Darkest Dungeon - Uncompromising Design Choices

Couch has found this article at PopOptiq about the uncompromising design choices of Darkest Dungeon, related to user feedback that is given to developers.

Several times over the course of early access, changes were made based directly on player feedback. I’m all for a bit of developer transparency, and I wish good luck upon any designer who wades into the murky depths of a public forum to talk directly to players. A lot of good suggestions were made on various platforms – Steam forums, official forums, even Reddit – that actually ended up implemented into the game one way or another. As someone who grew up in an era when game designers were held in such mystique that “my dad works at Nintendo” really meant something, it’s pretty exciting to be able to speak directly to developers and actually have them listen.

t should be an ideal “everyone wins” scenario, but the problem is players are divided on how the game should actually play. For every reasonable discussion of balance, there were people taking sides, forming camps around two fundamental ideas: “this game should be harder” and “this game should be easier”. Bile and insults were thrown, the developers got called incompetent or other nasty things an innumerable amount of times, and yet they still continued to listen and respond to the community, braving the horrors within much like the dungeon-crawling heroes of the game itself. The arguments became more personal, with one side claiming that “casuals are ruining it for the real players” and the others saying “the elitists are ruining it for everyone else”. Only with more vulgarities bouncing back and forth.

Unlike other games, this isn’t just something that can be done away with by adding a difficulty selection and calling it a day. Sold as a game that’s supposed to be harsh and unpleasant at times, taking the sting off of its nastier moments runs the risk of eliminating all the tension the game’s aesthetics deliberately evoke. After all, a game about the stresses of dungeon crawling wouldn’t have much impact if the average player rarely had to worry about death or madness. The game’s difficulty moved back and forth around a personal sweet spot for me as development went on, eventually falling into a nice middle-ground by the time of release. I’m satisfied, but as made abundantly clear by a vocal minority, not everyone is happy, with both sides of the previous argument sometimes stating that listening to the other faction caused the developers to ruin the experience.

More information.

You cannot lose, you have to simply stop trying to win.

Sounds like a hell of a grind.

Navigating these waters of community ideas and developer vision can be very tricky, as we've seen countless times already with the new generation of gaming.

Personally, I believe that as a developer, you have to have an idea and a vision for your project. You need to get everyone on the team in line with that vision and work towards creating your idea of what the game should be.

When you start adding community feedback to the mix, it has to be taken with a large grain of salt. If the community has an idea for an entirely different game than is your vision, you have to balance that, or outright ignore it. However, in my world, the person with the ideal vision is always in the lead. You can take community feedback and improve your product, but you can't lose sight of the vision that you, the developer, see the game as being.

I am a music maker and I never let anyone tinker with my finished products. Now, it's probably equally seen as hard-headed and anti-social, but if I feel that others are overly influencing my idea, then I am not doing it from the heart and for the right reasons in my own mind.

In the end, you have to stay true to yourself and to your vision. Build a game and let the others flock to it and adapt themselves around it, not the other way around. Let the gamers accept the game as it is and evolve with your vision.

The funny thing is that the game is neither too hard nor too easy.
At least if you're not an extremist casual or hardcore player.

The problem is that the game is just FAR too grindy. After playing for not even 10 hours, I had seen everything the game had to offer. It would just pump up enemy HP and damage as well as that of my heroes.
Nothing else would change.
Why unluck everything up to the most expensive building upgrades if all that changes is just more HP, more damage, etc.
The gameplay stays 100% the same from beginning to end, and while fun at first it just becomes boring.

Originally Posted by TheSHEEEP
The problem is that the game is just FAR too grindy. After playing for not even 10 hours, I had seen everything the game had to offer. It would just pump up enemy HP and damage as well as that of my heroes.
Nothing else would change.

And that is the reason for all their pseudo-elitist mottos. They have very few game to offer. To make this less evident, they do the same tricks that others did in the prehistory of videogames: as far as my game has very few to offer I will hide this fact forbiding save/loads and introducing randomized death.
Fortunately we are in 2016 and all those tricks are only for people who willingly like that kind of masochist stuff. With so many interesting games outhere and Steam refunds, this kind of developers will be no more an anger for me…

Originally Posted by TheSHEEEP
The funny thing is that the game is neither too hard nor too easy.
At least if you're not an extremist casual or hardcore player.

The problem is that the game is just FAR too grindy. After playing for not even 10 hours, I had seen everything the game had to offer. It would just pump up enemy HP and damage as well as that of my heroes.
Nothing else would change.
Why unluck everything up to the most expensive building upgrades if all that changes is just more HP, more damage, etc.
The gameplay stays 100% the same from beginning to end, and while fun at first it just becomes boring.

Exactly how I feel about the game. I backed it for the sweet combat presentation, rather disappointed with the overall game. Always a risk of backing projects. Perhaps the combat presentation will carry on to other titles.

I enjoyed the game. For me the game was too easy up until the lvl 5 and 6 dungeons. I had no deaths and built my team up rather easy. Then in the highest lvl dungeons my guys started dying. I did not want to lvl new teams up from lvl 0. Game play did get too repetitive to go from lvl 0 to 6 again.

Originally Posted by TheSHEEEP
The problem is that the game is just FAR too grindy.

Not going to argue with that, but

Originally Posted by TheSHEEEP
After playing for not even 10 hours, I had seen everything the game had to offer.

Uhh, not quite. Have you even unlocked the four town areas in the first 10 hours? Have you played a Champion level run? You've only seen half the creatures at that point. There's a lot more to the game than the first ten hours show you. The *real* grind comes in the late game. If you don't like the gameplay, then I guess everything looks like a grind.

Wazhack plus Elder Sign meets tactics… Uh, I've been having a great time with this game.

I did not kickstart this, I waited until release to buy, I wish I would have. What a fun game.

Grind? Uh, are there… You know what I'm just going to stop there.

I wouldn't classify this as an RPG but it sure as hell is a lot of fun, for me personally.

Here's a mug of ale risen to you that enjoy this also. To those that don't; well there's plenty more fish in the sea.