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[Darkest Dungeon] Hellboy's art, Lovecraft's lugubriousness, XCOM's tactical nut shots...
Chance
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Launched on Steam Early Access February 3rd, 2015 ($20)
Full launch January 19, 2016. PS4 and Vita TBA 2016.
Full launch January 19, 2016. PS4 and Vita TBA 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjiBB3nBR-wRuin has come to our family. You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial. Gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor. I lived all my years in that ancient rumor-shadowed manor, fattened by decadence and luxury, and yet I began to tire of conventional extravagance. Singular unsettling tales suggested the mansion itself was a gateway to some fabulous and unnameable power. With relic and ritual I bent every effort towards the excavation and recovery of those long-buried secrets, exhausting what remained of our family fortune on swarthy workmen and sturdy shovels.
At last, in the salt-soaked crags beneath the lowest foundations, we uncovered that damnable portal of antediluvian evil! Our every step unsettled the ancient earth. Hideous rotting aggressor assailed us from the shadows! We drew what strength we could from our companionship, but we were in a realm of death and madness. In the end, I alone fled laughing and wailing through those blackened arcades of antiquity, until consciousness failed me.
It is a festering abomination! I beg you, return home! Claim your birthright! And deliver our family from the ravenous, clutching shadows of the Darkest Dungeon!
In a nutshell, Darkest Dungeon is a turn-based Roguelike dungeon crawler strategy RPG in a low-fantasy world of Lovecraftian horror with permadeath and character development that smacks of XCOM, randomly-generated dungeons and the stress meter, which is developer Red Hook's hook for the whole affair.
The core concept of the game is that, if you really did send some heroic badasses into an RPG dungeon and set them against the grotesques that linger there, they would come out the other side messed up six ways from Sunday. They would have serious emotional problems. They might have become better at tracking enemies through a particular dungeon, but they may have also/i] developed a crippling fear of it - perhaps best to send them to the Weald next time, and not the Crypts. Their time pouring over ancient manuscripts would have instilled a Dark Curiosity in them, and the next time their party nears a mysterious tome of secrets, they will ignore your instructions and open it themselves, regardless of what dangers may lay in wait. These are the quirks that all adventurers will develop - and they can be alleviated by time at the sanitarium... if you've sufficiently invested in it.
As the torch burns lower, as enemies land terrible blows against them, as they corrupt their souls by fiddling with the eerie curiosities they discover, down there in the dark, your heroes will suffer stress. The stress meter goes from 1-100 - managing your stress is crucial - and when it hits 100, your hero will have an Affliction Check. Odds are, your hero will become Selfish, breaking from the front ranks to hide behind their weaker comrades, or eating food meant for the group. They'll become Abusive, and each time one of their companions deals a blow that fails to kill an enemy, they'll give them a vicious tongue-lashing for it - raising their victim's stress for their trouble. It spirals on and on.
There are a ton of different afflictions, and not all of them are entirely bad. Everything in Darkest Dungeon is a tradeoff, so that Abusive Hellion may well be a jerk to her friends, but man can she land the crits! On their very best day, when their stress maxes out and they get that Affliction Check, they may call upon some forgotten inner strength and become heroic - receiving a huge buff, reducing their own stress and, with each action, reducing the stress of their allies in turn. "You are the light! We will not fall here!"
So how does it work? You arrive at the hamlet that rests in the foothills beneath your (venerable) house (opulent and imperial), which is nothing more than a leaky church and a dilapidated tavern, escorted by a sturdy Crusader and rogueish Highwayman. At that point, with the gold you'd gathered in the tutorial, you can upgrade the town a little bit, recruit a few new heroes at the stage coach, purchase supplied and set your pathetic level-zero crew to their first task.
Darkest Dungeon consists of five dungeons - the Crypts, the Warrens, the Weald, the Cove and the Darkest Dungeon. In Early Access, only the Crypts, Warrens, Weald and now, as of September 29th 2015, the Cove are available, but that's still a ton of content in a Roguelike you can essentially play forever. Prior to leaving the hamlet, you'll choose which quest you want to send your heroes on - they could be tasked with bringing down a boss, or something as simple as scouting out 90% of a dungeon's rooms. These quests are randomized, and the quest level dictates which of your heroes can be sent on them - a level 3 Grave Robber will not lower herself to the pithy work of a level 1 quest!
The dungeon itself is broken up into a snaking, randomly-generated collection of hallways and rooms. In hallways, you'll come across a random assortment of curios to investigate (if you're willing to risk your heroes earning a positive or negative quirk in the process!), you'll have to withstand traps, you'll find supplies - but you can't camp yet. You can only camp in a room - rooms which may contain a fight, some treasure or nothing at all - but we'll get to camping in a moment (it's important!).
You'll notice I've marked the heroes and villains above with numbers. In the same way you wanted your Sniper to hang back in XCOM while your Assaults rushed in, a hero's placement in the cramped halls of Darkest Dungeon is of paramount import. Those two enemy brigands in positions 1 and 2 on the right, for example, are melee classes. As such, they hit really hard, but their bread-and-butter skills can only reach positions 1 and 2 of your formation. Those jerks with guns in the back can deal major ranged damage from back there, but once they're up front they have to rely on their backup dagger ability, representing far less of a threat. In order to get them in to the front row, you may wish to use skills that affect the enemy's order (the Bounty Hunter's hook pull or the Plague Doctor's confusion grenade, for example), or simply kill the brigands in the first two positions.
Similarly, your heroes are designed for certain positions, and do far better up front, in the back, or in the middle. The Highwayman (position 1) may not absorb damage as well as the Crusader (position 2), but he dodges well and his devastating Point Blank Shot ability can only be fired from position 1. The Crusader's sword cannot reach enemies in the back row, and nearly all of his attacks launch from the first two positions, but if pushed back by a grotesque tentacle's swat, he can use a lunge ability to deal damage to foes and advance in the ranks.
In back, the Plague Doctor's most powerful attack - an AoE DoT which hits the back rows of an enemy formation - can only be launched from positions 3 and 4, and the Vestal takes up the rear because all of her attacks can hit anywhere, and she's your healer. Gotta' keep her safe.
Now, it goes without saying that your party order can get screwed up pretty easily. If an enemy ambush surprises your troops, they may be caught out of position, with your Vestal up front and the Crusader in the back - oh noes! You'll have to spend turns repositioning them to get the most out of them.
A character's preferred position is not always dictated by their class so much as their chosen skills. Each (speccable, upgradeable) skill launches from one or two positions, and affects certain positions in turn. The Vestal above does not do well in the back ranks - she's taken skills that turn her into a frontline combatant, and she can access her entire repertoire of abilities from position 2.
Combat is exceedingly tactical, through this simple set-up. Classic RPG tropes like damage-over-time, area of affect, debuffs, buffs, stuns and resistances all play their part, here, and you may find yourself far less concerned with the colossal brute slamming your crusader in the face than you are with the Bone Courtier in the back row, who splashes your crew with a goblet full of a disgusting, stress-inducing ichor each turn.
Depending on the duration of your prescribed quest, you may be permitted to camp once or twice. Where you camp within a dungeon is entirely up to you - though it must be within a room. Camping is your one major buff. It lets you sit down, chill out, and soothe the roiling souls of your heroes.
In order to camp, you'll need firewood (allotted in accordance with the prescribed length of your current quest) and food (purchased, by you). You can force your heroes to stress without food, at the expense of their health and mental wellbeing, you can give them just enough to keep going, or you can shower foodstuffs upon them, let them feast, and reap rewards of healing and stress reduction. The crew at Red Hook call it "tactical camping," as each of your heroes have certain camping skills to call upon. Each skill requires a certain amount of time to perform and thus, with your limited pool of time and choice of options, what will you do? Should you have your highwayman oil his precious guns, gaining an accuracy and crit buff for the duration of the dungeon? Will half your time be spent listening to the sage warrior wisdom of the old Man-At-Arms, for the benefit of all? Should your Plague Doctor see to the wounds of the Crusader? The choice is yours.
Once your quest is done and your heroes have returned to town with all that precious loot in tow, you can set upon upgrading your hamlet to better supply, better train and better support your troops. You can open the Guild to train new skills and the Blacksmith to craft better weapons and armor. You can upgrade the Tavern to offer ripose to more than a few heroes at a time, or simply invest in how much stress reduction a visit to the brothel will give your Hellion (because, after sending your Hellion to the brothel last time, she simply refuses to unwind in any other way).
After becoming deeply affected by some old scrolls you discovered in the crypts, your Highwayman cannot abide sins of the flesh, however, and he will only relax by meditating in solitude in the old church. All your heroes from the last run are stronger for it, yes, but they need time to chill out. So you visit the stage coach, recruit a B-team of heroes, and set them upon a quest.
Slowly, your estate builds the town back to its former glory, supporting a crazed regiment of fully-upgraded but mentally and emotionally scarred heroes that may have the fortitude to fight their way through the Warrens, the Weald, the Crypts and beyond - to the very core of the cyclopean horrors that have erupted from the Darkest Dungeon!
* * *
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGeC8QDZUI0The Wizened Hag boss fight.
Resources
The game's Kickstarter page excellently breaks down all its features.
Darkest Dungeon.com contains the game's once-fan forums, now official forums! As the Kickstarter Backers now have their Early Access to the game, the boards are lighting up.
You can check out Red Hook's YouTube channel for all of the game's official trailers and some 20-minute gameplay vids.
Fan site Darker Dungeon captured a lot of the backer streams over the past year.
There's a ton of stuff on Twitch right now. Just go to Twitch, search Darkest Dungeon and you'll find a ton of people streaming the game this weekend!
FAQ
How hard is this game?
Super hard. Like super, super hard. Your favorite heroes will die. That's just the case.
So explain "permadeath" to me.
It works just like non video game death - when someone dies, they's dead.
But I can reload a previous save, right?
No, the game is saving constantly to prevent you from doing that.
So a lucky crit from a boss can just destroy my best tank?
Not really. Once a hit reduces a hero to 0 health, they enter "At Death's Door," a state in which subsequent damage taken has a chance of killing them. Once a hero's at death's door, if you want, you can flee the dungeon, and save their precious life at the cost of completed a quest that would have made this run worth all the gold you spent on supplies. How much is their life really worth to you?
How many classes are there?
Fifteen.
How many classes are in Early Access?
At the Early Access launch there were ten - Plague Doctor, Highwayman, Hellion, Leper, Bounty Hunter, Jester, Crusader, Vestal, Occultist and the Grave Robber. Updates since then have brought the total to thirteen with the Arbalest, Houndmaster and Man-At-Arms.
Man, half those classes look like women!
They are women!
Can you break down what each class does or why it's cool?
Yes - but do keep in mind classes can be specced for drastically different roles, and these are simplifications:
The Plague Doctor can perform rudimentary heals, offers powerful buffs and specializes in ranged DoTs.
The Highwayman is a damage-dealing off-tank with high damage potential and a sweet AoE.
The Hellion is a front-rank berserker with incredible reach via her poleaxe, and consistent DPS through bleeds. She's high-risk, high-reward, and does well with +crit gear.
The Leper is a pure tank with high, consistent damage and high damage resistance, but his condition makes healing him... problematic.
The Bounty Hunter specializes in marking a certain enemy and dealing crazy burst damage to a single target.
The Jester buffs the team with his hijinks, reduces stress with his songs and bleeds his enemies dry with brutal scythe attacks!
The Crusader is a pure frontline tank, with reliable damage and some minor heals.
The Vestal is your pure healer, though she can deal solid damage when specced properly, and does well debuffing in the front lines.
The Occultist debuffs your foes and can heal your heroes, but his abilities often come with a cost (healing and inflicting bleed, for example)
The Grave Robber is a ranged attacker - imagine a Plague Doctor without the DoTs - whose skills allow her to dance back and forth within the party lineup.
The Arbalest is a pure ranged attacker, able to debuff her comrades and reliably hit any foe on the field.
The Houndmaster lacks the burst damage of most dedicated damage dealers, but his loyal charge can hit anywhere, and has the only attack that will hit every enemy on the field.
The Man-At-Arms' campfire buffs are second-to-none, he's the most tactical hero in your arsenal, and the only one with the ability to riposte enemy attacks. Lacking the reliable damage output of the Hellion and Crusader, the Man-At-Arms excels by being in the right place at the right time, giving the enemy formation the nudge it needs to begin to collapse.
The Highwayman is a damage-dealing off-tank with high damage potential and a sweet AoE.
The Hellion is a front-rank berserker with incredible reach via her poleaxe, and consistent DPS through bleeds. She's high-risk, high-reward, and does well with +crit gear.
The Leper is a pure tank with high, consistent damage and high damage resistance, but his condition makes healing him... problematic.
The Bounty Hunter specializes in marking a certain enemy and dealing crazy burst damage to a single target.
The Jester buffs the team with his hijinks, reduces stress with his songs and bleeds his enemies dry with brutal scythe attacks!
The Crusader is a pure frontline tank, with reliable damage and some minor heals.
The Vestal is your pure healer, though she can deal solid damage when specced properly, and does well debuffing in the front lines.
The Occultist debuffs your foes and can heal your heroes, but his abilities often come with a cost (healing and inflicting bleed, for example)
The Grave Robber is a ranged attacker - imagine a Plague Doctor without the DoTs - whose skills allow her to dance back and forth within the party lineup.
The Arbalest is a pure ranged attacker, able to debuff her comrades and reliably hit any foe on the field.
The Houndmaster lacks the burst damage of most dedicated damage dealers, but his loyal charge can hit anywhere, and has the only attack that will hit every enemy on the field.
The Man-At-Arms' campfire buffs are second-to-none, he's the most tactical hero in your arsenal, and the only one with the ability to riposte enemy attacks. Lacking the reliable damage output of the Hellion and Crusader, the Man-At-Arms excels by being in the right place at the right time, giving the enemy formation the nudge it needs to begin to collapse.
So my crew levels up?
Yes they do - they gain Resolve Levels, which make them more likely to become Heroic instead of Afflicted during an Affliction Check. They also earn the right to equip better armor and weapons, which essentially level up their base damage and defense, and can learn the higher tiers of their action skills, increasing a heal's potency or an attack's damage, accuracy or crit rate.
So my crew gets gear to equip?
Yes they do - you can buy new weapons and armor at the blacksmith, but you'll also find equippable trinkets in the dungeons. Almost all trinkets will have some sort of trade off - this one makes you less likely to suffer bleeds and blights, for example, but makes you more susceptible to stuns.
Sounds like trinkets kind of suck?
Quite the contrary - trinkets are the most powerful items in the game, and are the difference between a long-time player's ability to crush a Ruins run with a team of level zeroes and a noob's rather different experience with the same dungeon.
You can put your Vestal in the front ranks and expect her to debuff the enemy and whack them around with her club, but if you really want to rely on her debuffs, you're gonna' want to put a +accuracy trinket on her, some +debuff and maybe +damage. Your Man-At-Arms can bring the pain when decked out with +dmg and +crit gear, but it might be an even better idea to drop the Ancestor's coat on there with the Feather Crystal, permitting him to defend his comrades at very little risk.
Trinkets have an absolutely huge impact on the effectiveness of your heroes, and - beyond the selection of their attacks and skills - are essentially how you spec your team into specific roles, or further buff their strengths.
Is this game as awesome as it looks?
Yes, yes it is. Darkest Dungeon isn't out yet, but I've put more time into this than any other game in 2015.
Is it seriously coming to Vita?
Yes, yes it is.
WHEN? I must have it now!
The PC launch date was originally going to be "late October," but it's been pushed back to Tuesday, January 19th, 2015.
...still, that would make it less than a year that the game had been in early access, if they hit it. That's better than a lot of other games. I'm looking at you, Nuclear Throne!
But what about PS4 and Vita?
TBD 2016.
But I must have it now!
Steam Early Access.
I'm in a fight with some Cultists and I've got a bleed DoT on my Plague Doctor! Should I use the bandage in my inventory?
No! God, no. Don't do that. If you do that, the Cultist Ravager will just put another bleed on you mid-fight! Wait until after the fight, then use the bandage.
I'm headed into the Cove! What should I bring?
Medicinal 'erbs.
Is that all?
Shovels.
What about torches?
Well sure, if you want to play on easy mode.
But you said the game was hard!
I believe I said "super, super-hard." You gon' die, Son.
So I should start with using torches and work my way up to dungeon runs in complete darkness where my heroes will surely lose their minds and flee into the dark, laughing and wailing as they abandon their comrades to certain doom, all for the sake of some forsaken trinket or shiny bauble?
That was our Ancestor's way, and it shall be ours as well! The snapping bones and fraying minds of these stalwart mercenaries are naught but fuel in wretched, human form - tortured fuel for the unstoppable machine that is our will!
Dude. That's dark.
Oh, my, no. That's darkest.
'Chance, you are the best kind of whore.' -Henroid
Chance on
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(Sigh.) I wish. Still! Four days to go and I'm gettin' my Lovecraftian dungeon-crawling horror on!
Ditto. I'm a backer but I think it's really stupid to make your backers pay for early access so I didn't do it.
There's a difference - but it only affects certain skills. The Highwayman is perhaps the best example of this - nearly all of his abilities can be used from the 2nd or 3rd position, but point blank shot (hugely powerful) can only be used from the first position.
It's the sort of problem that can be easily fixed though, since it only involves reducing stress damage and/or increase the way stress is healed. All the other stuff that'd be hard to fix if they were crappy like the art, the narration, the animations and combat in general and so on are awesome. I was grinning from ear to ear for the first hour of playing time and I think that as soon as they fix the stress system and some minor glitches I've ran into this is going to be glorious.
I'd suggest that's a result of unlucky rolls/different tactics. I watched a streamer last night whose party was built around a Jester and, after two hours, he'd never lost a character and never had someone go insane just because his Jester, chilling in the back, was reducing party stress on one turn and buffing the party on the next. It was pretty awesome.
I started a thread about stress on the official forums and out of 15 or so replies to it, 14 thought the stress damage is an overkill and one said it is fine. A lot of time there's stuff you can't do anything about, like enemy critting you or the first actual boss hitting everybody for 15 stress damage with his AE. Once one goes insane, the lunatic ravings make everybody else insane as well. Once everybody is insane, even if you heal their stress damage they start the next dungeon run with 20-40 stress which means they'll go insane fairly easy again, dragging everybody else down with them. There's four people in the party and you make maybe 4000-6000 profit per dungeon run but healing one hero's stress costs 1000-1500 gold.
So yeah, maybe somebody manages their stress well enough and is lucky enough that he stays under the 100 stress cap with his party. To me in practice the system is just way too punishing - I like to think I'm fairly good at these type of games and I was never even close to managing my stress. One failure to keep everybody below 100 stress and it rapidly snowballs, not just for that party but every future dungeon run you bring already stressed heroes in.
From my point of view the stress system as it is currently is just not fun and that's what matters to me in the end. YMMV obviously, once you get to test the game yourself.
On the other hand I lost one of my veteran Vestal healers and most of my older heroes I actually plan to use are drinking or self-flagellating so it looks like next run is again fresh heroes Vs a noob dungeon to get some cash. Kinda feels like I'm treading water instead of making any progress but maybe that's the feeling they are aiming for.
Despite my grumbling I love playing this, at least as long as I'm in the dungeons. When I return to town and see my roster of insane heroes with crippling diseases and quirks galore I'm a bit less jubilant.
Also I find that a lot of the classes are interesting in how flexible they are. For instance, my Jester has only 1 buff song right now, instead he's specced out on a bleed damage dealer who focuses on the middle two ranks, and he's amazing. Positioning really is critical in this game. I came pretty close to losing to that wizened hag when I went up against her. I had my main party with the plague doctor, the vestal, the highwayman and the crusader, and I'd been lucky beforehand, I'd cleared all the enemies pretty easily, and found the boss quickly enough I could use my camp just to bring my all of my heroes back up to full health and relieve their stress. The thing is though, the hag throws one of your heroes into her cookpot if no one is in there, so she threw my paladin in and all my other heroes went forward one position, and they all became next to useless because of it. I could handle some movement around in my party, but with everyone moved up one and no paladin I was struggling to do anything. My vestal in the second position couldn't heal, my highwayman couldn't use his pistol shot, and my plague doctor could only use her incision on the cookpot itself. It was pretty crazy and I was lucky to pull it off without losing someone.
Also finally, bandits are bullshit. Of all the enemies in the game, I've gotten pretty unlucky and beaten up by a fair few groups, but the bandits always, always, always fuck me up. It's usually the party with two cutthroats and two of the blunderbuss users. The cutthroats are tough on their own with AoE bleed slashes and some pretty heavy damage, but the blunderbuss ones with their spread shot that hits everyone for at least 2 damage and usually up to like 5 or 6 on top of it are brutal, especially because there's two of them. Every turn your team is losing at least 4 health from them, it's pretty crazy. Like, unless you're super lucky they will fuck you up completely.
Been playing for 6 hours and been lucky enough never to get that bandit group - my bandit enemies have almost always been one big guy taking two spots, then one cutthroat and one blunderbuss guy and that's far more manageable. I can imagine two blunderbuss enemies crippling your team really fast, especially if they crit.
i need this game now holy crap
Am I correct in assuming that the town is more like XCom's base than, say, Rogue Legacy's castle, and it's possible to lose the game outright and start over completely?
I'm not sure if you can ever lose completely, even if all your heroes die there will be new ones to replace them the next week from the Caravan. Though they would take some work to get back up to where your old heroes were.
Steam: abunchofdaftpunk | PSN: noautomobilesgo | Lastfm: sjchszeppelin | Backloggery: colincummings | 3DS FC: 1392-6019-0219 |
Is there absolutely no difference from the rank 1 heal to the rank 2? How is it even considered a rank up?
Also, do the Vestal's heals heal more at higher levels?
I didn't actually buy the rank up and test, so it might be a tooltip error instead but if the numbers the Guild gives you are correct then at least the Vestal group heal doesn't get anything from going to rank 2. I don't have any Vestals with the single target heal so no idea if that goes up. Also Leper's self heal says it doesn't go up, same with Vestal's Judgement's self-heal part. Given how hard some enemies hit and the fact they can crit it would be nice to be able to heal a bit more for sure. Right now healing is mostly only viable if you can keep the last enemy stunned or for getting people back from the 0 hp Death's Door state.
Anybody know what they want for it?
Too bad I'm at work and can't download it just yet though. I will have to play vicariously through this thread for a couple days.
$20 for Early Access.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
My first mission ended with two of my adventurers in extremely poor mental condition (from which they were only barely able to recover after a days rest), but in a much better financial position. Brought in a second team to give the first group a break, but this B team failed utterly, and lost me quite a bit of money; they've since been dismissed. A team whent in for a second go and found enormous riches (at the cost of nearly going completely mad). A team's crusader is leading a group of fresh adventurers on a 4th mission soon; I have no doubt he will return victorious (if somewhat less sane).
So far I have no complaints. The very limited healing available is the game's primary difficulty; individual fights aren't much challenge (in the beginning, anyways), but they chip away at your party physically and psychologically. You get worn down in ways few other games could manage. And I really like how stress works. Mid-mission, you can't really deal with it in any way, so you have to be careful not to push your party too hard. On long missions you can camp, and most classes have camping skills that reduce stress, but that's about it. If a mission is going tits-up due to people freaking out, your only real option is to abandon and eat the loss. And I really appreciate that.
With the huge stress hit for abandoning a mission, there's little point in doing it just for stress-based reasons. If somebody dies or is about to die, that's a reason to leave. Otherwise just continuing with an insane party and aiming for completion is the best tactic in my experience.
I've read that darkness actually increases the party's crit-rates along with the enemies' accuracy and damage.