If there is a game that is only made by a small team of 2 people, the difficulty of the game is still very torturous, but the praise rate is as high as 90%, and finally achieved more than 8 million copies of the main body and is known as a god, then it is "Dark Dungeon".
If there is a game, made by a team of more than 20 people, the difficulty of the game is also very torturous, but the half-month praise rate is only 75%, which is evaluated by many old players as boring and inferior to the previous work, then it is "Dark Dungeon 2".
"Dark Dungeon" is a work familiar to many friends, its style is dark and oppressive, and the background takes the restraint route. As the protagonist, you'll run a town, recruit heroes, and form a squad of four to explore dungeons and fight monsters. Along the way, you'll also have to manage the resources at hand to deal with the heroes' stress and quirks before they collapse or fall out of the way.
The framework of Dark Dungeon 2 is somewhat different: after the destruction of the town, the heroes will ride together in a carriage and complete a complete journey, rather than resting in the town and changing people. The gameplay of the second generation is a bit like the climbing tower of "Killing Spire" - which route to choose, whether to go to boss battles or not, whether to fight more or take a rough road... Decisions are made based on the state of your team.
In terms of more detailed mechanisms, the second generation also has many innovative changes. For example, on the basis of the original pressure system, the setting of two pairs of favorability between four teammates is added, and a positive or negative relationship will be formed as a result. How good or bad their relationship often affects the fight – see which teammate is upset? When I fight monsters, I will make trouble and give you a knife; Who do you have a good relationship with? Then silently guard and use the exclusive buff.
Sometimes, complex character relationships can make people laugh and cry...
These two generations of games are very immersive and innovative in terms of packaging and pressure systems. But let's not talk about anything else, let's talk about its horizontal turn-based combat system. Because this is the essence of the game that runs through the two generations, there is not much difference in experience. Compared to traditional turn-based games, the most outstanding thing about Dark Dungeon is the cooperation between the characters:
First of all, a team can match four heroes, and their skills can be cast and effective positions are strictly limited, for example, the bandit's "close range shot" is extremely powerful, but he can only be cast when standing at the front, and can only attack the enemy number one. After casting, he will back one block (and those behind him will automatically go one block forward), and if he wants to cast it again, he must find a way to change his position.
Such a core mechanism makes the character lineup, position, skill matching, and decision-making during the battle very rich and important. For example, if I want to repeatedly use the bandit's close-range shooting to hit high output, then it is better to be in the front row, with a hero who can cast skills in the first and second positions. There are a lot of heroes and skills in the game, which makes for great fun.
And "Dark Dungeon 2" "under the premise of inheriting this excellent combat system, the art design, performance effects, and peripheral gameplay have also been greatly changed" - if you only read this sentence before release, anyone will think that this game must be more godly. But looking at the reviews, it seems that this is not the case at all: it does not satisfy players who have played the previous game, but it disappoints many people and reverses the Amway generation... What went wrong?
01 Three fatal contradictions make God fall off the altar
To put it simply, its problem is that it "takes the essence and adds the dross": although it inherits the combat system, the other peripheral systems are almost all designed to make the core combat experience infinite, limited, stretched and extended - this design is not rotten, but it is much inferior to the first generation. At least after playing in the past few days, Grape Jun has felt several of its deadly contradictions.
The first contradiction lies in the extremely uneven difficulty curve.
The designer's first trick to stretch a long time is to make a mobile game-like cultivation system into a single-player roguelike: in "Dark Dungeon 2", each game will settle the key resource "candle" according to the goal regardless of success or failure. Candles can unlock each hero's branch classes, advanced attributes, draw items that have not been obtained in the pool, unlock different difficulties, and even draw skins! Such a system divides the player's experience stage, but what will you feel strange when you actually play it, what is it?
It takes about 2,000 candles to unlock the entire content
You can get up to about 100 in a round
Not only the candle system, but the production team also adheres to this set of ideas in other aspects. For example, each of your heroes has less than half of the skills in the early stage, and the rest must be unlocked by entering a randomly generated special location "Reflection Holy Land". Each hero has to enter at least 5 times to unlock all of their skills, and if you fail to understand the level mechanics, you'll have to re-enter them once. And each map, at most, can only encounter 2 reflections on the Holy Land.
...... You should have figured out that something was wrong, right? This cultivation system is the core of the peripheral system of Dark Dungeons 2. Intuitively, this design makes sense: players and heroes are gradually growing, what's wrong with slowly unlocking from weak to strong?
However, from the perspective of experience, many players have found the key contradiction: when there is nothing in the early stage, they must invest a lot of time and trial and error costs to unlock content, and this forced liver reclamation process is very painful; But after unlocking everything in the later stage, the game seems too simple again, and the originally sinister combat has almost become mechanical. The end result is to go through some torture first, and then play more and more boring.
When facing most bosses in the early stage
You all have to "pay tuition" at the cost of group destruction
And, even if you're very hardcore, and carry the pain of the early stages through all the chapters, the game doesn't offer much more variety or difficulty beyond this set of battles and levels - it can only unlock higher difficulty, add more negative conditions to your journey, and do it again. Bone Killer like the one we talked about earlier is also highly difficult, but as an action game, it can squeeze the player's operating limits, and it has done a lot of new content. In contrast, the approach of "Dark Dungeon 2" seems to be difficult for difficulty, and it is no wonder that many players will ridicule it as "adding more water to the face, adding more water to the face".
The second contradiction lies in the extremely long length of a single game.
The designer's second trick to stretch the long time is to forcibly drag the length of the single game to the wasteland. Nowadays, most roguelikes will control the time of a single game to less than 30 minutes, such as the mechanic of the copy under "Dark Dungeon", a single game is almost 10~30 minutes, which will not make players feel too tired, and there will not be much psychological gap when failing.
But what about Dark Dungeons 2? From casting to the boss that completes this chapter, it usually takes more than 2 hours. If you are more critical of details and like to think, you may not be able to fight for 4 hours - a medium-sized Roguelike, which can make people have a heavier psychological burden than playing a 3A masterpiece, it is true to live for a long time - this is still an ideal situation, a bad luck, maybe you will be violently killed in an elite battle in front of the boss, and hours of hard work turn into a pile of candles, and you can get angry when you look at it.
A time of despair
The third contradiction lies in the lack of internal cultivation of change.
After doing all of this lengthy design, they seem to have no time to consider that after matching a fixed lineup at the beginning, the player's combat strategy is already locked, and there is no fun to build and grow in other typical rogues - because each character can equip only two accessories, and the overall impact on combat is not as great as in other games.
But at the same time, players have to face this unchanged lineup for at least two hours, using almost unchanged operations. Even if the game's combat is interesting, no one will be able to bear it under such wear.
In addition, "Dark Dungeons 2" has another embarrassing flaw: the mod is extremely difficult to make.
You must know that its previous work was not so popular, but because the art resources are light and easy to make mods, it has attracted a large number of authors. This allows us to play host characters such as Wolf, Geralt, 2B, and even a large number of characters in mobile games such as "Ark of Tomorrow" in this game of dozens of pieces.
But after the second generation fully upgrades the art design, the folk MOD will probably disappear. There is no need to say more about the reason, some old mod authors have already summarized it clearly. It can only be said that art is a double-edged sword, and the price paid by "Dark Dungeon 2" may be heavier than imagined.
02 The sequel that goes back more and more, can it be saved?
After all these contradictions, let's assume a situation: if a new player has never played Dark Dungeon for two generations, and he first touches Dark Dungeon 2, will he imagine or expect how the game should improve because of the above bad experience?
For example, Ta may think: "Dark Dungeon 2" can be shorter in a single game, the cultivation system can be less pressing, the overall experience can be less fixed, and it would be nice if the heroes could be more diverse... If there was a game that solved all these problems without losing the virtues of Diablo 2, what kind of game would it be?
Let me tell you: this game is called Dark Dungeon............ That said, except for art upgrades and a few innovative points, the Dark Dungeon 2 experience is almost a complete step backwards. The production team gave me the impression that they wanted to innovate, but got the wrong focus on what users liked about the product.
This is quite a frustrating thing, because if Red Hook Studio has a personality, it seems that it will be a very difficult person, and it likes to go all the way to the dark. Their creative director once mentioned in a speech that they value the core design upfront because all the subsequent designs will be rolled out accordingly. This is true, but sometimes if one decision is wrong, the design may go wrong later, and it is difficult to turn the tide.
I guess that the core idea of "Dark Dungeons 2" is to create a tower-climbing roguelike experience around the atmosphere of "four people and one car" road movies under the premise of retaining the combat system of the previous game - in fact, if you look at this work alone, "Dark Dungeon 2" is not a bad work, but a very good game. But helplessly the design completion of the previous work is too high, and the reconstruction of the second generation is slightly too bad, and even more and more back, in contrast, it is a little embarrassing.
In this situation, we may think of some better solutions, such as changing the fixed lineup at the beginning to a level to obtain new characters and expand the lineup, and maybe there will be a stronger sense of Build. But this can only be said - this kind of bone-wrenching design, it is too difficult to update and change alone, instead of expecting it to slowly iterate and improve, it is better to directly look forward to "Dark Dungeon 3"...
In general, my current rating of this game is quantum superposition - as long as I don't play it, it's a good game, white moonlight; When I opened the game and actually felt the torture, it pulled. Of course, despite my attempts to prove at length that Dark Dungeons 2 is not as good as its predecessor, it's still hard for me not to like the game, and a lot of its design.
For example, in addition to the gameplay, the desperate Red Hook also insisted on the character design they valued very much, and made qualitative changes. Take the memories of each character in the Reflective Holy Land, I can feel that they have eaten the combat design thoroughly, and you can completely understand a character deeply and immersively through those special levels.
For example, in the plot of the robber Disma, he tries to rob a carriage. The corresponding level design is: the carriage has high HP and will send guards to attack him, while Disma must repeatedly sneak into the grass, change positions, and take the opportunity to steal output. This level is like an elaborate puzzle that both tests the player's understanding of combat and subtly highlights Disma's cunning and ruthless style.
This style, this set of gameplay, these characters, are all reasons why we can't give up this series. Even though many players are complaining about the design of the second generation, I have reason to believe... Seeing Disma who can turn swords, and leprosy sword saints who chant "tide rises, tides fall", no old player can walk the road. As long as Red Hook continues to stick to the best and best designs, I believe it's not a problem for their follow-up to return to the altar.