One frequent point of feedback that we receive is that heals generally don’t keep pace with incoming damage from enemies. This is actually core to the philosophy of the game, and every time we hear that comment we actually take that as a positive and rub our bellies as though we just had a delicious Sunday roast. Every quest in Darkest Dungeon is meant to be a sort of fighting withdrawal against a superior force—given enough time and enough battles, you will fall. The accumulated stress and wounds will bring your heroes to their knees—you just ideally want to complete the quest before this happens. Philosophically, if healing (or stress healing) were strong enough to keep pace in each combat, then you could adventure indefinitely. Healing is meant to be a stopgap against death—use it judiciously and sparingly to keep heroes off of Death’s Door, or help arrest a combat gone bad. But as a general matter of course, we will always be striving to make healing feel underpowered compared to what you might expect in other RPGs where the rule of the day is stay at full health and just spam potions when the red globe empties. By far the most common complaint overall is our gracious lord and destroyer, RNGesus. Darkest Dungeon aims to strike a tenuous balance between plan and chance. There is no denying that there is a lot of variance in the game—too much in some specific spots. We have already sculpted a few mechanics under the hood to try to avoid ridiculously cruel and unlikely chains of events (e.g. 12 failed retreats in a row), and we have no doubt that we’ll be improving some more systems as well. But again, creative direction and design philosophy are very important considerations for us. Unlike, say, a pure strategy game, making all the right choices in Darkest Dungeon will not always guarantee a favorable outcome. The game is *sometimes* unfair (by design), cruel (by design), and unpredictable (by design). Even when you assemble the perfect team and provision appropriately and manage your risk, we want things to occasionally go pear-shaped and therefore put you in unexpectedly out-of-control situations where your favorite heroes die. BUT, if you play smart in the long-term, the game should reward you accordingly and we will continue striving to make it so. We do, after all, want to reward clever play! The analogy we use internally is poker. Poker players understand that holding pocket Aces greatly increases your chance of winning a hand, but they do not guarantee it. Sometimes you make all the right moves, and suffer a bad beat. Darkest Dungeon is a game about administering the occasional bad beat to you, and then watching eagerly to see how you take it. That being said, to quell any conspiracy theories, we currently DO NOT have an AI Director type system that measures how you are doing and then makes things harder or easier on you accordingly. That is, if you are playing well and having an easy time of it, we won’t necessarily spring Shamblers in every hallway for you. At least not yet…
Suffice it to say that RNGesus is never going complete away in this game, but we may try to reform some of his most problematic habits.
