Darkest Dungeon - Uncompromising Design Choices

Couch has found this article at PopOptiq about the uncompromising design choices of Darkest Dungeon, related to user feedback that is given to developers.

Several times over the course of early access, changes were made based directly on player feedback. I’m all for a bit of developer transparency, and I wish good luck upon any designer who wades into the murky depths of a public forum to talk directly to players. A lot of good suggestions were made on various platforms – Steam forums, official forums, even Reddit – that actually ended up implemented into the game one way or another. As someone who grew up in an era when game designers were held in such mystique that “my dad works at Nintendo” really meant something, it’s pretty exciting to be able to speak directly to developers and actually have them listen.

t should be an ideal “everyone wins” scenario, but the problem is players are divided on how the game should actually play. For every reasonable discussion of balance, there were people taking sides, forming camps around two fundamental ideas: “this game should be harder” and “this game should be easier”. Bile and insults were thrown, the developers got called incompetent or other nasty things an innumerable amount of times, and yet they still continued to listen and respond to the community, braving the horrors within much like the dungeon-crawling heroes of the game itself. The arguments became more personal, with one side claiming that “casuals are ruining it for the real players” and the others saying “the elitists are ruining it for everyone else”. Only with more vulgarities bouncing back and forth.

Unlike other games, this isn’t just something that can be done away with by adding a difficulty selection and calling it a day. Sold as a game that’s supposed to be harsh and unpleasant at times, taking the sting off of its nastier moments runs the risk of eliminating all the tension the game’s aesthetics deliberately evoke. After all, a game about the stresses of dungeon crawling wouldn’t have much impact if the average player rarely had to worry about death or madness. The game’s difficulty moved back and forth around a personal sweet spot for me as development went on, eventually falling into a nice middle-ground by the time of release. I’m satisfied, but as made abundantly clear by a vocal minority, not everyone is happy, with both sides of the previous argument sometimes stating that listening to the other faction caused the developers to ruin the experience.