborate.

Played this and almost uninstalled on first day.

Then I got gud, kept at it until I beat it, 10/10 game, best of the year for me so far.

Then again I like risk management and planning around wild RNG. The amazing art does help too.

It's pretty damn rare to have bad town events, let alone this bad.

Any mark synergy team will absolutely shit out damage.

I will have to try that at some point.

Also lepers with +ACC and vs. type accessories.
Bring guys that can move backwards in case you get shuffled.

It's a miniboss event, you have to kick the shit out of it to get your trinkets back.

Plague Doctor best waifu

Grave Robber begs to differ.

Think playing a 4X on fast.

I miss the 4 man crusader rape train boogaloo

Alright, the game is giving me some legit satisfaction at this point

It's really enjoyable in the early game when you're being drip fed a steady stream of new content. Losing people isn't that big of a deal because new ones will be able to jump right into dungeon runs and every run will open up new ways to improve your odds for the next one. Then the grind starts to set in and towards the end it'll look something like this.
Darkest Dungeon is what you get when developers take a fun idea and do everything in their power to remove the fun.

Darkest Dungeon could have been a brutal, moody game about throwing characters into the meat grinder where the ones who don't die go insane, throwing more fools into the grinder to replace the ones lost. Instead it was a game there you get your butt kicked the first attempt, then learn to play well in 30 minutes and have nothing left but grind grind grind grind grind grind fucking grind. Enemies stop being much of a threat so on any run they probably won't kill someone, but if someone does die it is horrible because fucking grind grind grind.

Instead of a brutal roguelite about death and insanity it is about boring grind with the occasional boring mission where the only thing you truly fear is having to do even more grind if something goes wrong in the process of completing your mission.

specifically you kick the shit out of the nest and break it, if you don't kill the nest in 3 turns, the bird flies away and your out of luck.

Pretty stressful, don't you think? The RNG.
The aesthetic of the game is pretty damn good. Especially considering there's not much art involved.


Alright, I think I should rest at the next room.

So do I, user.
So do I.

Fuck, I can only imagine how useful this could have been

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It's very shallow, very repetitive and has very swingy RNG (with compounding critical hits that cause stress, that cause debuffs and heart attacks etc) as substitute for actual challange. It's been like this since day 1 but it had a lot less content and looked like they'd improve the gameplay systems. They didn't. They added corpses of killed enemies that block attacks and nerfed all interesting and alternate strategies into the ground.

Shit game with cool graphics atmosphere.

I think you mean
>bitch and cry after the nerf

This is exactly why you block updates.

death by snuu snuu from a vigorous Hellion

The game isn't even hard, they just removed cheese strategies. The game was being refined.

I'm not even that experienced and I can make it to week 43 in Stygian with 1 death

The amount of misinformation in this thread.

All you have to do is fucking survive the Shrieker to get your stuff back. You don't have to kill anything.

Retards who haven't played the game shouldn't post.

The only issue I have with the game is how it does "Risk vs Reward".
I think the other whiners about game balance need to fuck off too, because this is the only thing they fucked up.
You can sum up DD as:
Which is something I abhor. I won't run the cheesy "famr lvl 1 dungeons to power up and then hit up a lvl 99 dungeon like a boss" that is a staple of jrpgs.

What I'd like is for the game to present situations where you have a serious chance of suddenly losing someone, or the entire party but entice you with something that can utterly turn the tides later.
For instance:
Would you take your chances for something like this? Assume the game warns you first.
This would provide a real balzy moment, especially if it's appearance is random. You're running with your top-tier team, this shit pops up. You know this thing could trivialize a boss fight right after this run. But you realize there's a good chance you're gonna lose 2-3 characters or even a wipe.

Instead, when the game puts you into dramatic situations like this, the additional rewards you can risk your life for are usually:
Why would you even risk that shit? Pull out everytime you run into trouble and only proceed if the dice align perfectly until then.

Other than that, great game, great narrator, great ambience, great mechanics (that allow tweaking because someone people like corpse piles, some don't) and great everything except the rewards.

Maybe it's just me though. I like when the game rewards me for taking incredle risks and punishes me for being overly greedy, not because I wanted enough money to buy a couple more rations.

Also the copy and paste boss fights that just ups the numbers bothers me. Could've done something cooler like the first boss being the necromancer's apprentice, then the actual necromancer, than a lich that was summoned and killed necromancer later etc etc so we get some different enemy movesets. Considering how fighting bosses is a highlight of the game there's a huge lack of it