Let's be honest here....

[Cruna]

Darkest dungeon 2 sure becomes a sensitive subject, and for good reasons. I am not a die hard DD1 fan, and I'm open for new ideas when it comes to games. But now after trying DD2 out for countless hours, I just realise that the game is simply doesn't have enough content to justify the price of a modern game. This whole roguelike approach, the slow moving cart mechanics, the silly relationship mechanics are just meant to stand in your way to breeze through a game which is at most 1-2 hours long. So the whole roguelike element isn't there to add something to the game. It's simply there to hide the lack of content behind a linear grind.

Seems like the whole aim was to make the game look really nice for trailers, and just avoid making a game full of content. You want more content, nah they never made it. How about you do the same thing 100 times? That's content! ...right.

Now yeah I know it's early access but even on Epic store the devs claim that the game is over 75% finished so it's not like it will change that much by release, so....

Back when I first saw the trailers I presumed, taht the whole stagecoach mehcanic was just a new and interesting way of doing dungeon runs, something that is added on TOP of the type of game we had in DD1. But no. It's basically all about a cart full of bickering idiots who are insulted by anything and have mental breakdowns over anything. That's the game. A cart full of idiots doing their Groundhog Day 100 times

[No One]

Let's be honest here.

You're presenting your personal opinion as if it's universal truth.

Among several other errors. The review section is thataway.

Originally posted by Tsela:

after trying DD2 out for countless hours

Um. Ummmm......

Either you were engaged, in which case you just nuked your entire point.
Or you took 'countless hours' to realize you weren't having fun, in which case you nuked your credibility. Excuse me while I go refer to a more discerning customer.

Note that I currently have no plans to buy DD2. I'm not defending the game. I just don't like your so-called argument.

[Slur Slinging Slasher]

After putting 30+ hours into the game I can honestly say I agree.
The relationship system sucks and it makes me miss the old stress system. The limiting on heals and stress heals makes the game more artificial hard instead of actual difficulty.
The driving system is the most boring thing they added and honestly it feels like they just wanted something anything different from the dungeon crawling from the firsts game.
Also I miss being able to strategist who to bring to the next zone instead of being forced to just bring the same four members of my team. So if I pick say the Runaway and end up in the sprawl she's effectively worthless.
Also this is a personal thing for me but I miss the game about and called "Darkest Dungeon" being about being in a Dungeon.

[Cruna]

Originally posted by No One:

Let's be honest here.

You're presenting your personal opinion as if it's universal truth.

Among several other errors. The review section is thataway.

Originally posted by Tsela:

after trying DD2 out for countless hours

Um. Ummmm......

Either you were engaged, in which case you just nuked your entire point.
Or you took 'countless hours' to realize you weren't having fun, in which case you nuked your credibility. Excuse me while I go refer to a more discerning customer.

Note that I currently have no plans to buy DD2. I'm not defending the game. I just don't like your so-called argument.

It means that I gave it a fair chance, if that makes more sense to you.
As for your so called dislike towards my so called argument, it really doesn't matter what sort of so called credibility you think I so called nuked. So that's all there is to it lol. That's just your so called opinion

[Cruna]

Originally posted by Artemis:

After putting 30+ hours into the game I can honestly say I agree.
The relationship system sucks and it makes me miss the old stress system. The limiting on heals and stress heals makes the game more artificial hard instead of actual difficulty.
The driving system is the most boring thing they added and honestly it feels like they just wanted something anything different from the dungeon crawling from the firsts game.
Also I miss being able to strategist who to bring to the next zone instead of being forced to just bring the same four members of my team. So if I pick say the Runaway and end up in the sprawl she's effectively worthless.
Also this is a personal thing for me but I miss the game about and called "Darkest Dungeon" being about being in a Dungeon.

I fully agree.

[Narrowmind]

He wasn't anymore wrong in what he said than what you said. It however seems far more wrongfully dismissive of you to pretend that a dissenting opinion isn't honest. You kinda brought the argument all by yourself. You came out looking for a fight and found one.

[Sybsidian]

Originally posted by Artemis:

After putting 30+ hours into the game I can honestly say I agree.
The relationship system sucks and it makes me miss the old stress system. The limiting on heals and stress heals makes the game more artificial hard instead of actual difficulty.
The driving system is the most boring thing they added and honestly it feels like they just wanted something anything different from the dungeon crawling from the firsts game.
Also I miss being able to strategist who to bring to the next zone instead of being forced to just bring the same four members of my team. So if I pick say the Runaway and end up in the sprawl she's effectively worthless.
Also this is a personal thing for me but I miss the game about and called "Darkest Dungeon" being about being in a Dungeon.

All true!

[Cruna]

Absolutely. I mean here is the thing. I love how the game looks and feels, but... where is the rest of it??
To put it in perspective I had the same problem with for example a game called Othercide. Even if that's a different genre. The point here is the reason behind the roguelike approach.

Othercide is also a really cool looking unique game, which borrows more than enough from Xcom, but it has just breadcrumbs worth of content. So what did they do to make up for that? They made that game roguelike also. Same way, yeah it doesn't even comes close to a full game in the amount of content it provides, but how about you just do it again and again.

It becomes sort of a sweeping under the carpet to dodge responsibilities in game development

I also have a few other problems with the game same things Artemis mentioned about the relationship system. I think it's cumbersome, and quite often ridiculous. We see some gang of hysterical emotionally unstable pals who are offended by anything and everything, people who wouldn't be fit to be even dishwashers, let alone a gang of rugged champions carrying the hope of humanity with those emotional vulnerabilities and constant bickering. But this part is more of a game design fault, or maybe preference. Who knows maybe some people are into emo champions or something. It's just cumbersome and often forces you to not play strategically, but instead keep in mind the "feelings" of the champions when you make combat decisions. But then again this is not game content problem, the main problem the game has is the sheer lack of everything. Changing numbers here and there using candles is not "unlocking more content" it's just a numeric modifier.

[Dark Messiah]

The most enjoyable thing about the game for me was the permanence. Going back to the Hamlet, relaxing a bit, buying upgrades and the like and generally having a whole other management side. I knew if I went and got destroyed, I could come back and regroup and try again. Memories of my favorite heroes who fell during a run, training new ones and all this made the game addicting.

[Cruna]

Originally posted by Dark Messiah:

The most enjoyable thing about the game for me was the permanence. Going back to the Hamlet, relaxing a bit, buying upgrades and the like and generally having a whole other management side. I knew if I went and got destroyed, I could come back and regroup and try again. Memories of my favorite heroes who fell during a run, training new ones and all this made the game addicting.

well yeah and the whole concept actually inspired bunch of other developers who made their versions of Darkest dungeon clones. It was interesting and unique twist for turn based dungeon crawler. While DD2 is full on roguelike without much offtime base management, or champion management. You just make a party of 4 offended feminists or something, and pack them in a cart and off they go until they die. do it again afterwards.

[No One]

So, uh, where does this 1-2 hours meme come from? Is the demo being confused for the full game? A run takes 4-5 hours even if you know what you're doing.

Originally posted by Tsela:

It means that I gave it a fair chance,

"Countless hours" isn't a fair chance. Countless hours is masochism. I'ma go ahead and not take the advice of a masochist, thanks. Indeed I'm going to immediately consider the opposite...

--

Originally posted by Artemis:

Also I miss being able to strategist who to bring to the next zone instead of being forced to just bring the same four members of my team.

I also found that Crimson Court and Endless made me want to switch teams after a while. Messed up the pacing: 5 hours is too long in most cases. I want to switch after 2-3 even if I really love that team.
I would suggest allowing three (or a dozen) runs going at the same time. If you get bored of one you can switch and finish it later.

Wait hold on you can really push this.

What if you had like 12-15 slots, each defined by a starter party? They would be meta-runs building on the single runs. You can restart them at any time, the way you can now, but you would be able to play a particular meta-run until everyone died. Equivalent to the game tracking win streaks for you.

If you want you can try to make a meta-run survive as long as possible.
If you have a favourite character, you can restart the meta-run the instant they die.

You have multiple slots, so you can do both. Have 11 winstreak runs and 1 screw-around save.

Have 11 experimental saves and 1 hardcore endurance mode.

--

Originally posted by Artemis:

The relationship system sucks and it makes me miss the old stress system.

The relationship system is badly implemented, especially the endless rain of pauses to animate minor events as if they're major turning points. I don't care, just let me keep playing.
Mechanically it's almost the same thing, except virtues are way easier to get and one affliction isn't a nearly-fatal catastrophe. Going by the obvious intent of the mechanics, anyway. Balance still seems jank.

I would also like to see consistent rules, instead of actions that you like if you're happy and hate if you're not happy. E.g. what if kill-stealing is always bad? It would create tension between optimal short-term play and long-term play. Instead the rule is: "Don't have specifically 4 stress. Good luck!"

Originally posted by Artemis:

The limiting on heals and stress heals makes the game more artificial hard instead of actual difficulty.

Limiting heals seems to have made the game in fact easier, rather than harder. You can't waste turns healing when you should be fighting, making the game play itself for you, and they rebalanced damage to be even lower than it needs to be to compensate.
I do agree that limiting stress heals was very much not the way to go. Feels artificial to me too. They should have removed the stress heals from battle entirely, and then rebalanced stress damage to compensate.
Classic Red Hook: notice a problem, don't take it seriously. Or take it way too seriously and fix it three times.
"Hmm, stress healing is way too powerful. I know, how about we don't nerf stess healing, we instead prevent players from using it." Sorry what now?

Also, they didn't actually manage to eliminate stalling. With a per-use limit, the key thing to do is always stall until you're out of charges. (Oh except the game isn't hard so you can not do that and faceroll the thing anyway.)
They couldn't have ATQ be a hero because protect me would let you put someone under the healing threshold on purpose and let you heal them.
The game shouldn't encourage you to take extra damage so it will let you heal someone - especially when there's already use limits. This is one reason the PD is so OP, with the 50% hp thresholds.

I still think healing should give the healers winded-style debuffs instead of all this nonsense. You -can- heal but there's a cost/risk to it.

I honestly don't really know what the hp thresholds are for. They're there, they're balanced around. If they're not there, their absence is balanced around. Whatever.
With use limits is only makes even less sense that you can't heal outside battle. "I'm sorry, I can only apply bandages if an eldritch horror is trying to kill me. Or you, at least."
If you're going to have use limits it should auto-cast all the remaining uses at the end of battle.

Originally posted by Artemis:

So if I pick say the Runaway and end up in the sprawl she's effectively worthless.

In DD1 all the DoT classes had "make the best of a bad situation" skills that you never had to use because e.g. you could just not take FLG to the ruins if you didn't want to.
That's supposed to be part of the risk and tradeoff: if you take a runaway, they're going to be less good in the sprawl, so do you avoid the runaway, do you avoid the sprawl? You always have that second option.

Originally posted by Artemis:

I miss [,.,] being in a Dungeon.

I don't understand this. DD dungeons don't feel like dungeons, you press right and hit a bunch of checklist points in order. (Hey OP, see how annoying it is when you present your opinion as universal fact?) Now you hit a bunch of checklist points in order, but you can't hit every point, so there's some actual choices thus gameplay.

It's just the walking speed in DD1 was 4X too slow and the driving speed in DD2 is likewise at least 4X too slow. Totally unplayable without speedup mods.

--

That said I really hated, surprisingly so, how 0-19 stress looks like 1 pip in DD1. There's a very big difference between 2 stress and 19, Red Hook...

Originally posted by Tsela:

You just make a party of 4 offended feminists or something

This one got me, nice.

[karinundmaedels]

Originally posted by No One:

So, uh, where does this 1-2 hours meme come from? Is the demo being confused for the full game? A run takes 4-5 hours even if you know what you're doing.

I assume, the time of a run minus the timewasters (like driving, barks, too long animations etc.). The time you spend with actual gameplay.

[Kakaru]

it's the same game without the hamlet
I'm not sure why they thought removing half of DD1 would transform the game into a roguelike but it didn't

[Cruna]

Originally posted by Kakaru:

it's the same game without the hamlet
I'm not sure why they thought removing half of DD1 would transform the game into a roguelike but it didn't

well it was transformed into roguelike because basically you are locked in a single run each time and start over from the beginning of the game with points earned.

[Cruna]

yeah... March the 1st. Some time passed after initially being angry about the final product, and now I'm hooked and the game is actually awesome. I still have my problem against teh hysterical emotionally sensitive relationship system of the supposedly badass heroes delivering the hope of humanity. And I also have problems against the stupid initial grind before the game actually opens up after you unlocked enough new items to enjoy it.

Hoping for expansive DLC-s for this also in the future, because it's still not enough :)

[gonzo]

Originally posted by No One:

Either you were engaged, in which case you just nuked your entire point.d
Or you took 'countless hours' to realize you weren't having fun, in which case you nuked your credibility. Excuse me while I go refer to a more discerning customer.

Stop. Giving a game far more hours than you normally would, to get a better opinion on it, is not a blow to credibility.