Darkest Dungeon - Interview @ Venturebeat

[Couchpotato]

Jason Wilson of VentureBeat interviewed Tyler Sigman and Chris Bourassa of Red Hook Studios this week to talk about Darkest Dungeon, and the games difficulty.

GamesBeat: I’ve been playing RPGs since the early 1980s. The one thing I noticed is that, almost universally, systems are geared toward not holding the player back but toward encouraging player success. That’s completely the opposite with your game. How different is the mindset that you have to be in, as a developer, to do this?

Sigman: I think you have to remember what you set out to do. Because there’s lots of pressures during development, and certainly even now, to make the game easier across the board. Why are you penalizing for this? Why can’t I save or bring the hero back? That’s not what we set out to do. We set out to make you feel like there’s a cost. We didn’t set out to kill everybody. But I think—that’s something we’ve been able to do really well, is hold true to that vision. Even in times where you’re going to get feedback that’s like, are you sure you want to do that? You’re going to be alienating a lot of players. But we never really set out to make the game for everyone. In having that strong vision, we ended up making it appeal to more people than we ever thought.

Bourassa: Yeah, that’s a great way to say it. The game is fundamentally different. It takes a left when a lot of RPGs take a right, at the very start of the road. We’re not asking you to build one party and get attached to them. You shouldn’t have an expectation of being able to finish a quest. That’s not bad balance. That’s by design. Sometimes things go wrong. You should get in the dungeon and realize you’re outmatched. For whatever reason you’re not getting the rolls you want. You should cut and run. That’s a very foreign mindset for a lot of people who equate balance with progression, immediate moment-to-moment progression. We’re asking players to take a long view of the campaign and use their heroes as a means to an end, as opposed to ends in themselves. Having the two of us, Tyler and I, go back and forth on the game, having built it up from scratch together from a conceptual standpoint, we’ve been able to act as checks and balances to each other. There have been times where I’m like, I think we should make this easier, and Tyler’s like, no, remember this! Remember that! And there’s been the reverse, where something’s really important and I feel we have to keep it in because of our core vision. It’s one of the advantages in having two heads on the snake, I think. We’ve been able to keep close to what we initially set out to do, and incidentally promised to our Kickstarter backers.

Sigman: We talk about this a lot, too. Chris and I played so many classics as well. I’m in the same era as you, everything from D&D basic set — not Chainmail, I was just being born, but the Basic Set — there are just so many good products out there. Chris said that we’re not going to out-Torchlight Torchlight, which was a great Diablo—I don’t want to say knockoff, but in that vein. I’m not ripping it at all. It’s a cool game. Legend of Grimrock brought back Eye of the Beholder and all that stuff and did an awesome job. We love that space, but we didn’t want to enter it just trying to do something either slightly better than the last guy, or maybe not even as good, because some of those are really amazing games. Our love of RPGs in the classic way of doing it is what got us excited about adding a twist, really.

More information.

 

[screeg]

Spoken like a true developer. Your job isn't to make the game everyone asks you to make, it's to make a good game. The ability to get feedback from your players is awesome, but the designer has to have a vision and stick to it. I think people are going to be talking about Darkest Dungeon for years to come.

 

[ChienAboyeur]

We’re not asking you to build one party and get attached to them.

No worries about that, it wont happen.

During Wasteland 2's playthrough, dull and long, Rimworld alpha 7 was released and I made the mistake to stop playing WL2 to start a Rimworld colony.
It ended with lifting off 35 colonists.
When returning to WL2, it appeared that I could not remember names in WL2 (including three out the four in my party) while I could remember more than 20 names from the rimworld colony.

Rimworld does that very well: making colonists memorable. They grow memorable as the game allows to make memories, colonists grow to life by the actions they take in the game session, events writing their story.

Darkest Dungeon could have taken the same turn, with heroes making a name for themselves by the actions they take, the events they survive etc
With a growing attachment to them as they rise to meaningfulness to the player.

DD's developpers avoided that pit trap though: their heroes are as nameless, faceless as it can be.
Players, when they recruit from the caravan, do not even bother to read the hero's profile. They need a bounty hunter? They take one, no matter the quirks etc

 

[rune_74]

My god the amount of posts on this game from you....basically all saying the same thing.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Where are these guys from? They seem to be from Vancouver, however Bourassa is a Canadian French name.

 

[rune_74]

Where are these guys from? They seem to be from Vancouver, however Bourassa is a Canadian French name.

Lots of people live throughout canada with a french last name who do not speak french at all...shocking, I know.

 

[Couchpotato]

Where are these guys from? They seem to be from Vancouver, however Bourassa is a Canadian French name.

The studio is based in Washington, and the games webpage has info on the developers.

Link - http://www.darkestdungeon.com/the-team/

 

[wolfing]

My god the amount of posts on this game from you….basically all saying the same thing.

hmm... I actually think he said something good about the game this time.

 

[ChienAboyeur]

My god the amount of posts on this game from you….basically all saying the same thing.

It must be the language barrier: I cant remember addressing that point before, how Darkest Dungeon fails to grow memorable heroes whereas the settings were favourable. Quite useless to look for it since it was never addressed before.
When different things are perceived the same...

The interview has one quality, though: it re affirms the vision of developpers, the way they want DD to be.

A vision that remains a wish as DD does not play the way they depict.
Streamers after trying so many things to bring the expected difficulty, now rely on mods like stuff called the impossible mod.
In the chat section, people wish for more monsters, no longer 4 but 6 in ranks, stuff like that.

The most telling point is, despite the use of mods to inflate the difficulty, DD still does not play as the developpers wish it to play.

 

[xSamhainx]

Blah Blah Blah, the game is easy. Bots and Blah blah blah, it's the biggest ruse ever Blah blah streamers doing this, streamers did that. Developppers vision streamers bots blah. It's a very easy game, blah blah streamers mods streamers..

Keep fighting the good fight, man. Need people like you on the front lines

 

[ChienAboyeur]

Good fight? Front lines?
Never try to apply for a PR position? Even goverments might be interested and they've got very talented people already.
Also the good fight, good pay and away from the front lines.