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An update to Steam Early Access hit Darkest Dungeon that significantly increased the difficulty has led to a climb down of sorts from its developers.
The game has received plenty of attention from the press and streamers, but a recent update introduced two new mechanics – Heart Attacks and Corpses. The first can result in user’s characters simply dropping dead through stress, while the latter required that bodies be cleared from the playing field, sucking up yet more resources.
The update also gave enemies a higher defence rating and an increased critical chance. Some players felt that the result of these changes not only made the game simply too hard, but also enforced a level of gameplay rigidity not present before the change. So of course took to the Steam forums in their droves to complain.
Now developer Red Hook has conceded to the ongoing complaints, saying the new features will be made optional during the Early Access period – although they will still be left on by default.
We believe that corpses and heart attacks are important mechanics for the game,” it argued. Just as we were willing to experiment by adding these features, we are willing to experiment with ways to allow you to shape the DD experience a bit to your liking.
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. 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.
Although we’ve always been unapologetic about how important it is that Darkest Dungeon is punishing, unforgiving, and sometimes not even ‘fair’…at the end of the day we want those of you who own it to have fun and that can’t be forgotten.
