flabbyjack
Arcane
I wish the game was half as exciting as that trailer. I'll end up buying it anyways.
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Game News Darkest Dungeon Released
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
Seethe
Cipher
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2015
- Messages
- 998
Age of Empires is the best roguelike ever. Your soldiers die forever.
- Joined
- Jul 26, 2015
- Messages
- 1,361
But do they level up? :1up:
The game is out of early access, but that does not mean much. I bet it will still get balance patches for months to come, so I will take interest sometime later this year. Around Steam Summer Sale, perhaps .
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 100,011
Even for me? I can't imagine what you're talking about
When a single mechanic causes a bunch of mainstream game journalism drama about "THE FIGHT FOR DARKEST DUNGEON BETWEEN CASUALS AND HARDCORES", I think I can reasonably characterize such a situation as probable "nonsense". See: CrustyBot's post. It is not a statement about whether the game mechanic itself is a net positive or a net negative.
You'll notice that I reported the stuff I saw people talking about on the Codex without any such embellishment, because the Codex's criticisms of the game are properly holistic, rather than focusing on one single mechanic as the reason why the game is bad.
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Celerity
Takes 1337 hours to realise it's shit.
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2015
- Messages
- 1,096
I agree, the corpse strawman is stupid as fuck no matter how it is being used. It's still relevant, in that it illustrates their mindset (do random unrelated shit that takes no effort), but then you look beyond it and see the other problems.
So official Celerity review for this coming when? We need a through dissection of the design choices, after all.
Read your review, interesting stuff. How come this game triggered a crusade from you? I mean, most people would just say fuck it and buy another game since corruption and money-grubbing is widespread within gaming.
It's definitely worth 10-15$, just wait for the price to go down if you haven't bought it already.
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2005
- Messages
- 24,793
It's good but very difficult after they tightened the mechanics. Still, it does get boring pretty quickly.
And of course it's not a Rogue-like, it's a Rogue-lite, like Binding of Isaac, FTL, Risk of Rain, or any of the other hundreds of Rogue-lites.
(It's the word I use for games with random elements that are mistakenly advertises as Rogue-likes.)
And of course it's not a Rogue-like, it's a Rogue-lite, like Binding of Isaac, FTL, Risk of Rain, or any of the other hundreds of Rogue-lites.
(It's the word I use for games with random elements that are mistakenly advertises as Rogue-likes.)
Lurker King
Self-Ejected
- Joined
- Jan 21, 2015
- Messages
- 1,865,419
The success of crappy indie games like Darkest Dungeon and Undertale are the equivalent of a viral YouTube video of some random retarded dude being hit in the balls. The can easily achieve hundreds of thousands of views, while a video of contemporary classic music or a good documentary will barely achieve one hundred views.
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So I take it the game didn't turn out too great? I haven't followed the thread and haven't tried it in a looong time.
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2012
- Messages
- 267
It's quite fun for the first 10 hours or so. I got rather bored after 8 hours. Too simplistic to offer more.
It's a good game to have installed for me. I'll play it a lot, then get bored, leave it, and then return to it later on. It's pretty good casual fun with great atmosphere.
If you're looking for something deep, look elsewhere.
But I suggest everyone to buy it just to spite our new local loonie Celerity.
If you're looking for something deep, look elsewhere.
But I suggest everyone to buy it just to spite our new local loonie Celerity.
I'd wager my left nut that this is a case of "baby's first BIG gaming related disappointment" with some extra "typical modder" sauce. The "salty" schtick, the epic [Lore Failure] regarding classic RPGs and the porn humour is a dead giveaway that Celerity is much MUCH younger than the Codex average.
He is not even 20 y/o, probably. Which also explains the sheer amount of free time he has to waste 1337 hours in a game he clearly despises. Reading his posts gives me a little nostalgia trip to the lands of "remember when you were young and thought Neverwinter Nights was going to be the bestest spiritual sequel to Baldur's Gate 2?". Yeah...
What's even MORE interesting than Celerity is how the joo manipulates the goyim ITT into checking out the game with shitty "pro dev humour" made at the typical modder's expense. "Check it out, Codex: this game has controversy! Every copy you buy gets Celerity more
. Do it for teh lulz xD". And you know what? His review is THE most voted review on Steam with roughly twenty times the amount of votes every single other (popular) review got. That has only one possible interpretation: the DD community DOES care about his opinion, whether you like it or not.TL;DR: modder kid is nuts, but he is right (about DD, that is). Inshillitron uses the opportunity to do what he does best: try to score some doritos. Kodex Kommunity pays too much attention to Celerity's shitposting and ends up biting the Merchant's hook, line, sinker and a bit of the rod too. Shamefur dispray.
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Lucky
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2015
- Messages
- 672
Turns out I backed the kickstarter so I’ve been playing this to see what the result is. Here's my impressions so far.
Great style. Lots of nice visual touches with, for example, the camera zoom being used appropriately and paced in a way that it doesn’t break up the combat flow. Game has a lot of style.
Great narrator. I don’t necessarily pay attention to everything he says, but his delivery really sets the tone and adds some character to the game.
Dungeons are awkwardly paced with too much emphasis on combat. They'd benefit from being larger in general so the game would have room to build up tension between encounters (or having it spike by suddenly throwing multiple at you), there being more ways to interact with the dungeon itself and incentivising taking on more difficult dungeons at low level - having encounters move around in combination with a larger dungeon, sneaking around to avoid difficult encounters, reworked scouting, and more puzzle like traps and ‘curiosities’ that you can figure out rather than them just being random. Probably best to mostly drop the random dungeon aspect and instead go for larger, hand designed dungeons with randomised elements that you explore over the course of multiple trips and quests that mean something on a strategic level. Right now, the dungeons are so straightforward that it doesn’t matter that they’re random, so you’re not getting any benefit out from it anyway.
Heroes not wanting to go on levels below their level feels weird and more than a little annoying. I suspect that this was done because they've heavily balanced the combat encounters around the enemies’ stats, rather than what abilities they have and their party synergies, so the heroes getting higher stats as a result of levelling up makes the lower level dungeons trivially easy after a while. For the player, however, this ends up feeling annoyingly restrictive and counter-intuitive, because apparently even my Bloodthirsty Hellion doesn’t feel like unwinding by slaughtering some low level enemies.
Similarly, there's no asymmetrical way to buff your party beyond their starting strength through the strategy layer to alleviate the grind of the lower level dungeons or allow them to take on harder dungeons at a lower level (trinkets are either shit or too valuable). There’s this weird dissonance where even if you level up your guild and blacksmith you can't use them to upgrade starting heroes because you can only upgrade the heroes' skills and gear up to their level current level. I thought I was upgrading them to not only buff my top heroes but also to give an edge to fresh ones that I liked, so discovering that I was restricted from doing that was more than a little annoying. Like with heroes not wanting to do easy dungeons, I can see the motivation behind this being that they don’t want to ruin the balance and atmosphere by making you too powerful, but this is just a symptom of poor design rather than being a legitimate solution to that problem, especially since by the time I’ve upgraded those facilities I’ll want to be able to speed up the early grind and move on to the mid-game dungeons. The result is that you’re discouraged to play around and experiment with the different classes and party compositions, since strengthening your character takes so much unfun grinding and there being no way to boost a starting team so that you can try out how viable they’d be in the mid-game.
Mechanics are easy to understand, but this also presents a problem since the game, so far at least, is not that challenging tactically. Basically, back row bad, go kill. If no can reach back row, move or kill front row. The rest then is keeping your stress and health at a respectable level, which is also why you kill the back row first since that is where the big stress dealers are positioned.
Consequently, the only deaths I did incur were from me weeding out which classes could or could not handle getting fucked by the rng, which ended with me now butchering my way through with double Hound Master and double Abomination teams. Just roughly comparing their stats and versatility to that of the standard team of Crusader, Highwayman, Vestal and Plague Doctor makes the latter utterly redundant. Some classes plainly can handle getting surprised and shuffled out of order, then double critted, debuffed and stressed nearly to the max much better than others. The annoying bit is that I’d rather go for a thematic approach with diverse teams that employ all the different classes, but the difference in party effectiveness is so clear that there’s no point in investing time in a neat little team since you’re just intentionally wasting your time on a group that will inevitably crumble when a really bad rng roll turns up.
I’ve also read that your heroes can only beat the Darkest Dungeon itself once and will afterwards refuse to go back, which makes me not look forward to what should be the climax of the game and the sheer amount of grind that would mean.
All in all, I’m not sure whether I’m going to continue playing or wait for some mods to fix some of the grind. I’m still sort of having fun with my current teams smacking bosses, but the combat has gotten stale quickly and it doesn’t look like the game has any other tricks up its sleeve. Overall, I’d say the biggest problem the game has so far is that it wants to create an oppressive atmosphere where your characters are replaceable and can die at anytime, while heavily punishing the player for actually losing any by requiring them to heavily invest their time into grinding. I’d be disappointed but able to accept it if the game was just a really stylish dungeon crawler to be finished in an afternoon, but the current game is severely hamstrung by its lack of decent pacing and how it relying so heavily on its combat keeping you interested when it lacks the depth needed to do so.
Great style. Lots of nice visual touches with, for example, the camera zoom being used appropriately and paced in a way that it doesn’t break up the combat flow. Game has a lot of style.
Great narrator. I don’t necessarily pay attention to everything he says, but his delivery really sets the tone and adds some character to the game.
Dungeons are awkwardly paced with too much emphasis on combat. They'd benefit from being larger in general so the game would have room to build up tension between encounters (or having it spike by suddenly throwing multiple at you), there being more ways to interact with the dungeon itself and incentivising taking on more difficult dungeons at low level - having encounters move around in combination with a larger dungeon, sneaking around to avoid difficult encounters, reworked scouting, and more puzzle like traps and ‘curiosities’ that you can figure out rather than them just being random. Probably best to mostly drop the random dungeon aspect and instead go for larger, hand designed dungeons with randomised elements that you explore over the course of multiple trips and quests that mean something on a strategic level. Right now, the dungeons are so straightforward that it doesn’t matter that they’re random, so you’re not getting any benefit out from it anyway.
Heroes not wanting to go on levels below their level feels weird and more than a little annoying. I suspect that this was done because they've heavily balanced the combat encounters around the enemies’ stats, rather than what abilities they have and their party synergies, so the heroes getting higher stats as a result of levelling up makes the lower level dungeons trivially easy after a while. For the player, however, this ends up feeling annoyingly restrictive and counter-intuitive, because apparently even my Bloodthirsty Hellion doesn’t feel like unwinding by slaughtering some low level enemies.
Similarly, there's no asymmetrical way to buff your party beyond their starting strength through the strategy layer to alleviate the grind of the lower level dungeons or allow them to take on harder dungeons at a lower level (trinkets are either shit or too valuable). There’s this weird dissonance where even if you level up your guild and blacksmith you can't use them to upgrade starting heroes because you can only upgrade the heroes' skills and gear up to their level current level. I thought I was upgrading them to not only buff my top heroes but also to give an edge to fresh ones that I liked, so discovering that I was restricted from doing that was more than a little annoying. Like with heroes not wanting to do easy dungeons, I can see the motivation behind this being that they don’t want to ruin the balance and atmosphere by making you too powerful, but this is just a symptom of poor design rather than being a legitimate solution to that problem, especially since by the time I’ve upgraded those facilities I’ll want to be able to speed up the early grind and move on to the mid-game dungeons. The result is that you’re discouraged to play around and experiment with the different classes and party compositions, since strengthening your character takes so much unfun grinding and there being no way to boost a starting team so that you can try out how viable they’d be in the mid-game.
Mechanics are easy to understand, but this also presents a problem since the game, so far at least, is not that challenging tactically. Basically, back row bad, go kill. If no can reach back row, move or kill front row. The rest then is keeping your stress and health at a respectable level, which is also why you kill the back row first since that is where the big stress dealers are positioned.
Consequently, the only deaths I did incur were from me weeding out which classes could or could not handle getting fucked by the rng, which ended with me now butchering my way through with double Hound Master and double Abomination teams. Just roughly comparing their stats and versatility to that of the standard team of Crusader, Highwayman, Vestal and Plague Doctor makes the latter utterly redundant. Some classes plainly can handle getting surprised and shuffled out of order, then double critted, debuffed and stressed nearly to the max much better than others. The annoying bit is that I’d rather go for a thematic approach with diverse teams that employ all the different classes, but the difference in party effectiveness is so clear that there’s no point in investing time in a neat little team since you’re just intentionally wasting your time on a group that will inevitably crumble when a really bad rng roll turns up.
I’ve also read that your heroes can only beat the Darkest Dungeon itself once and will afterwards refuse to go back, which makes me not look forward to what should be the climax of the game and the sheer amount of grind that would mean.
All in all, I’m not sure whether I’m going to continue playing or wait for some mods to fix some of the grind. I’m still sort of having fun with my current teams smacking bosses, but the combat has gotten stale quickly and it doesn’t look like the game has any other tricks up its sleeve. Overall, I’d say the biggest problem the game has so far is that it wants to create an oppressive atmosphere where your characters are replaceable and can die at anytime, while heavily punishing the player for actually losing any by requiring them to heavily invest their time into grinding. I’d be disappointed but able to accept it if the game was just a really stylish dungeon crawler to be finished in an afternoon, but the current game is severely hamstrung by its lack of decent pacing and how it relying so heavily on its combat keeping you interested when it lacks the depth needed to do so.
Great comments Lucky, that should be the Codex review for this game
I also agree that the game is needlesly grindy and the annoying bit of heroes not wanting to go to lower levels dungeons should be have been mitigated by making the leveling up of other heroes easier by allowing you to upgrade their gear as to help them be more competitive. Hell even X-Com (and XCOM) had that mechanic pretty balanced out; you can add a rookie soldier to go with your big guns to higher difficulty missions but still upgrade them with the best gear possible to ensure their survival and not having them to be too much of a liability on higher difficulty missions, or sending in a rookie team with a couple of higher xp soldiers to babysit them on lower difficulty missions.
By not allowing either of those the game becomes needlesly grindy and even more combat focused, and I agree it could have benefited from having some more interactivity with puzzles or actualy having more to do with strategy and lore besides combat...it is a lovecraft inspired game where the lore is only a backdrop; there are no puzzles, clues, flavor text (besides narration) and yeah it supposed rogue like elements are burried beneth the grinding and "hardcore" bullshit
It has a serious personaility problen; it want to play like a JRPG with lots of grindy combat and on rails gameplay but wants to have depth and rogue like elements for replaying but not giving you any incentive for it because rolling on a whole new party is almost exactly the same that starting the game over because the upgrades to your heroes are tied to their level advancement not the fact you may have upgraded the whole damn town
Perhaps the trinket system could have helpe there but since it is badly balanced and developed not even that can hep the game
Celerity has issues but in the end he is right; even fixing one or two issues is not enough (although fixing the gear upgrade would be a huge step forward) because the underlying system is simply too grindy in the long run the way it is set up
This is not a bad game for the price but as one of my favorite philosphers says " pity is the sentiment we get when we perceive more the qualities an object lacks other than the ones it posseses"
I also agree that the game is needlesly grindy and the annoying bit of heroes not wanting to go to lower levels dungeons should be have been mitigated by making the leveling up of other heroes easier by allowing you to upgrade their gear as to help them be more competitive. Hell even X-Com (and XCOM) had that mechanic pretty balanced out; you can add a rookie soldier to go with your big guns to higher difficulty missions but still upgrade them with the best gear possible to ensure their survival and not having them to be too much of a liability on higher difficulty missions, or sending in a rookie team with a couple of higher xp soldiers to babysit them on lower difficulty missions.
By not allowing either of those the game becomes needlesly grindy and even more combat focused, and I agree it could have benefited from having some more interactivity with puzzles or actualy having more to do with strategy and lore besides combat...it is a lovecraft inspired game where the lore is only a backdrop; there are no puzzles, clues, flavor text (besides narration) and yeah it supposed rogue like elements are burried beneth the grinding and "hardcore" bullshit
It has a serious personaility problen; it want to play like a JRPG with lots of grindy combat and on rails gameplay but wants to have depth and rogue like elements for replaying but not giving you any incentive for it because rolling on a whole new party is almost exactly the same that starting the game over because the upgrades to your heroes are tied to their level advancement not the fact you may have upgraded the whole damn town
Perhaps the trinket system could have helpe there but since it is badly balanced and developed not even that can hep the game
Celerity has issues but in the end he is right; even fixing one or two issues is not enough (although fixing the gear upgrade would be a huge step forward) because the underlying system is simply too grindy in the long run the way it is set up
This is not a bad game for the price but as one of my favorite philosphers says " pity is the sentiment we get when we perceive more the qualities an object lacks other than the ones it posseses"
Kalin
Unwanted
This right here should be the official Codex review.
Irenaeus III
Unwanted
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2016
- Messages
- 990
Didn't realize there was so much drama about this game. I might try it after patches/mods fix it. I don't like the art style (looks like a cheap/for children rip-off of Dark Souls (which already looks bad/edgy)). But. The game looks fun, if not too try hard and pathetically misinterpreting RPGs. The drama about it is the most surprising thing really. That guy really has 1337 hours on this? Unbelievable.
Black
Arcane
- Joined
- May 8, 2007
- Messages
- 1,873,176
But what does the Kool Kodex Kurator say? As good as Mass Effect or Dragon Age?
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