Iratus - Like Darkest Dungeon but different

Games
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I’m not terribly concerned yet. Currently only 60% of the content is in there as only 3 of the 5 total levels were released in EA. Each level gets progressively harder so I have actually been concerned that it would be too hard once the remaining levels are added in. It will be in EA until next Spring sometime so they have plenty of time to tweak stuff. So, we’ll see.

I did win my no-pain game and it went pretty smoothly. Once you get past the game’s learning curve it becomes much more manageable. My party for the Pyromancer boss was 2 vampires a mummy and a zombie. It worked very well.

62

I just hate the rouge-lite elements of unlocking units over playthroughs.

You want Vampires? Well you have to do this thing and get a bit lucky, but after a few games you’ll do it.
Meh.
Give me all the tools to play the game.

It also annoys me on some level that my units are less expendable than my guys in Darkest Dungeon. That feels off to me. In Darkest Dungeon people dying happens and it doesn’t matter much. In Iratus a unit dies and… well your run might be over because you can’t replace it since the whole game is on a really short timer.

Which feels really wrong in a game where the narrative is that you’re the aggressor. Why can’t I just go someplace else and get more minions? Why can’t I take another path?

It has a ton of potential, but the disconnect between the narrative and the actual gameplay bugs the shit out of me.

63

The unlocks are simply trying to give the game some replayability. I think they trickle out enough unlocks in the first playthrough that you might be able to beat cakewalk difficulty. However, I doubt it would be enough for higher difficulties. As you unlock more, higher difficulties open up to you.

I don’t think you will have too many runs completely derailed by losing a single troop. They are really generous with their high-level brains to alleviate the replacement process.

You’re the aggressor trying to break out of an excavated dungeon before the land forces can amass enough of an army to crush you and bring the entire dungeon down on your head. I think the narrative fits pretty well with the gameplay.

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That’s the worst kind of replayability though. Like I’ve given up on games in under 30 minutes that use that mechanic, cause it’s a stupid mechanic, imo.

Game: “You lose, not because you screwed up, but because you haven’t lost enough yet to actually get a chance to really play.”
Me: /uninstalls game forever

65

See, I think it is exactly opposite. Raise a new minion, slap in a brain, and go. I also really like unlocking stuff, so maybe we just like different things.

66

But if my level 6 guy with lots of upgrades dies I can’t really replace him most of the time.
If my level 5 dude in DD dies I probably have another one sitting around someplace and I keep his trinkets if I want to.
Plus I’m not on a conveyor belt to demise so losing anything at any point can potentially cripple you.
I like that there is a Fail State, but it feels arbitrary right now. Like “you lost a dude to a random crit, then lost the battle, so you lose now because there is no retreat and you can’t replace all the dudes you lost, also the next fight is the boss you couldn’t have beaten anyway.”

The unlocking thing we just can disagree on, but I think it’s a shit mechanic in almost every game. The only time it works is when it’s a matter of “different, but not necessarily better” unlocks. Or something you can easily accomplish in relatively few runs. Here the unlocks are almost all “way better than your starting shit” and “basically required to actually have a chance.”

I’ve been following how people progress and so far 100% of them lean on unlocked units, usually the hardest ones to unlock. So the fact that I know if I fire up the game right now I WILL lose because I don’t have 5 units unlocked or whatever makes me not want to bother. Make every unit useful imo, not “this is a skeleton, it’s garbage but you don’t have Vampires so you’ll use it anyway and then lose.”

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I don’t know this for certain, but I think the progression is supposed to be largely horizontal. If the advanced units are that much stronger, that’s probably a balance issue because they haven’t been used as much. Again, that’s just my sense, not something I know for fact.

68

It’s early, so I hope that’s the case, but right now most of the starter units are hot garbage or at best less powerful versions of later units.
Hell, the skeleton’s flavor text is akin to: “it’s shit, but easy to make.”

69

Agree completely.
(Not that I have tried Iratus yet, but in general.)

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I haven’t found that to be the case. As long as you have the skill for the +50% chance to find brains after a battle it’s pretty easy to replace dead minions. I lost my best deathknight tank and best zombie two battles before the final boss and it was pretty easy to replace them with level 5 brains on new troops. And after I won I had about 10 team B/C minions laying around and plenty of spare parts. There are multiple ways to optimize your play which is one thing I appreciate about the game.

I disagree with that completely. The Zombie is among the best units in the game. The Bride is super for DPS. Deathknights are possibly the best unit in the game. What is it that you find ‘hot garbage’ about the starting units?

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Skeleton really isn’t shit though, they can be pretty brutal imo.

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Finally got around to getting my computer setup and played through the first boss (continuing on from the tutorial).

There’s a bug w/ spine bomb causing a soft lock I think might be new with the patch today.

Aside from that, this has exceeded expectations. Even though I had watched a fair bit of gameplay, that didn’t do justice to the production values. Really impressed so far.

73

Finally gave this one a try.

I was surprised at how different it felt from Darkest Dungeon. The four against four battles, the menu of battle options, the town screen, and the trail through the dungeons all retain more or less the same look. But I find myself thinking differently as I play, so it is quite a different experience.

The biggest thing is grinding. Darkest Dungeon is the poster child for grinding as a central game mechanic. In its final form, it enforces hours of grinding. Iratus forbids grinding, you actually want more opportunities to gain experience and are denied them. If you lose units, you use brains of the level you previously reached to create new units; if you lose more units and no longer have a supply of brains, you are almost certain to lose that game. (an impossibility in Darkest Dungeon, where setbacks are inevitable, but you are not defeated, you just go back and grind for a few more hours)

But I also like the fact that Iratus provides interesting options how to bulk up for the increasingly difficult foes. You have Iratus’s talents, but if you want to cash in big on those, then you better be using Brides and Death Knights to supply him with points, and that is at significant opportunity costs. You can focus on minions’ direct damage, which is the most concrete and predictable, but has its limits in terms of enemies. And you can use stress, which is wonderful when it works, but relies on RNG more than the other choices – one enemy can crack and betray his side when the stress bar is still half full, while another keeps right on clobbering your glass cannon two big stress shots below zero.

The opportunity costs are acute, and the effort to strike an effective balance is interesting, and the mechanics for achieving that balance even more so. The level-up involve choices with two distinct parts to them, and the use of alchemy on minion replacement parts is a great mini-game all its own, with huge impact on the direction your minions take.

None of this reminds me of Darkest Dungeon in the least.

Of course, I have no idea if this game has legs. And there are some weirdnesses (lack of clarity as to opponents’ abilities, blocks from opponents who appear to have zero blocks, etc.) that may be bugs and may be features. We’ll see when it is finished. But for now, it makes a great first impression.

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Thanks @FinnegansFather for the write up!

It seems this one has come a long way. It has received some big updates. The game leaves early access on thursday. Starting now should be an option since save game compatibility was promised and the first two acts are ready to go. So I just bought it.

The less grindy and more gritty and natural looking Darkest Dungeon? I have never reached the part of Darkest Dungeon where the grind kicks in because it has never grabbed me in the first place - although I very much like the idea of a side-scrolling, map-based dungeon crawler. So I’m excited about Iratus. Anybody else looking forward to play this?

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Unfortunately Thursday is the day the new XCOM drops, so this will have to wait.

76

Haven’t played it in a while, but I like the way thIs one used theme to alter the way DD was, like being able to loot a brain of an enemy and then drop it into a “freshly” created minion to level them up quickly.

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On a whim I picked the game up again last week, and I was really impressed with the changes I saw. They added a ton of interesting new items, a stat-upgrade system that lets you deeply customize your undead, and a lot of rebalancing of skill trees and levels and the like. It’s completely re-invigorated my interest in the game. I think the Iratus team has excellent gameplay design chops, and they’ve created a really neat tactical sandbox that allows a lot of different strategies to flourish. E.g. in the run that just did, I tried something completely new for me, based almost entirely around Shades and their ability to blind and befog people while leaping out the mists to sap their strength and morale. Combined with one archer to pincushion the enemies as they move around in the mist, and it was a completely different way of playing. I’m now trying (and failing) to make the same strategy work on Hard difficulty.

Anyway! I feel like the game is almost deceptively good, and I hope it meets with the success that it deserves. Darkest Dungeon did a perfect job with their art, sound, and voice design, but the actual game play always seemed like an area where they were happy with just “good enough”. Iratus though has really put a lot of thought and boldness and cleverness into their tactical combat, and seems like a genuine upgrade to the 4vs4 genre.

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This game was solid and very fun in my early EA forays into it. I haven’t touched in since then so I’m really looking forward to digging back into it with all the changes/improvements they made.

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Well put. I always felt like Darkest Dungeon wasn’t for me, despite really wanting to like it. But for various reasons, I always ended up quitting out and not going back. It was an easy game to stop playing. It was an easy game to keep not playing.

That’s not the case with Iratus. I’ve been lucky enough to have access to the release version of this, and I’m really into it.

Part of what I really like is the clever theming for playing from the perspective of a necromancer using dark arts to inflict death and insanity on a bunch of heroes. Darkest Dungeon was fine as a grimdark “it’s hard to be an adventurer!” horror game. But Iratus does a great job flipping the concept around.

-Tom

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Anyone know if the price is going up tomorrow on official release? Any reason to jump in tonight?