KickStarter Darkest Dungeon AKA the Celerity Attention Whore Thread

[Invictus]

has nobody told them about this?

99,9% of the people who didn't liked the game just stopped playing it (the difference being Celerity of course)

But why then all the bullshit of making an explansion? That could have been a great opportunity for getting players to try the game again and find they adjusted the game to make it less grindy and by less grindly I dont mean going from 80 to 60 hours because they adjusted drop rates and prices but actually scaling shit down seems to be apparently out of their capabilities

 

[Lujo]

They've been told this numerous times. There's no point telling them, they know this.

They have 2 main problems, one isn't completely "their" fault, one is. The one which isn't is that they have a very VERY simple combat system, so they kind of ran out of design space. This isn't necessarily their fault in the sense that anybody would be in the same boat as they are if they wanted a combat system this simple. And simple combat (or mechanic) systems sell, this seems to be hard for average folks as it is, much to my disbelief.

What IS their fault is stretching the allready meager possible ability pool over a million player characters and 4 types of dungeons and THEN adding three layers of "difficulty" to rehash it all in.

Franky they were stretching it with the number of bossess, most of those could've been scaled down in power and just have been regular encounters. And a bunch of them don't actually have that much to do with the dungeon they're in compared to others. The new monsters mostly show that they understand this to some degree but they show up way too late.

 

[Invictus]

The combat is simplistic but so was the combat for a lot of similar games like the Final Fantasy or even Might and Magic games and they made up in design and quality and maybe beign repetitive but NOT grindy

 

[Lujo]

I think the game seems to be some kind of perfect shitstorm of incompatible elements and design philosophies which just makes it mechanically incoherent, so to speak. It's just an incredibly ineptly put together game on the game design front. If you ask me, this is due to the age old problem of people capable of physically making games (coding, graphics) and selling games (PR, finances, networking) being able to be big fans of games while at the same time being terrible at designing (or developing) games.

 

[Zombra]

If you ask me, this is due to the age old problem of people capable of physically making games (coding, graphics) and selling games (PR, finances, networking) being able to be big fans of games while at the same time being terrible at designing (or developing) games.

Nope, didn't follow that at all.

 

[Celerity]

It's more halfassed token measures that fool idiots. Still 2 hours of content stretched out heavily and they're censoring more than ever when you point that out because they're fully aware more and more people are aware of them and their days are numbered.

 

[Celerity]

This could have been a nice chance to make 20 hours playthoughs and make this palatable but seems it is just a sprinkling of chocolate and sunshine over the same old grindfest
I wonder, they do have their own forums, has nobody told them about this? Do they not have metrics that show that maybe 5% of their players have finished the damn thing? Or something? Maybe we arr the crazy ones or they are perfectly happy with a game that is fun and challenging the first 10 hours but then turns into a grind fest and most players drop it but who cares because they already paid
I actually enjoyed my first real playthrough until I found out that bosses came in 3 flavors and the parties thay entered the darkest dungeon were done for good, figured that making a copy of my saves was probably the best way to save me the rage of getting jumped by the collector or just getting wiped on some random enconter

Of course people have told them about that. Not just me, either. It sounded like work so they didn't do it and censored if you were persistent. Most left before that point, often Feburary 2015.

They'd rather do no effort token changes and shillshillshill because that's easier on them and their arrogance.

That and they can control narrative with the hour argument (anyone who grinds through that drek allegedly got their money's worth, anyone who snoozequits it has no argument) and pass off the low completion rate as "difficulty". Last I checked, the difficulty of games shouldn't measure the difference in remaining awake.

Now their narrative is basically that Derexiters are a minority. We fucking left, of course there's not many left there. Only retarded Remainers can tolerate it unless they just kick them around for the lulz like me of course.

You're being very charitible though. 10 hours for 2 hours of content? And the collector is for all intents and purposes an obligatory boss because the condition it appears under is something that will happen by room 2 at the latest of every dungeon ever?

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

and their days are numbered.

You realize that announcement of their next project will be one of the semi major gaming news pieces of that month?
Darkest Dungeon will be mentioned in the vein of " good game; wonderful presentation, but pacing was somewhat off".

 

[CptMace]

and their days are numbered.

You realize that announcement of their next project will be one of the semi major gaming news pieces of that month?
Darkest Dungeon will be mentioned in the vein of " good game; wonderful presentation, but pacing was somewhat off".

Oh he's aware, and he's prepared during these last months to endorce, once again, the role of avenger of incline. He'll spend as many thousands of hours as is required on their next game to make sure it lacks quality enough before he proceeds to persuade himself he's having any impact on their career or nightmares.
Which is why we love him anyway. <3

 

[Efe]

i wouldn't know about their careers or nightmares but it seems he did have a big impact on their community at the very least.
i'm pretty sure he is more known than developers of the game in its own forums

 

[Gord]

They have 2 main problems, one isn't completely "their" fault, one is. The one which isn't is that they have a very VERY simple combat system, so they kind of ran out of design space. This isn't necessarily their fault in the sense that anybody would be in the same boat as they are if they wanted a combat system this simple. And simple combat (or mechanic) systems sell, this seems to be hard for average folks as it is, much to my disbelief.

What IS their fault is stretching the allready meager possible ability pool over a million player characters and 4 types of dungeons and THEN adding three layers of "difficulty" to rehash it all in.

Several aspects of the game contradict each other. The amount of actual content would be much better for a game balanced around short-ish runs of, say, up to ten hours each.
Instead they went for an excessive amount of rather boring grind.
The sanity system - which was after all the main selling point during the kickstarter, iirc - was a great chance to provide a unique mechanic, but ended up as a rather simplistic and inconsequential system made up of a second health pool and some traits that for the most part provide minimal percentage based bonuses or penalties.

Where the game succeeds well is in creating a good atmosphere.

 

[Zombra]

The sanity system - which was after all the main selling point during the kickstarter, iirc - was a great chance to provide a unique mechanic, but ended up as a rather simplistic and inconsequential system made up of a second health pool and some traits that for the most part provide minimal percentage based bonuses or penalties.

This is by far my biggest disappointment. Even after some 25 hours I can only remember one or two traits out of all my characters. I don't remember the abusive plague doctor or the bloodthirsty abomination. There are too many traits per character and they come and go too fast to make an impression. I do remember the bounty hunter who always visits his favorite prostitute because I can relate to that personally, but that's the exception.

 

[Lujo]

The sanity system - which was after all the main selling point during the kickstarter, iirc - was a great chance to provide a unique mechanic, but ended up as a rather simplistic and inconsequential system made up of a second health pool and some traits that for the most part provide minimal percentage based bonuses or penalties.

This is several things at once.

Sanity meter as an alternative health bar? Ok, it could have hardly worked any other way, but the concequences of having your sanity run out are somewhat trivial. I went into dungeons with insane and nearly insane people and walked out. Same with people with any number of penalties. Or they are overly detrimental, but the actual fun part of it (insanity) goes away automatically, and the boring parts of it (the checklist of all the numbers/objects in the game you can get a penalty/incompatibiliity/forced interaction with) can be washed off.

Or, since the dudes are replaceable, you just fire and hire new guys. Which totally devalues either health or sanity as a mechanic, because in order for sanity to work you need to care about losing your characters, and in order for health to work they need to be disposable. And if they're disposable, then it's easier to not care for them than it is to care for them enough for sanity to work.

Also, sanity is a storyfag mechanic at it's heart, but if the guys aren't insane you don't know them from an .xl sheet. Since the dungeons themselves don't give any roleplay opportunities (it's all strictly functional math stuff), the only time the game actually works right is if you walk into dungeons with insane characters. Really, that's the most fun I've had in the game. I think I started doing it for an achievement or something, walk into a dungeon with 4 insane guys and walk out. They had actual personality! Something non-routine was going on.

It feels as if the guys who were making the game at one point assumed that folks would be going insane way more often, that you'd have one or two in every run. If you don't it's really a hot mess. I wonder what exactly went wrong and how.

 

[Celerity]

It's saying something when the only time the game can be considered as "working right" is when it's quite literally playing itself because your "heroes" are as easily triggered as a bunch of SJWs and had a meltdown because you walked down 2 hallways without eating then they got a drink thrown at them. Which is by far the biggest failing of the system, the sanity damage doesn't come from unknowable horrors or wtfever, the first horror they added is a Large Corpse Eater and it explicitly does not inflict stress damage! Some fatass with a whip is more of a mental threat than an actual Lovecraftian creature. Granted I wouldn't want any of that either, but...

 

[Lujo]

Well, played it a bunch and I still haven't seen any new monsters, because I still haven't done any champion level runs. There's still a laundry list of stuff a 5 year old child would've thought out or pulled off better. I've gotten involved with the official forum a bit, giving them insults mixed with feedback, that's the only way to treat "game developers". That way if they're dumb enough to not take good advice you can always say "Well I did insult them" to yourself and be satisfied - a) you know you failed and the bridge is burnt and b) you cussed them out beforehand so no reason to dwell on it.

Howeverz, the impression, for anyone who cares, is the following, just for the radiant mode and before having a chance to check out any new monsters (which kinda mostly look fine on paper). I'm not going through the whole laundry list of suck.

- They went and made the secret room not appear in every run ever. This lowered the overall average amount of gold you can expect to haul out. I think, it certainly feels that way. It was a bit ridiculous before.
- They bumped the loot stack sizes a bit which is fine.
- The antiquarian is rather good. I was expecting a weaker character, but no, as gimped as she seems she's been pretty handy so far. Not madly powerful, just not any kind of self-imposed challenge she seems to have supposed to have been.
- In radiant mode you can go into lower level dungeons with higher level dudes. One tier above is the limit, so champions can't go into easy. Funny as it may sound, this in effect makes the game much more enjoyable. Not because it's fun grinding low level dungeons with high level dudes (it's f****g awful, boring and doesn't pay), but because you can, for the first time, do the bossess when you feel like. You don't have to jump through hoops to have adequate leveled charactrs, you can't overlevel milestones you want to do. They shaved off god alone knows how many 100% pointless hours with this, and removed the insane "I leveled up a guy now I have to dismiss him" bollocks. Very nice and liberating, I wasn't expecting it.
- What it also helps is to kinda speed through the earlier difficulty levels in general. "Speed through" in "way too time-consuming slog" terms. The game is almost ridiculously sparse in monster variety and plays more satisfyingly at higher tiers where there is more of them, so being able to get through the easy (or even medium stuff) a bit faster is a very good thing.
- What happens, though, is that although your dudes will level up, the heirloom grind is still limited by your inventory space, so the upgrades will lag behind and you won't necessarily roflstomp everything just because your dudes are higher level. The non-radiant game has a ridicule worthy amount of progression staggering, radiant does away with some but leaves plenty. You can now trade one kind of heirloom for any other kind, and you can have any kind of heirloom as reward in any direction, which is also pretty nifty.
- Building upgrades are still largely bogus. You want the sanitarium, blacksmith, guild and stagecoach, everything else is mostly either meh, bogus or mostly a timesink. They said they improved this somehow, but it's not very obvious how.
- They seem to have been doing some survey about trinkets. The trinkets are still largely meh. If they give speed, attack, crit, stun and possibly scouting they're good trinkets, otherwise a few are situationally useful trinkets and most of them are complete trash not worth not selling immediately. There's mostly no middle ground. I suppose something's going to improve (it's hard for things not to improve, the trinket situation has always been godawful due to the simplistic system and monsters all doing mostly the same thing which clearly favors certain trinkets). Dmg trinkets are still just ok, but raw damage doesn't really compare to the important stats (and often isn't worth the downside and the trinket slot).
- Curios stil suck ass. They all ask what's in your inventory, and reward your alt-tab game.
- Runs in general still suck ass. They did improve the fetch quests by adding town-related rewards, and those are fairly nice, so that's something, but it's all still early-alpha-engine-test material and not game-that-sells-for-20$-in-a-store-and-is-played-on-a-pc material. Now that some other aspects of the epic grind have been adressed somewhat, this is what stick out the most.
- Town events / quest rewards are ok. They go from meh to... handy and strong, I suppose. Haven't seen them all yet, but can't complain.
- Stuns are still largely retarded and gamebreaking. Large sized monsters are strictly inferior to 1 tile monsters because it takes 1 single stun to take care of 2 enemy tiles. They seem to have taken the hint, new dudes are average size.
- It might, and I'm not sure, be possible to reliably do actual night runs for money with, IDK, higher lvl characters on, say, medium. This is strangely nice, because there's not much reason to go very dark outside of a few setpiece fights. So what I mean by money is actually variety.

Overall, strangely mellowing compared to how it used to be, if played on Radiant. Don't play any other mode it's a very pointless slog. Not really worth it yet, and I'm not sure champion level is going to be cool enough to pay off. Shows signs of hope, though.

 

[kyrub]

This still won't fix the problem that the game has about 1 quarter of the in-dungeon content it would need to be as interesting as it tries to pass itself off as, and I'm kind of sure stunlock still completely destroys the combat at a conceptual level, but wth, it's certainly going to be less grindy.

There is a simple solution for the stunlock problem. Open the /Darkest Dungeon/shared/buffs/buff_library.json with txt editor, find STUNRECOVERY entry, and add these 2 lines after the line with "amount" : 0.4.
"duration_type" : "combat_end",
"duration" : 1,

Now, each time you stun the enemy, he becomes more and more resistant until the end of the combat (not for 1 round). It seems to solve the trick for me (along with the wasted time stress mechanism). You no longer can overuse stun => heal, but still can use it once or twice with careful tactics.

 

[Lujo]

This still won't fix the problem that the game has about 1 quarter of the in-dungeon content it would need to be as interesting as it tries to pass itself off as, and I'm kind of sure stunlock still completely destroys the combat at a conceptual level, but wth, it's certainly going to be less grindy.

There is a simple solution for the stunlock problem. Open the /Darkest Dungeon/shared/buffs/buff_library.json with txt editor, find STUNRECOVERY entry, and add these 2 lines after the line with "amount" : 0.4.
"duration_type" : "combat_end",
"duration" : 1,

Now, each time you stun the enemy, he becomes more and more resistant until the end of the combat (not for 1 round). It seems to solve the trick for me (along with the wasted time stress mechanism). You no longer can overuse stun => heal, but still can use it once or twice with careful tactics.

That's nice info, but the devastating power of stun spam isn't in being able to heal up. This seems to be confusing people. It's in Plague Doctor being able to crowd control so effortlessly that you're always outnumbering the other guys. And vs. size 2 monsters everyone's a Plague Doctor because one stun takes care of two enemy slots while you always have 4 (3 since one guy is stunning, but still, an advantage). This makes it way too easy to just always stun a bunch of guys and while focusing down the other guys in one round, making healing and stress relief meh because you never get very hurt at all. As long as you can stack 2-3 stuns in a row on the same target, it doesn't really matter how resistant they are for the rest of the fight, because there usually isn't any rest of the fight.

Not sure I explained it well enough. The point is that you're not prolonging the fight with stuns. The fight lasts for 4 very efficient rounds, but stuns make it so that you beat the other guys up with plenty of focus and minimal resistance. The reason its so devastating (mainly) is that the devs used "having 2 actions" as a boss mechanic rather than have it on at least 2 mooks per dungeon type, and they have no enemy healers who can remove stuns or buff their party stun resistance, so the effective defense mechanisms are simply not used anywhere.

 

[kyrub]

Lujo, you seem to argue for the sake of proving yourself right. Is it just one unit, that is OP, like Plague Doctor, who can stun 2 units at once? That does not mean that the whole game is broken, no? Otherwise your logic does not stand: with the correction I suggested, you will not go a long way. You stun the opponent once, twice if you are lucky. But while stunning, you cannot kill him instantly. In second, max third round, he is immune to stunning. If you still feel the stunning is too powerful, just increase the "amount:40" to "amount: 80". You'll never get to second succesful stun.

Otherwise, I agree with your points of critique. The dungeons are samish, enemies are boring, trinkets mostly useless, curios meh. But:

Why don't you go playing the Pitch black dungeon mod? It introduces a lots of new enemies, with very dangerous affixes system. You get resistant Cultists, you get horrifying units that stress you with every hit, and the bloody charming units that steal your own army and use it against you... Of course, it is like a Long war version of DD, it's actually slower than the original, but it's infinitely more fun than it. It is certainly more brutal (especially if you bar away the stunfest).

 

[Reinhardt]

Pitch black dungeon mod

I played this mod and it was actually even easier than vanilla game. Slower - yes. Harder - no. Celerity may be obsessed, but his Deepest Dark was much better.

 

[kyrub]

There's no point in arguing what is harder, since that is subjective measure. If you find Vanilla harder, good for you, I guess.

What is sure, however, is that PDB gives you good deal of new combat situations and combat variability - that is the point that Lujo rightly criticised. But maybe it's not the right kind variability, especially if you all have put tens of hours in the game, I can imagine that it is not good enough. Yes, DD is ultimately limited and repetitive, even with all these tricks.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I find this game to be the biggest tragedy of all the new wave incline.

This game is the game I desperately want to play. It has all the facets I'd really like, such as originality, interesting art, design and atmosphere, genuinely interesting mechanics used in a lovecraftian setting. I absolutely adore the system of rest and recuperation and the way the game suggests you manage a large and interestingly varied party over the long-term so that, by the time you reach the end of the game it really feels like you've fully achieved something and that you did this because of your careful and diligent game knowledge that fostered an almost pet-like love for your characters.

And then the screeching brakes sound effect kicks in.

The game doesn't really have an ending. Or, if someone is masochistic enough to get to it then its so far removed from the pacing of the rest of the game that you'll die of boredom or exhaustion before you get there. The further you go, the more enemies just repeat. The further you go, the more the enemies just resort to cheap one-shots, obliterating all the love you'd built-up in a fit of cheap irritation.

It's a game that makes you love it then hate it, instead of making you confused by it then loving it. So many times I've wanted so badly to buy it and play it, and so many times I've just thought... what's the point, it all turns to shit at some point, why waste the emotional investment.

 

[Jason Liang]

Darkest Dungeon was consensus RPGotY last year on many game review sites. Looking at how weak the RPG field was last year from our own polling, perhaps Darkest Dungeon *was* the best new offering last year, out of an admittedly weak field.

 

[Reinhardt]

But maybe it's not the right kind variability, especially if you all have put tens of hours in the game, I can imagine that it is not good enough.

PBD is bloated mess of new features for the sake of new features. Look, i like slow and grindy games. First thing i did in Darkest Dungeon - edited files for slower exp progression. But i did it for longer low level feeling, not for the more hours of heirloom grinding. Instead of making game combat faster and deadlier but lengthen game overall PBD just make everything slower, including combat, which was already slow and boring.

 

[Celerity]

Ignoring the hilarity that Joey boy is involved in, PBD is basically RNG noise and grind amplified. He just added in stuff, made sure it didn't crash (sometimes), then released it. No actual testing. Meanwhile Deepest Dark development actually went faster despite being repeatedly tested, mostly because he didn't even do anything until after I had enough of Rekt Hook's corruption and left.

The even funnier thing is Deepest Dark for Lords of Xulima takes about 400 hours per run and that's STILL came along further because it actually has coherent design behind it.

 

[kyrub]

Hope your game design is not like the syntax of your phrases, otherwise it must lack any noticeable coherence.
I would certainly give Deepest Dark a try, but since you put it away it has become largely irrelevant.