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[IronyOwl]

Got this recently. Haven't played it a ton, but I'd agree with the lack of progress being kind of an issue. I mean, the town upgrades are nice, but the stress relief is more about convenience and the strength upgrades are linear. Leveling heroes does tend to feel like a grind, and "good" loot, even situationally, is a rare occurrence within a rare drop. Oh, and listening to your guys panicking in the middle of combat takes forever.

I do have to praise the general art and sound direction, though. Very nice battle aesthetics.

[Mattk50]

i did end up getting this. played through the mid tier bosses without losing a single person... got a bit bored, the game is too easy. Maybe i just got really good rng but with a solid strategy its very hard to be challenged regardless of your composition, and i've been playing with a weird hybrid build of every character in the game

[BishopX]

SO I lost my level three vestal. The one with no flaws. I haven't played in a week.

[Karkov]

So I like the game, though currently it doesn't feel like progressing is too hard.  Also there's not a lot to try and progress towards.  Otherwise I think the game's pretty good, it definitely has a great foundation.

One of my friends however decided to break the game something awful though. (Twitch highlight)

[Yolan]

After watching NortherLion lets plays and reading this thread, I'm going to hold off on playing this a while. I did buy it the day after it came out, but I have a feeling it might be a much better experience in six months and it would be a shame to burn myself out before then like I did with Sunless Sea.

[EnigmaticHat]

Yeah, this game is great but I would recommend waiting.  Here's my take on solely on the negative:

There are two big level problems with it.  First of all, the progression in this game is badly done, arguably not even implemented yet.  All the skills scale in the same way, I think for damaging skills its something like +5% accuracy +1% crit per level, which does little for some skills and is massively important for others.  Its pretty clear that the skill scaling was done in an hour or two by one person inputting a bunch of arbitrary numbers.  The enemies are basically the same, there are a few additions but for the most part its the same guys with some numbers changed.  Not even recolors IRRC.

The second is that it has this xcom style over-arching campaign progress BUT even though you can lose things permanently there's no loss condition and nothing that would really stop players from continuing to play.  Once you understand how it works it really sucks the tension out of everything.  There's always at least one lvl 1 mission to play, no real cost to retreating, and new characters are free.

[nenjin]

As long as you can avoid going into a death spiral at the beginning, yeah that's pretty much the case. You can still recover from it but it's pretty much blind luck and grinding at that point.

Personally I'm not a fan of doom clocks because I like to take my time, but I can understand why others need something like that to give consequence to outcomes.

[Ghazkull]

Thats actually what i liked about the game, the fact that no matter how bad you fuck up, you can still begin at the bottom again and work your way up.

[pisskop]

Somebody show me this.  The way they described it, I thought it was going to be a grimdark fantasy bit, with poor graphics or even text-like w/a focus on mechanics over graphical appeal.  Would I be wrong in comparing this to a JRPG?  It seems as gamey as the old ones.

Either way, ptw. 

[nenjin]

Nah, it's not a JRPG. JRPGs want you to finish the game and the mechanics are built around that. This has the look of a JRPG to lull you into liking and caring about your characters. Then it murders them and asks you to find 4 new ones.

It's also far less crunchy mechanically than your average JRPG.

[IronyOwl]

I'd argue that they have some issues encouraging you to like and care about your characters. The heroes are pretty indistinguishable from others of their own class, and the quirk system that ought to handle that is too random and temporary to give coherent character concepts.

So yeah, you can like that hero it took forever to level up, and if you've only got one of a class you can grow attached to that. But I often find myself having difficulty telling them apart otherwise, especially as your roster gets bigger.

[nenjin]

Agreed that transience of quirks and how arbitrarily they're assigned is a big minus in caring about your guys. They played up Pre-Kickstarter that those were somehow nuanced but right now it just seems to be a big 'ol random mess. They haven't had too much to say on that front, either.

[EnigmaticHat]

For some reason the quirk display doesn't scroll.  If you have more than 7 positive or negative quirks, any additional ones of that type erase a random previous quirk.

I once had this terrible plague doctor who had a mess of negative quirks; notably he had a disease that made him weaker to further disease and another disease with very bad effects.  A few missions later he'd "cured" himself because all of his terrible negative quirks had been randomly replaced with meaningless "mania" quirks.  So he had no meaningful negative quirks and a mass of positive quirks, didn't even matter which since positive quirks come so frequently that they quickly fill up and start erasing each other.

[Retropunch]

Agreed that transience of quirks and how arbitrarily they're assigned is a big minus in caring about your guys. They played up Pre-Kickstarter that those were somehow nuanced but right now it just seems to be a big 'ol random mess. They haven't had too much to say on that front, either.

This was something that disappointed me. I kept looking for meaning in how the perks were given but it seemed completely random. They also played up a lot about how unique the personality and the traits would make each character, whereas really they're just a collection of stat. changes. Even if they had done something like given them different clothing and a few different 'end game' skills, that'd have spiced stuff up a bit.

Whilst I did have fun with DD and I do think it's a fun game, it just hasn't kept my interest over time. For those of you wanting to find out what it's like, I'd suggest playing 'Monsters Den 2' (on kongregate and other places) it's pretty much the same but the combat is a lot more involved and, whilst it doesn't have the personality that DD has, it is more polished.

[ChairmanPoo]

I think this game needs more stuff to do outside combat. In fact, the game needs more feeling of control over what you're doing, in general.

This is one suggestion on how I would do it:

- Increase the risk of random encounters. Heck, make random encounters patrol the dungeon.

- Add an extra variable. Stamina, or somesuch.

- Out of combat actions (healing, scouting) deplete stamina. It recovers slowly over time (just like light recovers slowly over time). Stress affects negatively to stamina recoverly.

- Out of combat actions are (as a general rule) noisy, and draw the patrolling encounters towards you.