Please share more about your opinion of Darkest Dungeon 2.
As the reception on the internet hasn't been that great. The developer released a statement about the various issues. So it's safe to say my interest is minimal right now.
Played a few hours yesterday and finished one run completely.
It is pretty fun, but too unforgiving in the beginning. Also, it seems less customizable than the last game, at least thus far. Will see in a while how it develops. Rogue-likes often get more customizable after a while.
There seems to be a decent amout of enemy variety, with very different patterns to learn. Pretty fun, but the beginning was annoying with too much to learn, and after the end of my runs there seemed to be too little variation. But this might also improve after a while.
One thing I dislike is that my runs level up my "profile" and this unlocks more loot and more professions. It seems very meta gamey and not immersive at all. Most unlocks feel disconnected from the game itself this far.
And the horse carriage driving is really boring, feels clumsily and is, to be frank, an unnecessary time sink.
All this negativity aside, I have had pretty fun anyway.
So you're not finding the bickering and maluses to be too much? That's the main criticism I see. I believe the devs have already lowered the frequency in response to that criticism.
It is too much to me in the beginning of the game, since there are very few ways to decrease stress then. And it is annoying with the bickering animations in combat, since there are only a few things they say, and they only give slight debuffs or 1 stress point, and they are quite slow.
It seems like the party is supposed to become fractured, which is fine once I got used to it. But it needs more variation and that it gets less intrusive as time goes on. It becomes a little like watching the big attack animations in Final Fantasy games, ie annoying instead of mind wracking/awesome.
I don't know at what point characters die/become useless from stress, but thus far it was more an inconvenience which might end up killing the party, but mostly takes some extra time.
I think a lot of the tedium could be reduced if they add an option to increase animation speed. But that is the essence, in my opinion of course, of the stress mechanics in this game thus far: tedious management instead of a fun mechanic.