Opinions on Darkest Dungeon?

[bartholen_v1legacy]

This is a game I've been eyeing at since I saw it on the Escapist livestream. It looks really cool, and the kind of thing I'd really, really like, but I'm hesitant to buy it. The reviews on the Steam page are overwhelmingly on the "not recommended" side, and nearly all of them cite two things as the main problems: repetition and the RNG. I don't mind repetition at all. Hell, I love dungeon crawlers, which is specifically why I'm so interested! But nearly everyone says the RNG in the game is basically broken, taking strategy, planning and tactical decisions completely out, and just making the game a slot machine.

Which is why I'm asking: is the game worth the price of admission? I love the aesthetic (as does seemingly everyone else) and the gameplay looks great, but I don't enjoy getting constantly screwed over by an unfair RNG.

(For clarification, RNG = Random Number Generator, as in the code that randomly determines aspects of the game. I learned the meaning of this acronym only weeks ago.)

 

[Erttheking]

Uh. Since when has 86% positive reviews been "overwhelming not recommended."

The hardest dungeons can be brutal as all hell, but looking back I feel like I might have benefited changing my strategy. Though I do feel like the RNG fucked me a bit there.

That being said, even if both of those concerns are true, the game would still be worth your time 100%

EDIT: Also to echo Jim Sterling, the game has "People who have played it for hundreds of hours and obsessively hate it." Balance patches you see...

 

[Zhukov]

Yeah, it's pretty good. Easily worth a buy. Reasonably priced too if I recall correctly.

The repetition criticism is correct though. The dungeon runs quickly blend into one another. The difficulty curve is very gentle too, so it can feel like something of a grind. If that won't bother you then you should be all set.

Can't see how the RNG is a problem though. It never bothered me. Sure, there's chance-to-hit, chance-to-dodge, damage variation, healing variation, crit chance, etc etc. Nothing that would be unfamiliar to anyone who has played a stat-heavy RPG before. (And this game isn't that stat heavy, at least not to me.) It's theoretically possible to get screwed by a succession of bad roles, for example if the enemies crit three time in a round while all attacking the same hero. But the roll rate is high enough that such unlikely events are generally evened out. The only time the RNG frustrated me was with the occultist heal skill. His heal can roll really high, but it can also roll a zero and has a chance to inflict bleed.

Oh, and regarding user reviews, you should be aware that the game has acquired a sect of incredibly zealous haters. There were many balance patches and adjustments made during its early access phase. This resulted in the game becoming a bit harder over time and certain strategies became non-viable. Each time this happened the people who had come to blindly rely on those strategies completely lost their shit. Like... really lost their shit. To a truly bizarre degree. It resulted in a bit of review bombing and the like. So if you come across any particularly fiery criticism take it with a grain of salt.

PS. Oh yeah, and the aesthetic is fucking excellent. Best damn art style and character designs I've seen in years.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Why dont you watch a post release Let's-play to figure that out for yourself rather than relying on the opinions of random strangers?[/quote]

I have, but many critical reviews have pointed out that the game is fair in the opening hours, and gets shitty later. LP's usually focus on the beginning of the game.

Uh. Since when has 86% positive reviews been "overwhelming not recommended."

The hardest dungeons can be brutal as all hell, but looking back I feel like I might have benefited changing my strategy. Though I do feel like the RNG fucked me a bit there.

That being said, even if both of those concerns are true, the game would still be worth your time 100%

EDIT: Also to echo Jim Sterling, the game has "People who have played it for hundreds of hours and obsessively hate it." Balance patches you see...

Well egg on my face then. I don't usually look through Steam reviews, therefore I ignored the score aggregates (which I didn't even know was there) altogether and just scrolled down. The vast majority of reviews that show up this way are negative, and all cite the same issues.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Yes it is RNG heavy, but only to the point of a comparable dungeon crawling system, sometimes the rolls go badly for you and people die.
Never the less there are strategies in the game that make your odds favourable, but you know how it goes with RNG, even the best tactics can fall apart under bad luck.

I would certainly prefer a mode where RNG goes down to a minimum, and because that doesn't exist I play it very rarely.

 

[Redryhno]

Is it worth the $25 asking price? I'm personally of two minds about that. It starts to drag around the time you get level 4 heroes much like Xcom Long War(for reference) so I have to say no. But it's incredibly good, so I have to say yes.

I'll just say that as often as it goes on sale, I think it's worth slightly less than the asking price due to how it's designed to just wait for one of those.

The RNG can be shitty, yes, and you're going to get your ass handed to you by it at some point no matter how much planning and decision making you do, yes. But once you get the hang of it with what characters do, it'll happen less and less. There's alot of party comps that can go through pretty much everything with only a week of downtime once you figure them out(hint: Jesters are OP if played correctly).

 

[Frission]

I recommend it, since it's a pretty good game. It's a roguelike though, so RNG can really destroy a play through.

It really depends on your tastes whether you enjoy the game or not.

 

[Jandau]

Initially, I'd reccomend it, but after playing it for a while, not so much.

Basically, it has a solid core. The visual style is awesome, the soundwork is great, it all comes together to provide a wonderful atmosphere. The basic gameplay is straightforward and engaging, but also has a degree of depth to it. Combat is fun and feels visceral. Finally, the game offers fairly unique mechanics for its genre and all this makes the first 5-10 hours of the game a true joy. But after that, the tedium sets in.

The game is EXTREMELY grindy. It reinforces its grindyness repeatedly, with some obnoxious mechanics, gradually ever slower progress and annoying punishments for failure. It doesn't help that you see most of it in the first few hours, and from there on until the last dungeon its just repetition with bigger numbers. The developers really dropped the ball by slowing the mid-late game down to a crawl. I guess they were hoping to extend the game, but they just made it tedious.

I never finished it, likely never will. Not because it's too hard, but rather because it blows its load waaaay too soon and fails to provide compelling content later on.

 

[omega 616]

snip

The only youtuber I know who plays it is baertaffy, he has 140 plus video on it, plus a twitch only save. He seems to somewhat negate the RNG and do really well, like he just defeated a late-ish game boss with 3 out 4 people surviving. He went through the whole dungeon doing really well, then things went south within one fight but still managed to pull through, which does sound like RNG fucked him but it's nothing worse than xcom 2.

 

[omega 616]

snip

The only youtuber I know who plays it is baertaffy, he has 140 plus video on it, plus a twitch only save. He seems to somewhat negate the RNG and do really well, like he just defeated a late-ish game boss with 3 out 4 people surviving. He went through the whole dungeon doing really well, then things went south within one fight but still managed to pull through, which does sound like RNG fucked him but it's nothing worse than xcom 2.

His friend Northernlion is doing a second LP of the game since release too.

True but Baer is a MUCH better player, showing that RNG isn't just going to cripple you at a certain point.

 

[NPC009]

The beginning of the game is great and the final (actual darkest) dungeon certainly packs a punch, but the middle part really is repetitive, and that's were the game can fall apart for several reasons.

1. You'll be fighting the same bosses over and over again. Sure, they are a little tougher each time, but you should have a basic strategy figured out after the first one, making the stronger versions little more than reruns. To make matters worse, once a character is considered too strong for a dungeon, he/she refuses to go in there, meaning you have to have several teams worth of characters to get everything done and dead. It's very time consuming.

2. You can work around RNG, but there are no guarantees. If things do go south, you're looking at an icy pole. While the game is set up so that you don't lose upgrades you made to your town, having a level 3+ hero die is still a big setback, as it takes a lot of time and resources to train a replacement.

Personally, I recommend fiddling with the settings to make the middle part less frustrating and elimate some of the RNG. For instance, you can make the flee command 100% succesful, vastly increasing your chances of salvaging your team when a mission is about to fail. Ignore the folks who say you should just 'get gud'. Being good is not the same as being lucky and having dozens of hours to spare.

At the current price point, you're looking at 10 hours of solid entertainment (that's the amount of time it takes to get started and defeat the first set of bosses) and, if you want more and don't mind the grind, another 25+ for a full playthrough. Could be a lot worse, but wehen in doubt, wait for a sale.

 

[G00N3R7883]

I'm playing Darkest Dungeon now, 30 hours in, not sure how long left until I beat it.

I will admit that there is alot of repetition. So, quick explanation. There are a few tiers of mission difficulty - levels 1,3,5 and I think 6 for the Darkest Dungeon itself (I've not got there yet). Ideally you want a party of heroes equal to, or 1 level above, the mission difficulty (heroes 2 or more levels higher will refuse to do a mission because its beneath them).

The problem is, just having a level 5 hero doesn't really mean anything. You have to seperately upgrade their skill levels, weapon levels, and armour levels. This requires resources (scrolls, portraits, etc) to upgrade town buildings to unlock those levels, and then it also requires gold to actually purchase the upgrades for each individual hero.

Acquiring all these resources is a massive grind. I've currently got about 8 level 5 heroes, 6 level 4 heroes, but they've all only got level 3 skills, weapons and armour. It might take me another 10 hours to grind enough low level missions to get the resources to upgrade my stuff. And I've got to do it. I've attempted a few level 5 missions so far and got my ass handed to me every time in pretty much the first fight of the dungeon. I'm just not strong enough to stand a chance.

The good news though, is that RNG isn't a problem. If your stuff is too low level, you will lose. Simple as that. If your stuff is the correct level, its actually pretty easy.

Having said all that, I am actually mostly enjoying the game. I just wish the economy was a bit quicker to grind.

 

[Laughing Man]

The opinion that seems to float about is that you either hate it or love it, the game is very Marmite. I got the game around a month or so ago and flip flopped between loving it and hating it with rage keyboard smashing passion. I settled on hating the game.

The core mechanic of the game is simple, it's going to fuck you, everything literally everything in the game is designed to fuck you and once you are fucked it will then continue to fuck you. The factor that finally did it for me was a mid difficulty level I was around half way through the dungeon when I hit a roll of bad guys that basically consisted of a guy that had two or three basic attacks, one of these attacks essentially hit every team member doing a decent amount of damage to each. In any other game this would be a power attack and it would normally be pre cursored by giving you some indication that the bad guy was going to hit you and hit you hard so you at least had some chance to prep or counter the attack.

Not in Darkest Dungeon this was a basic enemy and this was a basic attack meaning that the the enemy could literally wipe your entire team out by rolling the same attack three or four times in a row to add insult to injury it was a god damn tank that took barely any damage per hit and had near 80 odd HP. Now I managed to get through this just, leaving with low HP on all team members and of course 3 of the 4 of them mentally broken. I opted to camp, I was under no illusion that the camp would suddenly turn my broken and battered adventurers back in to a dungeon stomping force but I at least hoped that I could recover enough to carefully crawl my way through to the end, no chance I ended up ending the camp with my team in a worse situation than when I started the camp, half refused to eat so took immediate damage to HP and Stress and half of them refused to do the actions I asked them and then when I finished up they told a few stories that increase camp stress in ALL four campers, and to add insult to injury I then got sneak attacked.

At this point I quit and vowed never to play it again, like I said the game is about just how fucked you can get to the extent that actions that should help, even a little bit end up fucking you. How about the escape from combat system that punishes harshly in stress for using it only to have the ability to fail and still punish you with stress.

Now XCom uses an RNG factor that on the worse days can really have it in for you but the key difference is that XCom gives you the chance to counter shit RNG rolls, you hit a shit roll and you can do something about it Darkest Dungeon just keeps fucking you no matter what if you get a good RNG you walk out not too bad you get a bad one and that's it you might as well walk away because your guys are going to die and their is no way to mitigate how badily boned you are going to get.

On a positive note the games atmosphere and deliver is superb but end of the day it doesn't recover a one note game, so one note that the developers actually felt that they had to warn the player about it when the game loads.

 

[MerlinCross]

Now XCom uses an RNG factor that on the worse days can really have it in for you but the key difference is that XCom gives you the chance to counter shit RNG rolls, you hit a shit roll and you can do something about it Darkest Dungeon just keeps fucking you no matter what if you get a good RNG you walk out not too bad you get a bad one and that's it you might as well walk away because your guys are going to die and their is no way to mitigate how badily boned you are going to get.

You're right Xcom gives you a way to counter the shit rolls. It's called save scumming.

Really I never understood how Xcom is supposed to be more 'fair' than Darkest Dungeon. Both have RNG(In battle, and locations), both can have you end a session with you either getting half your team back or 4 new headstones, A lucky Crit or miss can turn the battle for or against you, etc etc.

As for the actual game, yeah a lot of people hate the changes they've made since it made it 'harder' for certain teams to go through and just curb stomp everything(One Jester + 3 Helions). Corpses got hate, heart attacks got hate, the removal of stun lock healing got hate; so take most negative stuff with a grain of salt. It's still a pretty cool romp and an interesting battle system I hope to see more of.

If you're really interested, wait for summer. 2 reasons; 1) It will probably go on sale and 2) They might have patched/updated it. There's still at least One more class coming and Red Hook has shown a healthy interest in patching their game(For better or worse some would say but at least they work on the thing).

 

[Wrex Brogan]

It's a good game with a solid atmosphere and interesting story (bit slow when too many things happen in a turn and grindy as hell later on) - but man, can the RNG fuck you over. I've had a few dungeon runs go south really fast despite good clearing beforehand where one guy gets crit, which does enough damage to stress him out which then stresses the other characters out, they all roll Abusive and then spend the next 3 turns stressing each other out, resulting in a triple heart-attack because none of them are hitting the cultist spamming Stress damage.

On the other hand, I've currently got a level 4 Jester who is 'literally' invincible - early on in one dungeon he got hit heavily, reduced to On Deaths Door and then... didn't die. Soaked about 20 hits without dying, turned Valorous when his Stress hit 100 and never went any higher since he kept scoring critical hits and lowering everyone elses stress. Have now dumped a hell of a lot of Gold into him and wanna try and get him to the end of the Darkest Dungeon.

That said, it's still worth a pick up, since you can counter the RNG by having a solid team composition and using the right abilities. Level 1 heroes are practically cannon fodder, so experiment away with the lower level dungeons until you find something that works before you start investing in them. Healing, critical chance buffs, stress reduction and stuns can be more important than an ability that does high damage.

Also, most importantly, pay attention to Stress - I've lost more heroes to Heart Attacks than I have to enemy damage, and enemies can inflict high stress on you fast. Stress often chain-reacts, so it's best to focus down enemies that can inflict direct Stress over enemies who just punch you in the face.

 

[The Madman]

Sure, it's a great game, I'd say without hesitation it's worth the asking price.

That said it's also admittedly one of the most infuriating games I've played in ages. Having your idiot Occultist heal for 0 three times in a row is table-thumpingly frustrating, especially when it seems your enemies can sometimes land crit after flawless crit. But then at the same time every once and a while you'll be just barely clinging to a slim chance of victory only to have your heroes resolve tested and they prove a certifiable badass, staring death in the face, spitting in its eyes, buffing your entire team, and carrying a seemingly hopeless scenario into victory.

Definitely a game full of ups and downs. I can see why it wouldn't be for everyone and it's not a game I can play for long stretches at a time myself, but I'll be damned if I don't get a kick out of it when I do play. Plus if nothing else with your veteran groups you can always retreat when shit goes bad and low level hero are pretty easily replaced. Defeat can be annoying but it's never the end, unlike in a game like XCOM where a major failure can actually cost you a chance at victory.