In the darkness, the heart is toward the light.
Text/Isaac
The game to be talked about today is called "Dark Dungeon 2", and its predecessor "Dark Dungeon" is called Roguelike God, which has sold more than 5 million copies across the platform and has a high praise rate of 90% on Steam.
Official greetings
After experiencing "Dark Dungeon 2" for a while, I think it can be called "Four people go in, go crazy when they come out, five · 2", "Love and hate is in an instant", "Love is always simple, it's too difficult to get along"... The bitterness behind these names, you may not understand for the time being, we will expand on it later.
But if you've ever heard of Dark Dungeon, you might have heard about its difficulty. The game was once described on Wikipedia as "hellish", and I can only say that it is quite apt. Aptly so much so that at the beginning of the game, it had to release a statement: "Don't blame me for not reminding you, our game is really funny." ”
A similar hint is available at the beginning of Dark Dungeon 2
A few years ago, grape jun, who was not yet mature in his mentality, encountered this game and was persuaded to uninstall it shortly after playing it. It wasn't until a year ago that I plucked up the courage to re-download it and completed the journey with torture. Now that this game that I love and hate has launched a sequel, I can say that I am full of confidence when it has matured! Immediately after the EA version went live, I made a payment.
Unexpectedly, it broke my mind with two more rounds.
01 "Four people went in, and when they came out, they went crazy five"
The story begins with a generation: you are a distant relative of a local tycoon, because a family letter returned to the fiefdom of your ancestors. The land has been "dirty" by the local tyrants— he has opened the gates of Cthulhu because of greed, and the town and its surroundings are being ruled by darkness and despair. To revive your family, you have to hire outlaws, go deep into dungeons, clean up evil, and face a bunch of monsters that make people lose their sanity.
The game mode can be summarized as a "quest-based turn-based RPG": you have to hire characters in the town, form a team, take them to explore the randomly generated dungeons, gain experience, equipment, and supplies, take a break and start again, and finally challenge the most difficult "Dark Dungeon". In the process, as suggested at the beginning, any character you carefully cultivate can die unexpectedly or permanently, forcing you to cultivate new people from scratch.
Many of the mechanics in the game are not described here, but only the soul of it - the "pressure system". What makes Dark Dungeon the most different from ordinary RPGs is that each character has their own emotional embodiment. Every detail in the dungeon can add to the stress, such as stepping on a trap, hearing a monster howl, being hit with a critical hit, or watching a teammate die...
Group pressurized monster skill
When the pressure level reaches 100, the characters face a test, like the san check in the COC running group (i.e. Cthulhu-themed running group).
Most of the results of the test are like the picture below – crazy. And they are crazy with their own characteristics, some people are masochistic, some are paranoid, some are desperate... These symptoms will also be reflected in games, such as self-masochistic people will give themselves a knife for no reason, paranoid people will refuse instructions, and desperate people will kill and abandon treatment...
This state cannot be lifted in the dungeon
What's more, these behaviors can also put pressure on teammates. So under the vicious circle, you will watch a team of people and horses go crazy one by one, and then either be killed, or die of excessive stress and heart failure... When your blood pressure is gradually full, you will understand what "four people go in and come out five crazy".
In Dark Dungeon 2, the game tortures players even more. In this generation, the dungeon is gone, and all you have is a carriage and four characters you meet at the fork in the road. You have to take this "last hope" to the Snowy Mountains to defeat the monsters (because it is the EA version, the setting is so sloppy for the time being), which is an apocalyptic journey.
If you think about it, you are driving a car, out of town, eating hot pot and singing songs, and suddenly you are robbed by monsters...
In combat, the pressure system remains. But the key test changes from the character's individual mental state to the relationship between the two people. Can you imagine? It's all characters made up of code, and these people can make trouble for a variety of strange reasons - grabbing people's heads and lowering their good feelings; my blood, your milk other teammates, reducing good feelings; buff on the wrong people, eating flying vinegar, reducing good feelings; and even more, hearing teammates burp on the road, they will also feel disgusted and reduce their good feelings!
"You don't protect me, you've changed"
When the favorability of the two characters reaches -6, the two must brush up on a negative relationship, such as jealousy, suspicion, hatred... These relationships will make them stinky in battle – cynical, yin and yang, and similar to a generation, committing all sorts of pit teammate behaviors.
The game also links the relationship system with the stress system: when a character collapses due to excessive stress, he is no longer subjected to personal tests, but is instantly bloodied and reduced in favorability with other teammates.
The pressure is too much "Meltdown", which I think is quite appropriate to translate as "Beat"
So in the worst case scenario, you'll find that no two people in the team look at each other well. Every small action will cause quarrels, and the usual smooth battle will collapse completely because of the stink of teammates... Watching them torture each other like this, my blood pressure was finally full.
Head-scratching? Friends!
But you have to admit that this kind of use of game mechanics and character behavior to present human nature is a wonderful design. It passes the player's decisions to the character, and then uses the character's feedback to transmit the pressure to the player. The cruelty experienced by the player is not mainly due to the art, text, and numerical values, but is actually felt through the gameplay.
On the other hand, this design also explodes with greater energy.
02 The other side of despair is the brilliance of human nature
Let's take the perspective back to another generation: no game is designed purely to torture the player, which is unreasonable. So in addition to relying on correct operation to reduce stress, Dark Dungeon naturally has a pleasure side to the player - "virtue": when faced with a test, most of the time the character will go crazy, but there are also people who will trigger virtue with a very low chance. They resist madness with a firm will, illuminating the darkness with their own light.
When triggered by virtues such as determination, concentration, and fearlessness, the corresponding character explodes with powerful buffs and encourages all teammates to persevere in desperate situations. Although you may know that this is just luck, the game's desperate atmosphere and gameplay design will enhance the coolness of virtue triggers layer by layer — because the more desperate the situation, the more precious this human brilliance is.
So when virtue was triggered in the first few times, or flipped by virtue in the most desperate moments, I was almost in a state of intracranial orgasm... The impact of this strong contrast is really addictive. but...... Is it really perfect enough? Not necessarily.
The production team of Dark Dungeon may have also thought of this problem: virtue can only be triggered by full pressure testing to be too "metaphysics". Although the atmosphere is in place, it is slightly insufficient for gameplay. If the player can't control it, torture is obviously out of proportion to pleasure – with the player making all the right decisions, the ideal state is that nothing happens, neither torture nor virtue;
But this kind of metaphysics happens to be its charm. Because virtue is less valuable if the player can easily control it - at present, players can only greatly increase the probability of virtue through equipment (SL Dafa does not count), and these equipment are almost all strictly limited or negative.
How to make the ratio of torture and pleasure more balanced, and the player experience more stable and rich? This is probably the main proposition that Dark Dungeon 2 ponders.
So you can see that Dark Dungeon 2 has made as balanced adjustments as possible in most of the design, especially the feedback from the positive effects - if the virtue of the first generation is the climax of the instant explosion, then the positive relationship of the second generation brings an endless and continuous pleasure.
In the second generation, when the favorability level between the two characters reaches 6, it is bound to brush up a positive relationship. For example, respect, admiration, encouragement... These relationships will allow them to work closely together and cheer each other up in battle. Due to the involvement of two people, there are more positive effects in the second generation, such as when one person attacks, the other person will shoot at the same time, or when one person is hit, the other person stands up for protection.
"We have to do better!"
Compared to a generation, virtues disappear when they are copied or when the pressure is great, as short and beautiful as a flash in the pan, but the relationship between the two can be maintained for a long time, and if properly arranged, you can make all the members of the team friendly to each other, and the positive effects in the battle will be endless.
But the design faces two important questions about balance: First, in randomly generated maps and events, how do players ensure that they can stabilize the relationship between the players? The solution given by the production team is to set fixed rules for each character - for example, if someone is happy, you can't let other characters grab his head.
Some of the rules that have been summarized so far are derived from the network
(Swipe up and down to view)
This rule is summed up and related to the personality characteristics of each character. This also shows the ambition of the production team - they want to set the gameplay around the characters, and through the long-term game progression, to pass these rules to the players invisibly.
Second, the problem of optimal solution - if a player is familiar with these rules, will he be able to pass the perfect level every time? Not. On the one hand, randomness is the fire that breaks the perfect relationship, and under the influence of probability, you can't guarantee that a character will not collapse. When a person begins to collapse, a chain reaction will occur - the relationship you have painstakingly cultivated will collapse in an instant, and the lover may turn against each other, which is the real "love and hate in an instant".
On the other hand, on this basis, you cannot guarantee that while maintaining one pair's relationship, you will not destroy the relationship of the other pair ... So things get interesting again – "love is always easy, it's too hard to get along" – and how to take care of everyone's feelings every time you make a decision is something you have to think about.
03 I still can't hate Dark Dungeon 2
Although I have been tortured to the point of exhaustion in the past few days of my experience, I have been completely unable to hate Dark Dungeon 2 because of the wonders of these designs.
Not only can I not be annoying, but from a selfish point of view, I still think the production team is too good - under the premise of retaining the unique system and familiarity of the previous game, they have innovated and made new systems, and they have also been tightly related to the game setting... For game designers, this is already a super cool thing. In the EA phase, the equilibrium problem is clearly not worthy of being a reason to be criticized.
If you don't feel the difficulty of this change from the perspective of the two generations of Dark Dungeon itself, then let's look at it from the perspective of gameplay: the gameplay of one generation focuses on long-term cultivation, and you need to consider the item allocation, skill upgrades, and resource rationing of all characters... And make subtle operations in the dungeon, it looks more like an RPG, and roguelike tastes a little less;
In Dark Dungeon 2, the game has done a lot of simplification, focusing all on the decision-making - the carriage's forward route, the person who triggers the event, the allocation of common skill points... This game drastically reduces the elements of RPG cultivation and makes it look more like a Roguelike work. Many people think of The Killing Spire when they see the map, but in fact, the synergy of the core systems gives Dark Dungeons 2 and The Killing Spire a fundamentally different experience.
They "adapt" all the RPG elements into Roguelike elements, such as characters, skill points will be refreshed after each big picture, and each of your carriages will only have one way to go black. Many players have pointed out that the long pace of such a round is very different from previous Roguelike works, and the production team does not seem to have grasped this point well.
However, Dark Dungeon 2 has clearly shown greater ambitions. For example, in the first generation, the production team designed the character from the story, but at that time, it was only presented in the comic book, and it was almost impossible to feel in the game.
In the second generation, they began to design the character story as a unique "echo of the past" level to scatter through the process, and used it as part of a long-term collection - unveiling the story and unlocking a new skill for the corresponding character. This shows that they are exploring narrative in a new way, and that there is still a lot of potential for this approach.
For example, in the story of the robber, he wants to take advantage of the riot to defeat the jailer and escape from prison
In addition, whether the production team is intentional or not, their perspective shift on the game itself also makes me feel quite rare.
Over the course of a generation, many players have come to realize a truth: in the face of the desperate abyss, you can only fill the gap in the team with new characters, and then try to fill the abyss with one corpse after another, no matter how much a character has moved you... As a cold-blooded lord who hires thugs, you'll gradually become numb to the process.
But in the second generation, they clearly pay more attention to the uniqueness of each character than to use the brilliance of humanity as a tool to trigger pleasure: these characters are no longer your thugs, but interdependent partners. If they are united, they will not be afraid of great difficulties; if they break up, they will most likely fall into darkness... Are you shirtless? Robes with the Son; Wang Yuxingshi, repair my spear.
And whether their relationship is good or bad is largely tied to your choices.
Behind the gameplay, this is what moves me most about Dark Dungeon 2 – it portrays not only despair, but also the "last hope" in this dark apocalypse.
Game Grape Recruitment Industry Reporter/Content Editor,
Click "Read the original article" for more information
Shanghai Talent War | Chengdu Talent War | Guangzhou-Shenzhen Talent War
Tianmei industrialization | the comparison of Chinese and Japanese two-dimensional art| anti-addiction dilemma
Black Myth Goku | Final Fantasy 14 | Harry Potter