Darkest Dungeon - Interview @ Venturebeat

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.