This game isn't a roguelike

[Nogan]

It markets itself as one, but it's pretty much a grinding simulator with some RPG elements. I'll explain: roguelikes are generally characterized by a degree of replayability coupled with permanent player death. That is, they're short, heavily randomized, and come with a large degree of risk because you'll lose everything and have to start over if your character dies. Darkest Dungeon loosely adheres to these principles, but deviates in some pretty significant ways.

The first is that a normal playthrough is actually quite long. Like full length RPG long. It would be demoralizing if you could actually lose.

The second is that while you can lose your characters, you can simply build up a fresh batch like nothing ever happened. You could argue that this essentially qualifies as a losing condition since it's a reset of sorts, but you retain every upgrade in your Hamlet. And it's actually kind of the point. You're supposed to randomly throw characters at dungeons until you build up enough resources to actually support a fully leveled team. In this respect, the lives of your characters don't actually matter. They aren't a component of your win/loss condition. And as they're the only thing you ever risk losing, losing the game is never part of the equation in the first place.

It's even encouraged to just run random mooks through torchless runs, because it nets you more than enough income to build up your Hamlet. Then you dismiss them, get 4 new guys (who replenish immediately) and start anew. Raising the overall level of your characters raises the level of the quests without significantly improving the rewards, so it's actually a bad thing to do until you've fully upgraded everything. You do get better trinkets, but you can simply buy trinkets. And you don't need trinkets anyway until you start actually building a team that can take on the DD.

Recruiting new characters should actually cost you something. Or they shouldn't replenish as quickly as they do. Time should actually influence something. Maybe you have a time limit. Maybe the dungeons get more difficult independent of the average level of your characters, so you can't just cheese the dungeons and level up characters later. Maybe dismissed characters should show up as bandits or raving lunatics. More difficult dungeons should maybe give greater rewards, with an exponential increase in cost of upgrading services in the Hamlet (I would actually hate this, but it's a suggestion).

Regardless, the game markets itself with this dark oppressive atmosphere that's supposed to build this tension, but there's no real risk involved until maybe the end of the game. This is because neither time or your characters matter. Consider probably the most similar game to this one, XCOM, where both of these elements are significant. There's real tension in that game, because taking too long to progress or losing your best soldiers can have significant impact on your ability to continue.

All this said, I don't think Darkest Dungeon is a bad game by any means. It just feels a little uncoordinated in its approach.

[soul like that be capable of]

i think you need to shup up and go away. its conisdered one of the best games . so many word written by an idiot.

[Pothocket]

I can't take anyone with that user name seriously.

Also, it's like a roguelike. So close enough to not be worth ranting about

[Jeba]

sounds like you have a problem because you play the game in a way it wasnt meant to be played. hilarious

[Ironsides]

NG+ does put a turn limit on the game. Fail to reach the end of the Darkest Dungeon by something like turn 93 and you fail. Your save gets deleted.

I also suspect that one of the things the devs will be working on next year is additional game modes to offer regularly requested features like an easier game mode, modified stage coach rules, and other similar stuff.

Also, this isn't the best place to talk about Darkest Dungeon. The Steam community is super toxic.

[pi73r]

its conisdered one of the best games

Nope, it's not.

[Gaule Man]

Originally posted by TinkerBell:

i think you need to shup up and go away. its conisdered one of the best games . so many word written by an idiot.

Oh no ! He can say what he think about the game, by the way he didn't say the game was bad he said "for him the game is not a rogue-like" that's not the same thing.

[LaserGuy]

Have you already posted this before? I swear I've read this exact post like three weeks ago.

Yes, DD is not a Rogue-like in the strictest sense of the term, but then, most Rogue-likes are not Rogue-likes depending on what definition of the term you like to adhere to. Does it matter?

FWIW, not all Rogue-likes are short. Modern Rogue-likes tend to be shorter, I guess, but several of them require easily 20+ hours on a run for players who know what they're doing, and conceivably much longer if you're blundering quite a bit. Others, like Cataclysm, Dwarf Fortress, etc. have no end state--you simply keep going until you die. Actually, Dwarf Fortress is maybe a better comparison to DD than a lot of traditional Rogue-likes (minus several orders of magnitude of complexity and difficulty).

[Mindmaker]

I'm pretty sure it's not advertising itself as a roguelike, unless they changed it.
Doing so would be pretty silly.

[Eldritchness]

Roguelike is a term that has degenerated a lot through the years so I don't think is worth discussing about it. Roguelike, roguelite, RPG... does it really matter?

[karl-emil]

Originally posted by TinkerBell:

i think you need to shup up and go away. its conisdered one of the best games . so many word written by an idiot.

Either you didn't read the post or you can't read.

[Mindmaker]

Originally posted by Eldritchness:

Roguelike is a term that has degenarated a lot through the years so I don't think is worth discussing about it. Roguelike, roguelite, RPG... does it really matter?

How exactly has it degenerated? It's only been misused a lot by people who don't play them.

[NoerLuin]

Well if you don't like it don't play it. I think how you call it does not matter so much. If you have fun playing it that is great. These words are miss-used often anyways.

[Muscarine]

They should have just made the NG+ rules default so this wouldn't be repeated ad nauseam.
But then again there would still be a whole other kind of QQ spam.

[Sh1ki]

Originally posted by Khal Drogo's Glorious Nipples:

This game isn't a roguelike

We move from room to room, RNG, some events like fight with enemy, loot, strange ♥♥♥♥, which may kill you. Ok, it's not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ roguelike

[Aeternum]

The first 3 comments in this thread were written by mongrels, no doubt. This is why Steam forums are never a good place to discuss anything.