...after a long rage-quit hiatus, to check out the new DLC. And I gots OPINIONS.
Now, I preface this by saying that Darkest Dungeon is a wonderful game that I cannot stop playing until the moment when I inevitably get my A-team wiped out while half-asleep at 4am and not paying attention. So the game itself is something unique and lovely. But the new DLC is...unimpressive.
It's a vampire-themed expansion, adding a new enemy roster, a new hero class, a bunch of new bosses and a new mechanic called the Crimson Curse, which is basically vampirism. I was reading about this and thinking to myself, "yeah, I can see how this is going to work," and then inexplicably the game defies my expectations of how it's going to work. Like, in a bad way.
Anyway. What are the positives? There's some new trinkets,one two for each hero class, that have some backstory hints and neat bonuses. The new art is somehow even better than in the base game; they draw a neat thematic connection between the vampires and blood-sucking insects like mosquitoes and ticks, so the vampires are these shapeshifting half-insect creatures that look cool as balls. To fit the mood, their new environment is a swamp, and one of the new bosses is a goddamn crocodile with insect legs which has a Surinam toad thing going on, where it shoots mosquitoes at you from a bunch of holes on its back. It's creepy as balls.
tl;dr - some DLC came out and Ruined Darkest Dungeon FOREVER, and now I'm not having any fun playing it. I'm seriously considering starting a new save and disabling all the DLC content just so I can get back to actually finishing the fucking thing.
Now, I preface this by saying that Darkest Dungeon is a wonderful game that I cannot stop playing until the moment when I inevitably get my A-team wiped out while half-asleep at 4am and not paying attention. So the game itself is something unique and lovely. But the new DLC is...unimpressive.
It's a vampire-themed expansion, adding a new enemy roster, a new hero class, a bunch of new bosses and a new mechanic called the Crimson Curse, which is basically vampirism. I was reading about this and thinking to myself, "yeah, I can see how this is going to work," and then inexplicably the game defies my expectations of how it's going to work. Like, in a bad way.
1. The Crimson Curse is essentially an affliction mixed with a disease. It makes your party member act randomly and stress out the party just like an affliction, and it has some pretty massive stat penalties like a disease, one of which is a whopping 10-20% health reduction. It also cannot be cured, or if it can, I haven't found out how yet.
Now, I get that the developers wanted vampirism to be a bad thing that you had to deal with, not a secret advantage you could min-max with. But at the time I'm writing this post, I have twelve heroes with the Curse, and I'd have more if six of them hadn't died of it. Yes; you can die of vampirism, even if the sufferer is in town, if you don't have enough blood vials to feed them. Only special blood vials that drop from the vampire enemies can be used, and their drop rate is atrocious. And the curse spreads like fucking malaria; every one of the new vampire enemies has a special attack that can curse a hero, and I quickly found that the only way to stop my entire roster getting cursed was to only use heroes who were already cursed, and then I had to deal with a) them having a massive HP penalty and b) sometimes randomly starving to death in the middle of a dungeon because they're fussy little shits about what blood they'll eat. Sometimes, if they're in the "Wasting" stage of the curse, they die immediately after entering the dungeon. You spawn in, they go "Whoops!" and explode. No Death's Door; they just die outright.
And I can't prevent this! I don't have enough blood to feed these guys, I can't get more blood without fighting the vampires who spread the curse that makes me need even more blood, and if I send cursed guys out to fight the vampires they just fucking die! Even when I'm doing regular dungeons and trying to avoid fighting the fucking vampires for five minutes, they pop over into other dungeon types and I have to fight them anyway! And to top it all off, if you leave a cursed hero back in town, there's a chance they'll spread the disease to other heroes in town anyway. One hero infected three other heroes with vampirism and then died of starvation, presumably because he spat all the blood back out after drinking it.
The whole system is a tremendously unimaginative clusterfuck. They could've done some interesting stuff with the vampire concept, made it kind of a special trade-off thing like they do with the disorders, the torch-light, or the virtues and afflictions. Instead, it's just a huge debuff that you can't cure and can't avoid getting and which can kill your heroes if a steady supply of blood vials doesn't drop.
2. The Flagellant is a huge missed opportunity. Don't get me wrong, he's a neat hero. But his schtick is basically a combination of many bleed attacks with a couple of more powerful attacks that can't be used until he's below 50% HP and which heal a huge chunk of his health. I figured, for a guy called "the Flagellant" whose attack animation is whipping himself with a flail, that his attacks would have a "deal damage to enemy and self" mechanic, so that you use those attacks until his HP drops and then use one of the more powerful ones to heal him back up. But his regular attacks don't do that, they just apply bleeds. So I'm just using these lacklustre bleed attacks and waiting until an enemy decides to hit the Flagellant hard enough that he can use one of his better attacks. It's weird and unpredictable and kinda dull, to be honest.
3. One of the new additions in the DLC was the option of having more buildings in the Hamlet, which I got excited by and then promptly started scratching my head when I saw the things. They are tremendously expensive, requiring literally hundreds of heirlooms to build. I can't imagine any situation where I would be sitting on that many heirlooms except for when I've already maxed out literally every other building in the Hamlet. Rather than "here are some more building options," it's just "here is a place to dump your excess heirlooms." The buildings themselves are unimpressive; they mostly provide stat buffs to certain classes in three-man groups, with a couple of utility ones; there's one that gives you some free Blood at the start of every week, which would be tremendously useful for me if it didn't cost like eighty fucking busts to build. You can only carry busts in stacks of six. Farming that would take me forever, especially considering that someone turns into a vampire and dies every time I leave the Hamlet.
4. The Baron map! What the fuck is going on here? First, there's the fact that the very first map in the DLC, the one that unlocks the vampires and their new dungeon environment, has a secret boss fight that the game doesn't tell you about until you stumble into it. I can forgive that; that's Darkest Dungeon. But the Baron map is listed as "Epic" in length, and has the unusual trait where you can leave it half-finished and retreat, then return later and pick up where you left off. That's a cool trick, I like it, so what's the problem?
The map is fucking huge. Like, it's four or five times as long as a Long dungeon. I've made five trips in and haven't found the boss yet. It has a lot of dead ends, it has a fog-of-war mechanic that stops you seeing where those dead ends are, and it has a mechanic where you collect coloured keys to open fucking doors. There is a lot of backtracking, a lot of just walking around through areas you'd cleared ten minutes ago, watching as your stress bar climbs and your cursed characters start to wither and die. It's not that it's hard; it's just fucking boring. It's this godawful slog of a mission, and in some brazen oversight by the developers, they don't give you any opportunities to camp like they normally do with long dungeons.
The number of times I've sent my carefully-quarantined team of cursed demi-vampire heroes into the Baron map only to watch the only healer I had just starve and die right out of the gate...it's enough to make a man rage-quit and then go on the internet to complain.
5. Despite having over a dozen heroes cursed with vampirism, I have not yet encountered the new Fanatic roaming boss, who is supposed to turn up to hunt down your vampiroid heroes. His spawn rate may be bugged or reliant on some invisible condition I haven't filled yet.
Now, I get that the developers wanted vampirism to be a bad thing that you had to deal with, not a secret advantage you could min-max with. But at the time I'm writing this post, I have twelve heroes with the Curse, and I'd have more if six of them hadn't died of it. Yes; you can die of vampirism, even if the sufferer is in town, if you don't have enough blood vials to feed them. Only special blood vials that drop from the vampire enemies can be used, and their drop rate is atrocious. And the curse spreads like fucking malaria; every one of the new vampire enemies has a special attack that can curse a hero, and I quickly found that the only way to stop my entire roster getting cursed was to only use heroes who were already cursed, and then I had to deal with a) them having a massive HP penalty and b) sometimes randomly starving to death in the middle of a dungeon because they're fussy little shits about what blood they'll eat. Sometimes, if they're in the "Wasting" stage of the curse, they die immediately after entering the dungeon. You spawn in, they go "Whoops!" and explode. No Death's Door; they just die outright.
And I can't prevent this! I don't have enough blood to feed these guys, I can't get more blood without fighting the vampires who spread the curse that makes me need even more blood, and if I send cursed guys out to fight the vampires they just fucking die! Even when I'm doing regular dungeons and trying to avoid fighting the fucking vampires for five minutes, they pop over into other dungeon types and I have to fight them anyway! And to top it all off, if you leave a cursed hero back in town, there's a chance they'll spread the disease to other heroes in town anyway. One hero infected three other heroes with vampirism and then died of starvation, presumably because he spat all the blood back out after drinking it.
The whole system is a tremendously unimaginative clusterfuck. They could've done some interesting stuff with the vampire concept, made it kind of a special trade-off thing like they do with the disorders, the torch-light, or the virtues and afflictions. Instead, it's just a huge debuff that you can't cure and can't avoid getting and which can kill your heroes if a steady supply of blood vials doesn't drop.
2. The Flagellant is a huge missed opportunity. Don't get me wrong, he's a neat hero. But his schtick is basically a combination of many bleed attacks with a couple of more powerful attacks that can't be used until he's below 50% HP and which heal a huge chunk of his health. I figured, for a guy called "the Flagellant" whose attack animation is whipping himself with a flail, that his attacks would have a "deal damage to enemy and self" mechanic, so that you use those attacks until his HP drops and then use one of the more powerful ones to heal him back up. But his regular attacks don't do that, they just apply bleeds. So I'm just using these lacklustre bleed attacks and waiting until an enemy decides to hit the Flagellant hard enough that he can use one of his better attacks. It's weird and unpredictable and kinda dull, to be honest.
3. One of the new additions in the DLC was the option of having more buildings in the Hamlet, which I got excited by and then promptly started scratching my head when I saw the things. They are tremendously expensive, requiring literally hundreds of heirlooms to build. I can't imagine any situation where I would be sitting on that many heirlooms except for when I've already maxed out literally every other building in the Hamlet. Rather than "here are some more building options," it's just "here is a place to dump your excess heirlooms." The buildings themselves are unimpressive; they mostly provide stat buffs to certain classes in three-man groups, with a couple of utility ones; there's one that gives you some free Blood at the start of every week, which would be tremendously useful for me if it didn't cost like eighty fucking busts to build. You can only carry busts in stacks of six. Farming that would take me forever, especially considering that someone turns into a vampire and dies every time I leave the Hamlet.
4. The Baron map! What the fuck is going on here? First, there's the fact that the very first map in the DLC, the one that unlocks the vampires and their new dungeon environment, has a secret boss fight that the game doesn't tell you about until you stumble into it. I can forgive that; that's Darkest Dungeon. But the Baron map is listed as "Epic" in length, and has the unusual trait where you can leave it half-finished and retreat, then return later and pick up where you left off. That's a cool trick, I like it, so what's the problem?
The map is fucking huge. Like, it's four or five times as long as a Long dungeon. I've made five trips in and haven't found the boss yet. It has a lot of dead ends, it has a fog-of-war mechanic that stops you seeing where those dead ends are, and it has a mechanic where you collect coloured keys to open fucking doors. There is a lot of backtracking, a lot of just walking around through areas you'd cleared ten minutes ago, watching as your stress bar climbs and your cursed characters start to wither and die. It's not that it's hard; it's just fucking boring. It's this godawful slog of a mission, and in some brazen oversight by the developers, they don't give you any opportunities to camp like they normally do with long dungeons.
The number of times I've sent my carefully-quarantined team of cursed demi-vampire heroes into the Baron map only to watch the only healer I had just starve and die right out of the gate...it's enough to make a man rage-quit and then go on the internet to complain.
5. Despite having over a dozen heroes cursed with vampirism, I have not yet encountered the new Fanatic roaming boss, who is supposed to turn up to hunt down your vampiroid heroes. His spawn rate may be bugged or reliant on some invisible condition I haven't filled yet.
Anyway. What are the positives? There's some new trinkets,
tl;dr - some DLC came out and Ruined Darkest Dungeon FOREVER, and now I'm not having any fun playing it. I'm seriously considering starting a new save and disabling all the DLC content just so I can get back to actually finishing the fucking thing.
