Darkest Dungeon 2: The darkening of the dungeon.

[rusty_shackleford]

Releases in 8 hours from this post. Still no Crusader, therefore I strongly suggest you don't buy it.

[Cedric]

Although I'm still not sold on it, the few pirated builds I did try suggested that, indeed, the game has improved steadily over the months. It is good to see them actively fix the many issues the game had and still has.

They never seem to get the balance right though, it tends to go from impossible to too easy patch and back to impossible, or used to. They also did add a lot of content that doesn't look rushed rather quickly.

That said a pox on them for going in bed with Epic.

[wndrbr]

Not going to bother until they add the actual dungeons.

[Cedric]

They're not going to add dungeons. This is it.

[Lich]

I'm not feeling the road trip theme.

[Tweed]

Hard pass

[The_Mask]

Unless they DLC the Crusader, I imagine they won't get anything from me, either. Kind of sad. I liked the voice acting in the first one a lot.

[Sweeper]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If there's a group of people who continually **** up this simple wisdom, it's gamedevs.

[J1M]

Crusader was cut due to anti-Christian propaganda, correct?

[BlueMemphis]

Wow they really went all out on the visual side of things, I'll give them that much.
But that means nothing if gameplay sucks, and tbh I wasn't a fan of vanilla DD, could only ever really have fun with it with a ton of mods.

Wtf is up with the focus on the coach though? It looks to me like the those running games where you have to dodge incoming obstacles but surely that cannot be.

[rusty_shackleford]

<@Rusty_Shackleford> darkest dungeon 2 is ... hard to understand
<@Rusty_Shackleford> they made everything be represented by icons they refer to as 'coins'
<@Rusty_Shackleford> and there's like 30-40 of them
<@Rusty_Shackleford> I can't remember this ****
<@Rusty_Shackleford> "oh just hold down ctrl and mouse over the icon"
<@Rusty_Shackleford> ????
<@Rusty_Shackleford> just tell me?

<@Rusty_Shackleford> no idea why they'd go with such a silly system

<@Rusty_Shackleford> so basically when I'm picking an ability I have to keep hitting ctrl to figure out what it even does
<@Rusty_Shackleford> you'd think "oh, control just expands the tooltip"
<@Rusty_Shackleford> no, again, just the icon overlay and you have to use the decoder ring
<@Rusty_Shackleford> an ability has like 4 'tokens' on it

Terrible design, can't recommend even for fans of the first game. Spent most of my time playing with the decoder ring just trying to figure out what **** does.

[The_Mask]

The fans of the first game are playing the first game. XD

[J1M]

Whether true in practice or not, the carriage framing device makes it feel like all player agency is stripped away.

I also don't like that one must apparently fail dozens of times to collect enough candles to unlock the real game. The combat isn't fun enough for this game to be a rogue-like.

[Fuze]

The most infuriating part of the design is facing encounter where it's obvious you need tool that yet to be unlocked. Every ability, trinket and even champions are artificially lock, and even if you unlock all the champions, there is maybe only one or two of them that make decent backliner, because they are all gimped in some way by ****** starting skill, and you HAVE to play with them before unlocking something actually good.
The relationship mechanism is entirely binary, either you mange to build them, which will result in ridiculously good bonus, or the RNG **** you up and they start getting unfriendly. There is no return from such state, they will constantly bicker and further decrease whatever leftover point remain and put curse on each other, wich will result in ruined run. Again, there might be more way to deal with this later on, but you have to unlock it. The combat being way more deterministic also doesn't help at all.
Even the ennemies design seems dubious. Dreaming general is basically the canon from DD1, except it allows for even less player agency.

So far it seems like a straight downgrade on every gameplay mechanism, with either **** that add nothing worthwhile, like the carriage minigame (roll over **** on the road for chance to gain 2 gold piece, how exciting) or the dumbing down of stress.

[J1M]

Darkest Dungeon is about making the best of a bad situation.

► Show Spoiler

The best of a bad situation is 4 extra candles when you die.

[rusty_shackleford]

[Lhynn]

Celery was right?

[KnightoftheWind]

There are ******** in Darkest Dungeon II?. I played the first one for a bit, but got tired of it rather quickly.

[Fuze]

There are ******** in Darkest Dungeon II?. I played the first one for a bit, but got tired of it rather quickly.

Just regular cosmic horror, though red hook took a stand for them.

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[jcd]

Faggotry is the ultimate cosmic horror.

[Ratcatcher]

There are ******** in Darkest Dungeon II?. I played the first one for a bit, but got tired of it rather quickly.

Nope. No ******** whatsoever. The wokest I could find (beside the removal of Deus Vult Reynauld) is the Leper is now confirmed nog. It's presented in an incredibly hamfisted way, during shrines prologue battles you often have characters being in game as younger version of themselvs, seeing the events that led them to their downfall. For the Leper, it's the moment he contracts the disease.

He's clearly inspired by Baldwin the IV of Jerusalem, a frank King. He even shares his name. In game his "healthy" younger model looks like an ethiopian or smth. During the prologue, he contracts leprosy because he feels the need to go embrace the forsaken and downtrodded*, against the better judgement of le ebil court counselors (those look European ofc).



*: Yes, they are forsaken and downtrodded in the kigdom Baldwin himself is ruling over. One could probably think of at least a dozen ways in which a king could better their lot but no, free hugs day it is.


Edit: also funny that in the meme Rusty posted F&H is in the "what I expected" section. If I had to measure the degeneracy of the two titles, I'd say DDII is not even close, as far as Gay stuff and ****** agenda goes...

[jcd]

*: Yes, they are forsaken and downtrodded in the kigdom Baldwin himself is ruling over. One could probably think of at least a dozen way in which a king could better their lot but no, free hugs day it is.

It's symbolic and metaphorical. You wouldn't write a good story about how a wise king has improved the economic opportunities of the differently-abled sector.

[Ratcatcher]

You could write a good story about a warrior king contracting the disease while defending his subjects in battle?


...are you the same jcd that used to frequent the Codex?

[jcd]

That's not what Jesus would do. How do you even contract leprosy in battle.

[Ratcatcher]

That's not what Jesus would do

Jesus answered all questions tho, even inane ones.

How do you even contract leprosy in battle.

Biting:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-c ... l-fury-ex/

[Fuze]

Finished it this week. Last boss was sort of fun, though again, some party composition are going to have an hard time against it.
Overall balance of enemy and heroes is quite horrendous. Man at Arms is clearly the best heroes and every team will benefit from having him, while other like cultist are just a meme characters with obnoxious setup for little gain or outright no gain.

Confessions three boss is an insult to gamedesign. Speaking of which, the rate at which you gain new skills is comically low, you're going to visit 2 to 4 heroes shrine for a full run that could take around three hours. The issue is, once you've run trough a region twice or thrice, there isn't anything new to learn, and you have to subject yourself to at least two full run just to unlock an alternative way of playing ONE characters of the roster.

Most of the fun come from stumbling upon one the few crazy strong combo allowed by random trinket, generally dropped by lair boss. I had a virtually unkillable hellion for my winning run, because she started as a ravager (25% chance to bleed each turn), I gave her the heart of whatever ( at the beginning of a turn, 2/3 chance to bleed, 1/3 to got health regen) and looted a tunic that gave +50% bleed resist and 10% max health heal on a bleed resist. Last thing is pretty busted, it's not uncommon to have enemy healing you by attacking you.

I did not knew that it was stuart Chatwood that composed the ost of DD . I quite liked some of his other works, like the first two PoP game of the sand trilogy. Some tracks on DD2 are pretty great, the shroud is probably my favorite :


Artistic direction overall remains the strongest point of the games, and maybe make what I will call "the boardgame syndrom" even more infuriating. Dev have now idea how to make a decent gameplay loop, the token system that has been introduced as to allegedly "reduce rng" actually emphasis it, and it does not help that every non trash mob will also make you roll against their death's door.

Conclusion is wasted potential, whatever was good in the first indeed seems like an incidental blunder.

[The_Mask]

[Fedora Master]

So Yathz was too dumb for DD1 and enjoys the worse DD2. How surprising.