I’m going gi guess this will be in EA for a long time yet so they’ve got plenty of time to tune, edit, add to make it more what people want?
Easily at least a year, I’m betting.
The more I play around the more I hate it, I think.
The coach is a fine idea. Making me push W constantly and steer it makes me want to stab someone. I can double push W and it will usually go forward, but I still have to steer. Oh and sometimes it can’t make a corner to take the path I want to, so there goes my run maybe. Just let me click on nodes. I can’t even use my mouse to control it? What is happening and why?
The little side quest history things are a neat idea until you just hit one where you lose because they don’t tell you any mechanics. Like the Graverobber’s 2nd one. I’ve tried it like 4 times now, I always fail. Dude always does extra damage, always does stress damage, always protects his booze. Maybe there is a comibination that works, but it feels like the math doesn’t work out. You can strip his permanent buff, but that’s a losing path. You can try to stress heal, also loses because of damage buff. Get away seems to often do nothing. I hate it.
The past quests tie into my other biggest issue: Most of the abilities are either not fun or straight up garbage, so you need to unlock other abilities to make things work. Graverobber is a worse version of the character from DD1. Most abilities do little damage and not much else really? The firebrand character is basically hopeless, nothing works together. First unlock makes her playable, but not good. Because all her abilties are basically “strip a super rare ability from the enemy” to start. Great no one will be stealthing on me I guess. Too bad she has to hit a dead body again.
Speaking of which, so many abilities strip buffs, but it’s almost never worth the turn to do it. Like the Highwayman gets a shot that strips dodge. 95% of the time an enemy has one dodge. Attacking strips a dodge. It also has a chance of actually doing something, which Tracking Shot literally never does because all it does is strip dodge. Many other actions require abilities you don’t have to do much of anything. Which is back to not liking Bell Quests.
Stress is both crippling and has no real solutions. So your first Mastery is going into the smoke from the Plague Doctor so everyone doesn’t shit themselves constantly. If you’re feeling adventurous it can go into Bolster, but RNG might make your team hopeless because 50% chance of getting rid of a thing you need to get rid of can mean you end up with like 8. Can’t use items or stuff on the road, the first section is just tedious since everyone is vanilla.
Enemies that get free actions or multiple actions are kind of BS. Check out this fat dude, he gets 3-4 actions. This dude marks you and then immediately shoots you for double damage cause you’re marked, you couldn’t react to it at all. This guy heals for free and heals a lot. It’s like an action economy where the enemy has advantage and also your actions are mostly garbage. Now fight this dude with free heals and his giant bag of hitpoints friend in 5 rounds. Okay. I’ll just throw a couple daggers for like 3 damage. If I upgrade it might do 4. No buffs just terrible damage, but at least it strips buffs sometimes. Or I could have the Highwayman do something more reliable.
The only classes that feel good are Highwayman and Doctor to me, but maybe that opens up after I get more bells, but getting bells means playing garbage characters, which isn’t fun because they’re garbage.
It’s the curse of the Epic Game Store. Literally every game I’ve ever bought on it I end up not liking or even hating. It’s been without exception at this point. Also EGS sometimes just shits itself and I can’t play so I get to reboot my entire computer to try to fix it, which is… fun? Also it’s an Early Access that I can’t get information on because EGS has to updates or pages. You have the Store Page and… yeah you have the Store. Or a picture of the game in the Library. Go on their Discord I guess.
Anyway. Rant over. It’s a long ways from being fun to me.
Edit: And for the record I love the idea of the game for the most part. It’s just the process isn’t fun to me because the beginning is so… dull. Having to do a whole level before anyone can do anything fun and doing the opening over and over because the first area is the hardest (because no abilities!). It’s just tedium. The UI makes putting on stuff a pain, but at least my character model is huge? Meh.
Early days and all that, it will certainly get better.
At least it’s faithful to the original.
I bought it with the helloween-coupon and stuffed the game securely in my backlog. It was similar with DD1, I played it a bit in EA and then came back to it when it was finished.
So, I gave this another shot and basically… yeah everything you said with one more thing:
So I beat the mountain. And it seems to me the mechanic that is the MOST out of whack is stress and relationships. Once the relationship ball starts rolling in one direction or the other, it basically keeps going off a cliff. So you either end up with everyone pretty quickly hating each other, or everyone having some kind of love/friendship orgy of adventure. If you play the Inn card before you start that gives you bonus relationships and if you get a lucky couple of breaks, you are most likely going to win at this stage of development. Because once everyone is on the love boat, they throw spare heals at each other, they drop each other’s stress, they throw in free riposte attacks, etc. I think at the end of my run, I finished with everyone but one person at full health. It was completely unbalanced.
On the other hand, if the stress ball gains momentum early and rolls the wrong way, then your run is over before it began. Because when people don’t like each other all of their stress bars skyrocket, they steal turns from each other, they can CANCEL each other’s moves so you do nothing… its just woefully unbalanced.
So this one goes on the shelf for now. They have some work to do…
Thanks to everyone for their feedback. I think I will also give this some months in the cooker before diving in.
The stress/ relationship stuff seems pretty out of balance, and is super annoying, agreed. That definitely needs work. I found myself nodding at most of Shiva’s post, so I think those are all fair criticisms. I think it can be really good in time, but it definitely feels early access-y outside the generally polished look of the game.
So much this. Which is why getting the Plague Doctor with the stress heal is basically a required first Mastery.
Not doing so means everyone spirals into a hateful pit of incompetence.
You’re not wrong, but in the original I had a pretty good time for quite a while before I hit the unfun wall.
I hope you post this to their feedback. I think it’s easy for developers to get tunnel vision and lose sight.
I would had I any idea where that even is. Another downside of EGS to me is that feedback is so hard to give. I could hunt down their Discord or Forums, I guess? Just so much work and such a pain.
At best I might get bored and toss it on Reddit and hope someone sees it? But that means dealing with the most dedicated fanboys they have and that sounds about as appealing as slamming my balls in a car door.
There’s no button in game?
No idea. If there is it’s not super prominent.
And I’m not sure it would accept that book I wrote.
I played some more and got through a whole run. More or less on the back of the Plague Doctor.
Jester is an example of a fun character though. Like every ability is interesting and does something cool. Upgrades make your abilities crazy strong. Then I think about the Graverobber and how you can upgrade her 3-5 damage double daggers and it goes to like 4-7 and the crit goes up to 10%. Which is both lame and boring. Meanwhile Jester is over here dropping like 4 debuffs with a basic attack, all of which are extremely powerful. You’re marked, bleeding, take 50% more damage and also I hit you for 8 vs I hit two of you for 6 and that’s it.
Also I’ve noticed that enemies ALL get multiple actions in a turn. Which just feels like garbage. Basically anything you fight gets to go twice a round while you get to go once. So, I guess DoT effects are more effective than they look on paper, but also feels bad to watch the enemy beat your ass more than you get to do anything. Some enemies get to go 4+ times. Cause that’s fun. Watch this drummer dude drum over and over again. You only get to go once though.
Edit: Upgraded fire chick is solid with upgrades as well. Her smoke ability is stupid after an upgrade. Double blind, mark and I think 50% extra damage. Only every other turn, but that doesn’t matter. Between her and Jester I had a bunch of cool stuff I could do with marks and a couple ways to put marks on dudes and I was left wondering why I would ever play with Graverobber and her lame ass skill set ever again.
The EGS client provides a Follow Us section on store pages for devs to post their social media links. You can find it there.
That drummer douche is infuriating. I feel like all I’m doing in those fights is watching his animation.
The best is getting him in a road encounter where you know you can’t possibly win in 5 rounds so you get to watch him just waste your time. At least he’s really pumped about it. Dude loves his job.
On their main site Red Hook Games you can contact them directly. I would totally do that if I were you.
or
A new update with a new boss and stuff.
https://www.darkestdungeon.com/news/darkest-dungeon-ii-the-shroud-of-the-deep/
But the big thing from watching a stream of it that I took away was that the enemy seemed to follow the same rules as the player again (as in they got one turn and not 2-4 of them per round). Or maybe I’m just crazy. Still what I saw looked kind of fun, if I wasn’t deep in Chaos Gate I might fire it up and see.
A lot of my issues seem improved from what I’m seeing, but I’m going off watching someone who has played a lot so maybe that’s just a matter of them knowing what to do. The new boss seemed like pure garbage though, it utterly destroyed him and he never even seemed to have a chance, but overtuned bosses are whatever at the end of the day.
Looks like this full release is set for Feb 2023.
This community update features some important discussion revolving around the future plans and roadmap before it gets there.
https://www.darkestdungeon.com/news/darkest-dungeon-ii-community-update/
I haven’t played (or indeed, even seen footage) of this yet though I’ve heard @ShivaX describe it and walk me through some of the rougher edges, and it seems the devs are listening (I’m seeing a lot of “X mechanic is being reworked based on community feedback” and I think that’s a positive sign. Fingers crossed this ends up amazing.
