Darkest Dungeon has made a smashing debut on Steam as an Early Access game. Because it is so popular, there is naturally a demand for it to take flight into a full-fledged game. However, Red Hook has made some changes that have not exactly gone over well with fans.
For those not familiar, the game is a gothic dungeon crawler where the placement of your characters and the party’s mental and physical health either rewards you with fabulous riches or slams you with a Game Over screen.
Some of the unpopular changes included giving enemies higher defenses and a higher critical chance, as these changes have limited the freedom of changing party members. Reed Hook recently released a new update in July, which featured two new game mechanics: corpses and heart attacks. The corpse mechanic is that after defeating enemies, their bodies pile up and clutter the space in small dungeons. The only way to get rid of them is to destroy them, but this takes time that your party members do not have as each second saps their mental stability.
Heart attacks can occur at any time, and if one of your characters is too stressed they instantly drop dead. According to players, this happens more often than not and it sometimes happens to all party members at once. In both cases, many players have seen these additions as needless frustration instead of improvements.
Reed Hook has recently addressed these issues by keeping these new game mechanics, but while the game is in Early Access players can simply turn them off. They also posted in a Steam forum, giving an explanation of their decision to keep these mechanics. Corpses and heart attacks will be enabled by default.
It is good to see that Reed Hook does value its fans opinions, but is this solution one that will pacify majority of their fans? Leave a comment and tell me what you think.
