You can retreat after knocking the guy out of the cauldron. No one is guaranteed to die.
Ah, ok. I never retreated before, and thought you could only do it after someone died in a battle.
I found it incredibly grindy, in almost every way. Maybe that improved after I quit, but I eventually gave up on finishing the game. The beginning is a lot of fun, especially running the dungeons dark and getting off to a nice fast start, but right as I hit level 6 with enough heroes to try going for the final dungeon (for the first of 4 or 5 or however many times you need to do it) the game really started to feel like a slog. I rather wish you had only had to beat each boss twice and it had started out more towards the second difficulty.
It was a ton of fun during the leveling process though, I certainly don’t regret buying it. I should probably check youtube for the final story bits though as I’m sure I’ll never see them.
Oh god the griiiiiiiiind! Getting and maintaining hero after hero up the costly curve to optimal fighting strength is terrible. It makes it even worse when you’re dipping your toes in the final dungeon only to realize there’s a new catch and running away makes you lose a character.
Maybe, maaayyyybe, the new “timed exclusive” patch on PS4 that adds a few things (including, for a while, the backer exclusive Musketeer class, ooop!) will get me back into the game when it shows up on PC. The DLC looks neat too I guess. I mean, they’re not vampires, they’re human mosquitoes!
I backed the game on Kickstarter, so I should finish it right?
I mostly just dismiss and replace the bulk of people.
For what it’s worth, I did end up completing this in its entirety, and the only part I found unforgivably grindy was collecting enough of the various heirlooms to unlock all of the upgrades. I spent at least 10 hours with a max-level roster and a bunch of gold just grinding for heirlooms. From what I hear they improved that a little in a patch later on? Not sure. I could have actually used just a bit more challenge on the non-boss dungeon runs, though I admittedly say that as a big player of both roguelikes and JRPGs. The way I feel when people say this is super hard is how I imagine most people feel when I’m cranking down the difficulty on some 3rd person action game just so I can get through the story.
One of the most important parts of gold management that isn’t immediately apparent is that once you get into the mid-game and things start to actually get expensive, you should be handling much (even most) of the quirk/disease/stress management inside of dungeon runs. A big part of this is figuring out which items give the best result for which curios, as at least a couple have a 100% chance of removing a negative quirk if you do it right.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/darkest-dungeon-passes-1-million-sales/0174916
[quote]Despite the console arrival, it is Steam that has propelled it the furthest, accounting for 94 per cent of total sales – perhaps due to the fact that it was a Steam exclusive during its Early Access period, which lasted almost a year.
Of the total sales, only 11k are accounted for by crowdfunding backers. 46 per cent of purchases have come from the US. The UK is its sixth most successful territory, claiming 7.6 per cent of sales.[/quote]
Wow, that’s a pretty awesome success story. Congrats to the devs!
Seriously awesome! The game’s a little grindy and intense for me, but I love that it got made and wound up capturing the feel of the initial pitch so damned well. <3
You aren’t wrong, that’s for sure, but I will say that starting over and playing the incredibly enjoyable first 20 or so hours before it gets bad is still just amazing. It’s entirely possible the end game isn’t so grindy now too, I didn’t get very far after my restart due to like every other game I love getting massive updates at the same time (Civ VI, Stellaris, Warhammer, Dark Souls III, Skyrim, Age of Wonders 3, etc.)
I’m a little shocked (and pleasantly surprised) that a game with permadeath managed to sell so many copies.
There was news last week that there might be a tablet release. I would certainly buy it again, and probably wind up playing it much more. Only spent a few hours with it on PC but don’t regret the purchase.
This game reminds me of the TV show Oz, nothing good ever happens, only depression.
Anyway, I started playing this today and it feels like the early game is pretty brutal. Doing even level 0 (?) dungeons without a healer doesn’t seem feasible and none seem to be showing up in the wagon to replace my stressed out MVP. Well not really an mvp, honestly healing seems like pissing against the wind. 3-5 points of healing versus 7+ damage I’m getting hit for each turn.
Any tips for early game? Should I be buying bandages and other consumables for the first few dungeons?
Hmm… early game tips, nothing too spoilery… to play it quite safe, bring roughly 1 full stack of torches per day and I usually just buy all the food, it’s also useful for healing. It’s also pretty hard to play without a Vestal at first. A shovel or two is a must to avoid those pesky blockages. Level 0 heroes stink, but they get bumped to level 1 after their first mission and they get an appreciable boost in stress resistance. Don’t be afraid to fire weak overstressed heroes.
Don’t be too afraid of medium-long quest, camping can actually makes some missions much easier.
I hope that helps!
My standard advice:
-Progress comes along multiple axes. Even if not everyone survives a quest, or you have to dismiss a character or two, it’s not a waste if you advanced in gold, hamlet development, or your own knowledge of the game.
-Use a spoiler list for which consumables to use on which curios (and buy the relevant items before each mission). They’re a half-baked gameplay system, and learning them by yourself is completely one-dimensional trial-and-error and rote memorization, not interesting at all. This will give you substantially more loot and help get you off the ground much faster. But figure everything else out through experimentation.
-Consider the game beaten after you defeat the second tier of bosses, and turn it off. You can have many hours of fun and more than justify the game’s purchase price doing that, but afterwards it falls apart and will leave you with a sour taste in your mouth (as you can see in this very thread). The third tier dungeons don’t have any new ideas, just rehashes with bigger numbers. And the economy breaks down, as soon you have all the town upgrades you care about, and then more gold than you can ever spend, and then every relic worth bothering with. The early game works so well because you’re balancing multiple axes of progression simultaneously, and trying to avoid setbacks, but when all you care about with every dungeon run is just collecting experience to get more characters up to speed for end-game stuff, it soon becomes a tedious grind. And worst of all, the Darkest Dungeon itself is designed to be a meatgrinder that demands a large number of maxed-out characters, and even more so if you don’t spoil yourself on what to expect. Training up a new batch of characters isn’t challenging or interesting at that point – it’s just a time sink.
The heck with torches and healing, run dark, rake in the coins, if they can’t take the stress fire them. Upgrade your stage coach early to bring in more heroes and options.
I was only bringing torches for boss runs generally, at least until near the end of the game. It is a very appreciably increase in money that gets you going fast and you don’t want to spend hard earned coins de-stressing level 0 or 1 heroes. A couple shovels and one key for short runs, plus a bit of food. Admittedly this was easier after I learned a bit; I would bring along consumables for dungeons once I learned which dungeon favored which items.
I also quit after the second tier of bosses as above. Tons of fun until then though.
I would say that one important thing to realize is that generally you should focus on damage over healing. Particularly with low level heroes maybe heal them on death’s door but the enemy can generally damage faster than you can heal so kill them first.
You can change which combat skills a hero has in town which isn’t always clear and makes a big difference.
Stun skills, particularly multiple enemy stuns are awesome.
Once you realise that you are supposed to be an evil wicked abuser of heroes and adventurers who works for your goals. You will experience so much less stress managing your gangs of exploitable wannabe adventurers.
I bought it again for the PS Vita, my thought was, that it would be a great game to have on the go… but I can’t read the damn font. It is way to small. And there is so much text going on… now I am bummed, at least I can play it now on the PS4… I checked other Vita games, they are alright with their font size…
hey newbrof, get used to it!
I got used to the controls using crossplay on the PS4… they are OK now, you have to learn them, then they click… now for my issue with small fonts, I bought magnifier goggles for my regular glasses, so that I can play the damn thing on my Vita… something like this
I don’t know something is wrong with me, Dark Souls, Demon Souls and Darkest Dungeon are kind of machochistic games… maybe I have a quirk or trait for enjoying these kind of games