Darkest Dungeon Catch All

I thought this had some similarities to the Torchbearer RPG. I guess I was right! http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/pos...

So much for holding off on Early Access games.

Demyx wrote:

This game is cool, but I have one complaint: combat animations take too damn long.

In one particularly awful mission, I had three of my four guys afflicted with Irrational which makes them autoattack and babble nonsense. I was tempted to go read a book since 90% of combat was slow text scrolls and autoattacking.

Looks like the insanity "barks" have been tuned down a bit in the most recent update, according to the most recent patch notes.

pyxistyx wrote:
Demyx wrote:

This game is cool, but I have one complaint: combat animations take too damn long.

In one particularly awful mission, I had three of my four guys afflicted with Irrational which makes them autoattack and babble nonsense. I was tempted to go read a book since 90% of combat was slow text scrolls and autoattacking.

Looks like the insanity "barks" have been tuned down a bit in the most recent update, according to the most recent patch notes.

PC only, sad trombone

Right now I definitely feel like the thing the game is lacking is some balancing on the difficulty curve as you go on - Just about hit the 30 hour mark (66 weeks in game) I've already got most team members to level 3 or 4, with fully levelled up skills, armour and weapons and I just stormed my way through the medium (orange) level bosses, and barely anyone goes over half stress levels (if that) during each mission. That said, I've not tried any of the level 5 (red) missions yet.

Also - more variety in bosses and unique dungeon events would be good - right now each is just three different (very slightly) tougher variations of the Necromancer, Hag and Hog King.

Still early access and all that, so I'm sure this stuff is coming.

I told myself I'd wait for final release on this one, but got bored and bought it last night.

It's fun, and has some amazing atmosphere. I feel a little stuck though... My roster is full (9 characters). I've been on a few quests, some I completed, others I had to abandon. At this stage everyone is at max stress and has an affliction. I don't have much money to heal them up, and no artifacts to improve my hamlet. Finding it difficult to progress now.

I keep thinking there should be a way to just pass time in the hamlet until characters are less stressed. Or a way to dismiss characters.

Am I missing the obvious? Or is the game off balance?

BTW, how do you figure out what the effects of an affliction are?

You can dismiss characters using the little button under their name on the character sheet. Probably the best option if your short on cash - just dump em and grab some fresh ones.

Some of the affliction effects seem deliberately obscure but I think a bunch of them have to do with the various dungeon objects (obsession with the dead = character will automatically open up an iron maiden without being prompted, etc).

Anyone else having to run the game In Window mode?

It worked full screen for me first time I loaded it up but I've been running it in windowed mode ever since so that I can keep an eye on the time (this is one of those game where I need to keep an eye on the time else it ends up being suddenly 2am for some reason ).

Are you running windows 8? If so, try this...

Can't Run Fullscreen On Windows 8 PC and Surfaces
Try disabling UI Scaling
Also try disabling UI scaling on a per-exe basis

Go to c:\program files\steam\steamapps\common\darkestdungeon\_windows
Find Darkest.exe
Right click->Properties
Go to Compatibility
Check "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings"

You put it in quotes rather than spoiler tags

Current status : Got my first level 5 character (congrats Sir Quintin of Stone!) and took out the Necromancer Lord. Most everyone else is at level 4 with all their gear and most of their skills upgraded, and I've unlocked everything bar the highest tier stuff for the camping skills (which I've never really used beyond what is initially available on each character) and the item caravan (ditto).

Two bosses at the highest tier remain, and then I need to do the "get character type X to level 6" stuff...

It took me a lucky crit to get past the hag without losses as well, but given it was my first attempt and I had no knowledge of the fight when I went in I'll take any loss-less victory. Tonight I'll take my first stab at the first of the swine bosses and I finally successfully finished a veteran mission. Therefore it must be time for the game to throw a string of misses or enemy crits at me. Probably those bloody fusiliers and their blanket fire. Not sure which is my least favorite mob thus far, the offensively overpowered fusiliers or the hard as heck to hit rabid wolves.

pyxistyx wrote:

It worked full screen for me first time I loaded it up but I've been running it in windowed mode ever since so that I can keep an eye on the time (this is one of those game where I need to keep an eye on the time else it ends up being suddenly 2am for some reason ).

Are you running windows 8? If so, try this...

Can't Run Fullscreen On Windows 8 PC and Surfaces
Try disabling UI Scaling
Also try disabling UI scaling on a per-exe basis

Go to c:program filessteamsteamappscommondarkestdungeon_windows
Find Darkest.exe
Right click->Properties
Go to Compatibility
Check "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings"

Thank you. Seems to work except there is a green bar and the windows button (I think) in corner. I checked properties via steam and deleted any options. Am I still running it in window mode?
Pt hank you.

Chad

This looks custom designed for my situation, Im moving houses (and countries) but in between that I will be spending 3 months on my parents farm and wont have access to my desktop. I need a good game to play in the cold nights by the fireside that works on my wife's laptop -
Vista 64, Intel Pentium P6200 @ 2.13GHz, Ati HD 4330, pretty basic stuff i know,

Thus i need this kind of game, an deep, involved RPG like game with replay-ability that is not at all demanding spec wise.. So its a question of this vs Sunless sea ? Which do you think has a good 3 months of stuff in it ? I wont be gaming an awful lot as i need to help around the farm and I haven't seen my parents for a year and half.

Picked this up on a whim.

Great game, but damn it's hard. All of my guys are constantly at max stress.

pyxistyx wrote:

You can dismiss characters using the little button under their name on the character sheet. Probably the best option if your short on cash - just dump em and grab some fresh ones.

Some of the affliction effects seem deliberately obscure but I think a bunch of them have to do with the various dungeon objects (obsession with the dead = character will automatically open up an iron maiden without being prompted, etc).

Yeah, I think that's the right of it. I've got a guy now with Necromania and if I come across a searchable corpse he sometimes goes right after it because of this condition.

Just had a wild encounter with the Wizened Hag...

Spoiler:

...who dumps a party member into her boiling cauldron, leaving you to choose between attacking her (if you have the range) and attacking the cauldron to get your companion out. It took me a couple rounds to realize that after you get your squaddie out she'll just throw another one in on the next turn (and that if you leave them, they'll dump out at Death's Door), so I made sure anybody with ranged attacks focused on the hag. It *barely* worked, thanks to a couple of timely crits. Had to save two characters from death and one more had to survive a lethal attack, but they all survived the encounter.

Good times. (Spoilered the text just in case people want to discover boss tactics on their own.)

Edit: oops. Quote tag. Spoiler tag. It's all the same to me, apparently.

Brownypoints wrote:

This looks custom designed for my situation, Im moving houses (and countries) but in between that I will be spending 3 months on my parents farm and wont have access to my desktop. I need a good game to play in the cold nights by the fireside that works on my wife's laptop -
Vista 64, Intel Pentium P6200 @ 2.13GHz, Ati HD 4330, pretty basic stuff i know,

Thus i need this kind of game, an deep, involved RPG like game with replay-ability that is not at all demanding spec wise.. So its a question of this vs Sunless sea ? Which do you think has a good 3 months of stuff in it ? I wont be gaming an awful lot as i need to help around the farm and I haven't seen my parents for a year and half.

Sunless Sea is also great...and brutal. Just to add to your decision, would Crusader Kings 2 run on that ok?

I wasn't interested in this game at all. Then I heard, at the end of the first trailer on Steam, that guy say "Darkest Dungeon." Oh man... it is now on the wishlist.

chooka1 wrote:

Thank you. Seems to work except there is a green bar and the windows button (I think) in corner. I checked properties via steam and deleted any options. Am I still running it in window mode?

Not sure, sorry - I'm running windows 7 here. I just found that stuff on the "known issues" page of the steam forums for the game.

Brownypoints wrote:

Thus i need this kind of game, an deep, involved RPG like game with replay-ability that is not at all demanding spec wise.. So its a question of this vs Sunless sea ? Which do you think has a good 3 months of stuff in it ? I wont be gaming an awful lot as i need to help around the farm and I haven't seen my parents for a year and half.

There's not necessarily 3 months worth of stuff in Darkest Dungeon just yet but if you're just picking at it now and again it'll probably stretch out long enough for them to add more content.

For me, I'm 35 hours in and I've got everything pretty much upgraded in my Hamlet and I've killed all but one boss from the checklist of options provided. Still need to level up certain characters to level 6 but essentially it looks like I'm approaching the end of the current content.

***

and I'm there I think. I have my entire roster either level 4 or 5 with all their skills and equipment maxed, the hamlet is fully upgraded and I have killed all the checklisted bosses. All that's left is to level one of each character class to level 6 but I think I'll hold off on that until new content shows up. Took around 37 hours total in case anyone's wondering how much content there is at the time of writing.

Been looking for the next FTL and so far this is it for me. That game that makes you want just one more turn.

I tried Dungeons of the Endless and it didn't grab me.

Sunless Sea is looking real nice too

I am still catching up with this thread, so forgive me if this has already been posted.

One of my favorite YouTubers (Das24680) has just started a new LP series for this game.

I hadn't really heard of this game before that, but WOW is it on my wishlist now.

The updates from pyxistyx have been awesome, too.

fogrob wrote:

I thought this had some similarities to the Torchbearer RPG. I guess I was right! http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/pos...

So much for holding off on Early Access games.

Hah, when I read "This is a Tycho game, not a Gabe game" I laughed because that seems so accurate from what I've read on PA.

Well you folks can be thanked for enabling me on this ... Love the game so far even though it seems I'm not very good at it. Still trying to figure out the class dynamics and what I can do to get rid of afflictions as they seem to differ from quirks and ailments. Although with every member of the party suffering from some affliction it did make for some pretty funny combats that were almost completely out of my control. I am curious as to how much additional content they are planning to put in the final release but I feel I will definitely get my moneys worth just out of the early access.

I'm basically just guessing, but there are 2 more dungeons to unlock and I'd assume the final one will be a bit larger/nastier than the others so I figure about 50% of the game is in content-wise. Not following particularly closely so not sure if there are any more systems to be implemented though I read something somewhere about selling trinkets.

Frankly I think that'd make the game too easy, once you get a handle on the game after the first few weeks it doesn't seem too difficult to keep enough money around. I'm doing all my runs in full torchlight but bringing back plenty of loot. I'd like to see loot lowered a bit when running light to really make it worth the risk of running darker.

Does time has any affect on the game? I mean, do quests get more difficult with any passing week or monsters? Because if not, can't you upgrade the recruiting thingy to have 4 recruits available, hire a "loser" team (hiring is free), run it through the dungeon until they are exhausted, get 3-5K or whatever money, some heirlooms, abandon the quest, dismiss the "losers", hire a new "loser" team, repeat.

This could be the way out of the money problems when you have no money to stress relieve your "main" team, upgrade them or when you have no heirlooms to upgrade the hamlet (current situation in my 1st campaign :)).

Will this work or will, eventually (say 20 weeks later), your "main" team face tough dungeons they can't complete no matter what? If this works, having 12 spots in your roster will work nicely - 2 "main" teams and 1 rotating "loser" team for when things go awful in your "main" quests.

BTW I wish I could kill the jerk that is always praying in my abbey. I also wish I could keep the unused provision. I also wish I knew how much food my party will need (sometimes it's 4, sometimes it's 5) and when. I also wish my "tank" had some kind of taunting ability because it seems stupid to have him all buffed up while the enemies constantly hit my 3rd spot.

Oh and I had no idea I was supposed to drag the shovel into that window and I was wondering how come shovel or no shovel seemed to have no difference.

Hedinn wrote:

Does time has any affect on the game? I mean, do quests get more difficult with any passing week or monsters? Because if not, can't you upgrade the recruiting thingy to have 4 recruits available, hire a "loser" team (hiring is free), run it through the dungeon until they are exhausted, get 3-5K or whatever money, some heirlooms, abandon the quest, dismiss the "losers", hire a new "loser" team, repeat.

Yes you can do this, and realizing this is what allowed me to finally make progress in the game. I think it's absolutely necessary to do some throwaway runs in the beginning, and there really isn't a good reason to pay money to cure a level 0 with 60%+ stress.

BTW I wish I could kill the jerk that is always praying in my abbey. I also wish I could keep the unused provision. I also wish I knew how much food my party will need (sometimes it's 4, sometimes it's 5) and when. I also wish my "tank" had some kind of taunting ability because it seems stupid to have him all buffed up while the enemies constantly hit my 3rd spot.

Two of my highest leveled people right now have the quirk where they can only pray for stress relief and that frigging guy is always there. Thankfully you can upgrade the abbey to have more slots.

BTW is there really no way to heal between in the fights in the dungeon? It sucks to win a battle by a hair and realize someone will die in the next one because you can't heal up at the end of a fight. Kind of doesn't make sense why a healer can heal only during fights.

Hedinn wrote:

BTW is there really no way to heal between in the fights in the dungeon? It sucks to win a battle by a hair and realize someone will die in the next one because you can't heal up at the end of a fight. Kind of doesn't make sense why a healer can heal only during fights.

Once you are able to have a campfire you can do some healing and stress relief but it is a one time thing (I think) and the characters have to fulfill some requirement that I didn't catch but doesn't seem to apply to my loser teams I tried last night. I started noticing that even though the new characters are of the same type they don't always have the same starting abilities but then that explained unlocking abilities. I'm still getting the hang of this thing but loving it the more I do.

Definitely don't waste money/resources on loser characters. If you can cheaply outfit them on a run where you don't care if they survive or not, so long as somebody lives to return the loot, I think that's a totally viable strategy. I do, though, try to make sure I never leave the sanitarium empty when making a dungeon run. For the characters you intend to keep leveling up, it's worth the money to try and keep their afflictions from mounting too far. I didn't pay attention to this in the early going and I now have a couple very good characters with a list of afflictions about 6-10 items long. Any couple of them isn't a big deal, but as they add up they can seriously gimp an character.

Survived (all four squaddies) my first Long dungeon run (medium difficulty) last night. It was pretty exhilarating having to manage health and sanity over the course of two camps. By the end I had sanity well under control, but everyone was low on health, despite having three characters who could run out some form of healing (Vestral, Wizard type-Seeker?, Leper). It also threw the big "fat" skeleton type at me for the first time, over and over again. Managing him with a couple crossbow skeletons behind him is a challenge. Thank god for Abyssal Artillery!

Hedinn wrote:

Does time has any affect on the game? I mean, do quests get more difficult with any passing week or monsters? Because if not, can't you upgrade the recruiting thingy to have 4 recruits available, hire a "loser" team (hiring is free), run it through the dungeon until they are exhausted, get 3-5K or whatever money, some heirlooms, abandon the quest, dismiss the "losers", hire a new "loser" team, repeat.

I was wondering the same thing. I don't think time has any effect. It seems like there's some randomization to the available missions each time you finish one. I think there was only one time when I didn't have an option to take a short level 1 mission.

BTW I wish I could kill the jerk that is always praying in my abbey.

Yeah, he's annoying, but I think he's the same guy that sells you your provisions.

Hedinn wrote:

BTW is there really no way to heal between in the fights in the dungeon? It sucks to win a battle by a hair and realize someone will die in the next one because you can't heal up at the end of a fight. Kind of doesn't make sense why a healer can heal only during fights.

Aside from camping, which has a fixed number of uses depending on the length of the mission, food will heal them one point. It's not a lot, but sometimes it's worth doing. It's another one of those strategic decisions.

deftly wrote:

Aside from camping, which has a fixed number of uses depending on the length of the mission, food will heal them one point. It's not a lot, but sometimes it's worth doing. It's another one of those strategic decisions.

Yep, but be aware this does not effect the part notification to eat. Before I knew how this mechanic worked I once fed all four of my squaddies in a room with the last of my food and then got the Party Eat notification in the very next room. If you have food to spare, though, you can bump a guy up a good 4-8 health points by just having him stuff his face.

Hedinn wrote:

Does time has any affect on the game? I mean, do quests get more difficult with any passing week or monsters? Because if not, can't you upgrade the recruiting thingy to have 4 recruits available, hire a "loser" team (hiring is free), run it through the dungeon until they are exhausted, get 3-5K or whatever money, some heirlooms, abandon the quest, dismiss the "losers", hire a new "loser" team, repeat.

Nope, time doesn't factor in at all as far as I could tell - at least for now. Once you level up to certain levels your team will refuse to do stuff below their levels though (levels 3 and 5 respectively). As Demyx says, it's perfectly doable to go back and redo low level dungeons, although the rewards are FAR less than you get from the more difficult ones (and by that time your best merc's should be pretty good at staving off stress so you're spending less money on fixing them afterwards).

**

Something I found quite amusing - try adding a low level character to a party going into a high level dungeon. His panicked "oh gods WHY I'm going to die!" barks are quite amusing. (Sadly, it's the only way I'm going to be able to level up a Leper to level 6, since I only have one slot left and everyone else is level 4+ at this stage, so he's just going to have to #dealwithit ).

**

Also congrats to Crusader, Quintin of Stone, my first level 6 merc

I'm only about 30 minutes into this, but I can feel its talons sinking into me deep. I like the narrative as I dive into dungeons - it's like I'm inside my own little Castlevania-esque noir.

"As the enemies fall, hope rises..." made me cringe during my most recent fight. It's like the game was mocking me for feeling like I'm making progress.