Gaming INDIE EARLY ACCESS Tutorial
The Road to Darkest Dungeon 2 (Early Access Review) (11/3–11/4/2021)
There is always Hope!
Due to the shortness of time between the launch and the first update. I combined the two articles together. One right after another.
As someone who just started playing the Darkest Dungeon 2 early access build on the Epic Game Store, I can say that I was never more excited about playing a sequel to a series that I already loved. Darkest Dungeon has only gotten better as time has gone on, with expansions and constant tuning of gameplay mechanics. Darkest Dungeon 2 wants to make even more changes by taking almost everything away from you.
First, you are no longer the master of a domain. You no longer have a management sim to play with while you play the dungeon delver. Now, you are thrown into a wagon with a torch on the back and sent into the apocalypse. Once you hit the Crossroads, you pick up your heroes. These heroes are gated by Profile progress which you earn by making runs. You begin the game with the following characters:
· Man at Arms
· Grave Robber
· Highwayman
· Plague Doctor
These folks can succeed, the problems lie more in your relationships than your skills deficiencies. Once you reach the first Inn, you will get a skill point to spend on anything you want. You can only spend one skill point on one skill at a time. So, choose wisely as this skill will end up being quite significant. You have a long journey ahead of you. You can also outfit your wagon with any wagon items that you picked up between the Crossroads and the Inn. You can only equip wagon items at the Inn, so don’t save any for later. Sometimes the items you pick are a good haul; other times, it’s barely anything. You will also acquire trinkets; each character has two slots for them. Don’t bother buying any; you will soon pick up more than you can carry. Next, there are Inn items; these can only be used within the Inn. These are mainly stress healing items and food. If you have any food, use it to heal up all your characters to total health. Don’t save anything like that for later. Currencies are called Relics and gold. These are also items in your inventory. I’ve found them incredibly annoying to juggle in the inventory. But it seems like the usefulness varies depending on the selection you are given, which is pretty impossible to know in advance; so, you might want to hang on to these until you get to an Inn or the Hoarder, either place you can use them to buy items. Finally, there are Combat items; each character can equip one type at any time. Please don’t use them sparingly; you can equip a new one any time you are in the wagon. So, make sure you check this out in-between areas and fights. Doing this will help keep your inventory from being encumbered and might help you out in a tight spot during a battle.
Make sure to pick the easiest path you can, to begin with. This is where your run will likely live or die. You want to choose a golden path rather than a blue one mainly.
If you’re a Darkest Dungeon veteran; I recommend stress healing as often as possible and investing your first point into either Man at Arms Bolster ability or the Plague Doctor’s Ounce of Prevention ability. Either one will do stress healing to your party, which is essential because you will get A LOT of stress throughout the run. This seems to be the main thing that veteran Darkest Dungeon players don’t want to do. They consider these buffs to be a waste of time or inefficient. In Darkest Dungeon 2, they are essential to you getting to the end of the run alive. There is no other easy way to handle stress, and if your stress levels get too out of control, your party members will form bad relationships and pile on the stress even more. You will eventually cause a cascade of meltdown effects that take off large amounts of health and add terrible modifiers.
The torch on your wagon is a bit of Hope that you are given at the start of the run. You need to keep this light up as high as possible. This will grant you bonuses and keep you from taking on negative modifiers as easily and keep your party from piling on stress even further.
There is a Slay the Spire style map that you can bring up at any time. I’ve already discussed the Hoarder and the Inn. But there are many more stops for you along the way to the end:
· The Desperate Few: This is where you give some poor people some of your relics, and they can give you everything from a torchlight increase to some trinkets. All of these things are random, but as long as you have currency, you should get something.
· The Shrine: These fill in the backstories for a specific character chosen. These can be just a narrative sequence or a minigame depending on the chapter you are doing. These will permanently unlock a skill at the end as long as you are successful in the minigames. These skills carry over and are saved to your profile.
· The Hospital: Here, you can heal your physical wounds for gold (which you get as rewards for battles); you can also heal your negative quirks. If the negative quirk is tied to a relationship and that person is still around, the hospital cannot heal it. It’s locked, which you won’t find out until you try and heal it.
· The Watchtower: Here, you get the parts of your map revealed. Usually, if not all of it, it does most of it. This can be helpful when you need to pick a path to take. Picking a particular path can also cause or relieve stress depending on the opinions of your party.
· The Academic’s Cache: These are just places you can grab a random number of supplies that the Academic left for you on this road to hell.
· Lairs/Dungeons: Yes, the game wouldn’t be called Darkest Dungeon 2 without some dungeons, and here is where you delve deeply. You will have the option to fight three fights. After each battle, you have the chance to collect your rewards and leave or move on. If you win, you get all the rewards for all three fights; if not, you lose it all. Also, you are probably dead after this anyway, so it doesn’t matter. The usual fight rotation goes from relatively easy to the third fight, where you fight a boss.
This is all that I am aware of so far. I’ve played around 9 hours of Darkest Dungeon 2. I’ve already made it to the final boss only to go down to the last character on the last two or three hits before the boss killed me. I actually couldn’t believe it. The next run will be better. I think there is a level cap for your profile in early access right now. But I tried looking it up and couldn’t find the answer. Please let me know if you know what the profile level cap is in the responses. You will need to max this out to get all the available items and characters. Also, you will probably need to run quite a few runs to unlock all the character-specific skills, as each Shrine will only get you one skill for one character.
I love how Darkest Dungeon 2 changes things up so much from the original game. Seemingly making the Darkest Dungeon formula more challenging and making you reconsider how you play the game. I will keep you guys apprised of how the game changes throughout early access. Currently, I think they are mainly focusing on bug fixes and tuning the content they already have.
Darkest Dungeon 2 Early Access Update #1 (11/4/2021)
What a Patch that Was…
While I know that my last entry was quite long. I have to say that this won’t be anywhere near as long. This patch seems to have addressed the relationship system and general game difficulty. The patch was successful in this regard. The relationship system, at least the negative aspects are much more manageable. The positive returns are quite large. But The enemies in both the Tangle and the Sprawl have gotten significantly more difficult. On my first-half run, I was able to reach the end but then I got destroyed by the final boss. I’m guessing they tweaked something with him as well. Then I started another run, and I went to the Sprawl first, wanting to check out to see how difficult these enemies are now. The answer, very…
The difference from the release build seems to be the enemies are far more aggressive and if you haven’t gotten the chance to get at least 2 mastery points you are in for an uphill battle. The enemies don’t scale so, the same enemies you face at the beginning of the game are the same strength as those at the end. Which makes the early game incredibly difficult.
All that being said, I really love Darkest Dungeon 2 still and I have no problem saying that with every failure I have; I just load right back in, without hesitation, and keep going. This is by far one of the most addicting games I’ve ever played.
There is no doubt that this is an extremely difficult rogue-like but it is also a great game; that you would be a fool to miss. Even in Early Access.
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