Darkest Dungeon was initially lauded as a role model Early Access title, something all other developers should strive to emulate. In recent months though, it hasn’t been all plain sailing for developer Red Hook Studios.
Trying to make the roguelike dungeon crawler more challenging for a hardcore group of fans, the team added a few harsh new mechanics – and ended up irritating everyone else.
The game’s not exactly a cakewalk at the best of times, but the addition of enemy damage resistance, heart attacks if your heroes gained too much stress, and enemy corpses that blocked your teams movement. Fortunately for those who felt all that was a bit much, Red Hook’s now added the option to turn it all off. Though the teams says they consider the three features “important mechanics”, they also don’t want to alienate their fans.
“As many of you know, we have been reluctant to add difficulty related options until now because focusing on our intended version of the game has been our number one priority and our experiments and changes during Early Access have all been in support of iterating on that,” Red Hook explains. “But it would be foolish for us to not consider the fact that the Darkest Dungeon community is now big enough to include diverse groups, some of which would like to play the game differently than we might have envisioned.”
The features will be enable by default, but you’ll be able to turn them off in the options menu. An even-handed compromise.
