Darkest Dungeon 2

Wonder if they'll still rely on the "it's hard on purpose" excuse for missing game balance.

I mean, right at the beginning it literally says "this game is about persevering and making the best of a bad situation". You're supposed to feel stress from losing people, and the joy of pulling through by the skin of your teeth. That's definitely not for everyone, but the effect would be lessened if the game were easy.

Anyway, can't wait for the sequel. DD is one of my favourite games of the last decade lol

Yeah, fair enough. It did give you radiant difficulty and lots of customisation options, but it can be tough to get used to it at the start. Personally I bounced off it a couple of times before I really started to understand.

Hopefully with the new run-based structure it will be a bit easier to get into.

Well yeah, losing people sucks! But you can retreat from most battles, and from dungeons, and you keep the treasure you found as long as one person survives. The only time I've had a complete party wipe was when I stupidly challenged a Shambler when I wasn't prepared for it.

I do think the difficulty jump between different dungeon tiers is hard to manage at first, and it can be a bit grindy (though much less so in Radiant). But it is manageable imo, especially since you get new recruits (or meat sacrifices) to build up resources every week.

Anyway, it's cool if it wasn't for you; not every game is for everyone! I just disagree about there not being ways to deal with random bad luck or difficulty increases. There's plenty of ways to mitigate it.

Different good or different bad? I bought it last night but have not yet downloaded it yet.

Oh and I love that Dismas is still the canon Highwayman. He survived the first game for me, so I can imagine that he's still at it in this one.

(he's probably thoroughly insane by this point though)

I see their art design is still absolutely top drawer. Looks amazing.

Is it early access only on Epic? The full release isn't going to be an exclusive, is it? I'd far prefer to have the full series on one platform as opposed to spread across.

So I've played a bit more (gotten through about 3 regions).

"Different" is still the verdict, but I'm leaning towards it being good as well.

Overall it feels quite a bit easier than the original, though this might be just me having played the original to death. The combat is basically the same, but you get helpful little things that weren't in DD, like a limited turn order indicator.

On the other hand, certain things are more difficult. It's harder to get rid of corpses (though there's an item that can do it), and enemies now have Death's Door too, so they're harder to kill.

Stress doesn't feel quite so debilitating. It's still definitely a thing, but you'll never (at least in my experience) have heroes refusing to do certain things, or skipping turns or whatnot. When it gets too high, the character has a tantrum, loses some health and the respect of the party.

Speaking of respect, what you have instead of major stress management is party relationships. Members of the party will start negging each other before long, and when they hate each other enough they'll start giving each other stat debuffs and the like. But it works the other way too; if their affinity goes up enough, they can become solid stat-boosting, stress-healing bros, or love interests. Just now my highwayman fell in love with the man-at-arms, so cute!

And you also get to do little side stories with the characters, which unlocks extra skills for them. That's pretty cool too.

Anyway, yeah, less difficult overall so far, I guess maybe there will be ascension levels or something if you complete runs. A lot of it seems to be about how far you want to push your luck, which is how a roguelike/lite should be. And if you get wiped, starting another run isn't much of a pain.

I really want this but I'm trying to hold out until early access ends as I prefer to play complete games. It's a whole year way though!

Update: yes you do get replacements at the next inn lol

I almost finished a run just now! (well, unless there's a second phase to the final boss that I don't know about)

I wasn't at all prepared, but it'll be easier next time, once I unlock food that doesn't give me syphilis. And other characters and such. Though hopefully more will be added further into early access; there only seems to be 9 of them at the moment.

One of them is new! She's called the Runaway, and feels a bit like a Shieldbearer that uses Fire instead of Blight. Pretty cool!

The others are all returning heroes: Man At Arms, Highwayman, Grave Robber, Plague Doctor, Hellion, Jester, Leper, Occultist. They seem a lot more versatile, with more skill selection and such. I guess they have to be, since you can only have 4 on a run!

The thing that'd probably hurt the most when losing someone, is that their replacement doesn't come with upgraded skills. You only get so many skill upgrades during a run, and losing an upgraded character would be a heavy (but not insurmountable!) blow.

Blog update: I finished a run! The secret was to (as much as possible) keep stress levels low, so you're less likely to end up with a party of bickering assholes WHO REFUSE HEALING GODDAMNIT DISMAS YOU'RE ABOUT TO DIE, ACCEPT THE HELP.

Anyway, you can still only do one "chapter" of the game; apparently future ones will have different end bosses and other content. I've seen a bunch of people complain about lack of content, as if they had never heard about the concept of "early access" before.

Personally I just got it because I was curious about the Early Access thing, which I haven't done before.

I don't imagine I'll be playing it religiously for the next year, because yeah it'd be best as a finished game. I may just jump into it from time to time, when major updates are done.

When stuff launches on Epic Game store only is that generally a year exclusive?

I really want a physical equivalent to the Ancestral Edition so I assume during that year any expansions they're planning will move forward as planned. It could still be 2-3 years before I get to play this, considering that the original version debuted in 2015 I can't help feeling that getting bogged down with expansions delayed the sequel far too long, it's looking like a seven year gap before anybody can play a complete initial version of the followup.