Played EA for a bit. It doesn't look as bad as I thought.
Not sure why they bothered with skill specific pose animations, seems like a waste of resources. The rest looks good: snappy animations with slapping impact and satisfying sound effects, impressive monster designs and narrator doing his thing.
Gameplay changed completely, outside of base fight mechanics. Stress shifted from second healthbar into a more complex system: heroes become more of an asshole the higher it goes and if it maxes out they get dropped to low health and fuck up their friendships.
Relationship mechanics are great. Had 4 heroes get hateful and jealous of each other, driving out all the hope (relpaces torches), by constantly shittalking every single mistake made by each other, while enemies beat them to death.
They added these sanctuaries where you can do background battles for each hero (4 per each character), that unlock skills if you win. They add a lot of personality to them, but at the same time- you always play the same heroes (thou their personalities change per run), so the old soul crushing loss of an experienced hero is not a thing anymore.
Heroes don't have upgradable equipment, but get way more skills to pick from and can use consumables as free action. Miss rate seems to be toned down by a lot.
Hud still sucks dick.
I'd say it's a good direction for a new game, overall. Way better pacing and way more personality.
Misinformation city here.
The stress bar is not complex at all. It's literally 1-10 instead of 1-100 and what you just described is how heart attacks functioned in DD1. Relationship mechanics are ultra gimmicky and feel half-baked at best, extremely annoying at worst. The characters don't shut the fuck up and the benefits of two best pals are much less frequently applied through gameplay than two characters that despise one another where they will actively debuff one another at every opportunity. They also don't fit in tone with the whole "terror and madness" theme DD was founded on. Very bizarre change in direction.
The hero backstories are most of the time just a few sentences of narration with the occasional battle sprinkled in somewhere in their various chapters. You'll often do one, have Wayne June talk into your ear with pretentious dialogue, then auto unlock a skill for your character.
You could also use consumables as a free action in DD1, only here in DD2 you don't have an entire inventory shared among the party. Each character gets one consumable type to use. The reason why miss rate seems down is because they changed the mechanics towards this "token" system where you will have things like an enemy getting a token for 50% damage taken and once you hit them they get that token consumed. It trades in the RPG stuff for icons you're expected to get familiar with over time.
In fact, that's why DD2 is pure bells and whistles because it's hardly an RPG at all anymore. It has lost ton of that to fit into this new highly original and highly innovative roguelike direction they went for. There's no feeling of real progression, no real care for the characters you build up, and when you're not in the battle screen you're just looking at the back of a stagecoach.
DD1 had tons of issues but as it stands it is a much better game than DD2 by far. DD2 is just a weird, jarring experience that reeks of too many people having input and no real direction for the project or being afraid during brainstorm sessions to say that idea is retarded.
Regardless, I look forward to DD3 being a survival crafting card game simulator in 2026 though.
