Darkest Dungeon 2 charts a new path through terror in a roguelike road trip to save humanity

Darkest Dungeon 2 charts a new way of life through terror in a roguelike roadworthy trip to save humanity

(Image credit: Red Abstract Studios)

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This article first appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 358 in July 2021. Each month we run exclusive features exploring the macrocosm of PC gaming—from behind-the-scenes previews, to incredulous community stories, to fascinating interviews, and more.

The world is dying. Tendrils of darkness crawl crosswise the land, swallowing up everything but the beaten-up road forward and your unsteady torch, the world's last hope for salvation. The apocalypse has arrived—merely if that sounds raw, you've probably ne'er played Darkest Dungeon.

"The first Darkest Dungeon, the further you crash, the worse and worse and worsened it gets," says Red Hook co-founder and creative director Chris Bourassa. Chris is about to convince Maine that this spirited well-nig the end of the world, full of lost souls and horrifying monsters, is actually about hope. Darkest Dungeon 2 is a road trip, a roguelike mash-up of Darkest Dungeon and The Beaver State Trail about clawing your way out of the darkness, rather than descending ever deeper into it.

Last wagon out of hell

"The more you learn about The Ancestor, the worse of a guy he is," Bourassa says, looking back on the floor helium and cofounder Tyler Sigman created for Darkest Dungeon starting in 2022. "This guy was the worst art object of shit in history. You get at the end of the bet on and you're like, not solitary is helium the worst, but the whole world is the inferior, everything's the worst… I feel like six years into Obama we were all ready to experience some fun with nihilistic delusion, but it just didn't feel like we could go whatsoever further down. We went to the heart of the actual planet, revealed it's a monster, and then nothing matters."

In Red Hook's first game, extant a 40-positive-hour fight meant putting lashings of heroes direct the grinder and observance them go mentally ill, then replacement them with fresh meat. Darkest Dungeon 2 wants you to care more than about your flawed heroes. Information technology's keeping the idea of quirks and tenseness creating unexpected, sometimes maddening surprises. Just this clock time you'll live managing a party of only four heroes happening a roguelike run to an ominous mountain, a rattling five hours if you survive the journey.

Shorter runs bequeath hopefully follow more inviting for players intimidated by the first game's large campaign. Like other Modern roguelikes, there's meta progression between runs. And the like Hades, DD2 will have a story that evolves over the course of development in Early Access. The idea is for the game to be easier to get into but just as deep once you're hooked. "We want more people to feel worse" jokes Bourassa.

"In that location's some games where once you have the sequel there's no reason to go rearmost and play the new. We yearned-for to do a dissimilar structure," says Tyler Sigman.

They settled connected the idea of a road trip, which Sigman relates to the bitty-bit-brighter tone, likening it to Lord of the Encircle's quest to Mordor. The trip May represent brutally hard, but this time there's some nobility to it.

Launch lineup (1/2)

💀Beset Doctor - A potion medical specialist WHO can heal allies and plague foes from the back row.
💀Occultist - A wielder of incomprehensible powers and strong crit hazard who's especially strong against eldritch creatures.
💀Highwayman - With shooting iron in one hand down and knife in the other, the road agent is just World Health Organization you hope non to run into on the route.
💀Man at Arms - A tanky defender who can buff other Allies with block tokens, safekeeping them lively since therapeutic is a rarefied treat.
💀Leper - A frontline bruiser who knocks endorse enemies and gets blind tokens after extended swings. May want glasses.

"If you go down rearward to this whole theme of settling West, it's people trying to achieve a better Beaver State freer spirit than their options where they are," he says (the Beaver State Trail reference wasn't a joke). "I think those motifs, and dunking the ring in Mount up Destine, are so powerful because the remnant goal is worth the trials of the journeying. I think that is really important. The journey is direful. You are leaving safety device and leaving towards the worst possible thing you could, because somebody's got to do it."

A run in Darkest Keep 2 looks often like-minded a journey up the pillar in Slay the Steeple or through the stars in FTL. Every region is divided into ramate paths, each node a battle or ruin to investigate or an bump with survivors who need your help.

Serving them is one way to keep your torch, the symbolical and literal light of promise, burning beaming. Someplace in each region is a proper dungeon, home to a tough boss campaign and better loot. A powerful trinket could transform a run, but tackling information technology is risky: any hero you turn a loss is dead permanently.

"I don't think we could observe ourselves Beaver State look at ourselves in the mirror if we didn't kill your characters," says Bourassa. "They can die down, and you can represent on a run with ii characters left. But we reward your progress at the end."

Are we there yet?

Launching lineup (2/2)

💀Jester - The sickle and lute aren't a likely pair, but the Jester pulls it off by buffing friends and bleeding enemies.
💀Grave Robber - Armed with darts and throwing daggers, the tomb robber is a speedy killer with an superior hat.
💀Devil - The Hellion, who after DD1 had a stellar office in Horizon Zero Dawn, uses a giant glaive to fade up foe back rows.
💀??? - What role will this mysterious newcomer fill? My guess is another heavy frontliner or a member of close to new faction being introduced in DD2.

Like in a veridical-life road stumble, Darkest Dungeon 2 is all about the personalities in the car. "I've done a few of them in my time, and you end ahead best friends with person and never talk to the other guy again, e'er," says Bourassa. They've recreated that driving by tossing out the old afflictions caused by stress and creating an phylogenetic relation system, where characters gain and lose favour with each another. Relationships cause tendrils into every tree of the game. When you come to a crossroads, all four will have an opinion about which room to go.

When you run into strangers, your highwayman might require to rob them, while your man at arms wants to turn over them food. Whichever option you pick, somebody's likely expiration to end up angry and stressed. In combat, if your grave robber is near death and you have your chevy mend sky a remedial potion to your highjacker instead, how coiffe you remember the grave robber's going to react?

Rack aweigh enough positive or negative reactions and characters will form relationships. Well ones will pay dividends: friendly heroes might "pull a Kevin Costner bodyguard" operating room "double-up Capcom style on the enemy", Bourassa says. But this existence Darkest Dungeon, thither are a a couple of million ways for relationships to go terribly, terribly wrong.

"We like that every run tush have a story. You can have a grave robber who gets collide with with overmuch stress early on, then just gets real bum to everybody. Detestable with the man at arms, jealous of the highwayman, just a cyanogenetic person. But she's probably better off alive than dead for the health of you running. That becomes the report of that time you had that awful peeress in the back of the railway car and she was truly mean to everyone."

Character quirks like 'clumsy' operating theater 'kleptomaniac' will feign how members of your political party play off each new, and emphasize heaped on by being dragged to the dungeon or watching a admirer die in combat can earn them gyrate away of operate

Case quirks like 'clumsy' operating theater 'kleptomaniac' wish affect how members of your company match each other, and stress piled along by being dragged to the donjon surgery observation a friend die in fight give notice make them helix proscribed of control. Unlike in the first stake, a full stress measure won't trigger a heart attack – it'll trigger a meltdown, where their health drops to death's door and all their relationships are reset. Their succeeding tantrum wish stress everyone else out too, naturally.

There may be runs where you by desig trigger a meltdown to readjust awful relationships. You can besides examine to build positive bonds at the inn where your weary band will rest at the death of every domain (it replaces tenting from the first Darkest Dungeon). You rump have your characters share a game of cards or a bottle of booze and hope they bang it off, but a destructive quirk like egomania could make your good intentions backfire. "We always want to put you in a set down where you'rhenium stressful to make the most of a sub-optimal situation," says Sigman.

Battle lines

If you haven't played untold Darkest Dungeon, combat in the subsequence will look much the same to you. Your party still stands in a delineate, a selection of skills under. Each persona's position is key out, since skills can only hit certain distances. With each attempt you get a cutaway animation as sword or bullet hits flesh.

If you accept played a of import deal of Darkest Dungeon, battle will look strikingly different. It's in 3D now, for one thing, as is the whole rest of the gage. Characters have bigger bodies and smaller heads, no thirster cartoonishly proportioned.

"There's really amazing preparatory animations in combat," Bourassa says. "If you click 'wicked slice' on your highwayman he whips his stab unstylish and gets ready, and when you click a target atomic number 2 follows through. The result is armed combat feels fashio more alive. People are acquiring potions out then launching them on your mouse clicks. Erst you tangle with a flow, if you watch someone who knows how to bet, even though IT's turn-based IT feels very fluid."

There are even more dramatic mechanical changes. Characters no more have upgradeable armour or weapons, Oregon stats like dodge and truth. These sweeping changes shuffle combat 'chunkier' – designer speak for 'easier to realize.' Clearer information makes each turn more of a puzzle to solve than a slugfest to stomach.

Darkest Dungeon 2's battle makeover started with a extremist move: ditching accuracy altogether. "We found over time that people just disapproval absent thus much that we ended up tuning up accuracy quite very much over the life of the [first] game," Sigman says. "So what if we just got free of truth as a stat? You hit. You know you're exit to smash – unless the opponent is dodgy, unless they have a choke up." To bring up a dodge or a block, they condensed percent chances into tokens that represent concrete effects. If your character or an opposition has a block token, they're guaranteed to assimilate 50% of their next collide with.

"We started doing that with all the mechanics and information technology was sort of an experimentation at first. The concern was what if we earn it too simple, but it ended dormy running." Sigman compares the token system to a cards the like Hearthstone, where if an foeman has a creature with taunt on the dining table, that's an obstacle to work around. Almost all the effects from the first spunky have been converted to tokens – immobilise, stun, bleed, blind, even team-up combo attacks.

"It gets people mentation a little fleck more," Bourassa adds. "I found that it erodes the natural inclination we saw in the first game for people to just usance damaging attacks all day long." And thusly you now get to construe with the next few turns in the bend orderliness, rental you plan come out duple moves front.

Novelty for your thoughts

Characters do still have some stats: hit points, speed and resistances to position ailments like blight. But the simpler puddle helped Sigman go enthusiastic design trinkets, the only gear you'll follow equipping. Once you found a novelty in the first game you could keep IT forever, so favourite strategies turned around the most knock-down ones. Trinkets usually had a negative stat tradeoff, only only few stats in truth mattered, so the figure options were limited.

That's the fun of a true roguelike. Sometimes you give birth a run and you obtain a insane item and you're comparable 'I'm unstoppable'

Tyler Sigman

In DD2 you may get apotropaic and find an awful trinket in unrivalled run, just it'll be gone the next. "So basically we can receive unusual," Sigman says. Instead of percent tweaks to stats, trinkets can right away grant effects like starting every round with a pair of mental block tokens, or getting a crit token every time you miss an attack (which could stack well on the leper, who blinds himself later on landing big hits). "That's the fun of a true roguelike. Sometimes you have a carry and you get a crazy item and you're like 'I'm unstoppable'. That's a really amusive place to be equally a player." Trinkets will be subdivided into whatever standard dinero tiers: commons, rares, epics. But there will also be trinkets unique to certain bosses and dependable factions of enemies. Those bequeath dangle an motivator to chance taking on a keep or war-ridden a tough battle against cultists to luck into a particular drop.

"In that respect are a lot of novelty-based interactions and class skill interactions you can try to maximise," says Bourassa. "At that place's a good deal of ways you can extenuate a class's downsides with trinkets and some help from his friends. That's awesome, simply where we're hoping our gamy rattling comes into its own is 'what if they detest all other?' They won't do [what you read], so you'ray sort of stymied straight though you do have the optimal strategy in mind. I think that's quintessentially what we've time-tested to explore."

Skills for kills

Darkest Dungeon 2 is launch with 9 heroes: eight familiar haggard faces and cardinal other one silent under wraps. From each one returning class is now importantly expanded, from a pool of seven skills to eleven. You unlock more advanced skills by completing special encounters for each hero on multiple runs. "We neediness you to feel rewarded that you put some clip in the halt. Information technology directly translates into much flexibleness in the run, more team comps you can put together, and a greater chance of success," says Sigman. "It's non that we give you crappy skills to start, but the more skills you have the more you can adjust to the changing conditions along the touring."

Those unlocks will go hand-in-hand with learning Darkest Dungeon 2's regions, so you'll know when you head into a region where enemies get high plague resistance, information technology's time to adjust your provoke doctor's loadout. You can switch out skills on the road betwixt encounters.

But Red Draw never giveth without takething away. You tail no longer have multiple copies of the same hero in your party, and each run you cause to choose from a bunch of heroes pre-rolled with a good and intense quirk. "It's not look-alike Wizardry from the 1980s where you keep rolling till you get 18s across the board," says Sigman. "If you truly hot a leper this run but He's a peaceful Oregon whatever, that makes you really choose."

Restricting you to a just single hero case per-company made the game easier to design – Sigman zero longer has to think about what a political party of four lepers plays corresponding. But that decision was ultimately more about the characters themselves, "It keeps that experience of each hero organism super specific and full of life as a key part thereto SWAT team."

Forward unto dawn

Darkest Donjon ended up with 18 classes after years of expansions. Darkest Dungeon 2 will get, too. It's coming to Early Access in Q3 2021, and you'll be able to complete a run from the starting time: if you survive long enough to haul your flickering great mullein to the mountain's peak, ready to stop the universe from crumbling, you North Korean won't be greeted by an 'under construction' sign. Bourassa says to expect a five-play story, with for each one act delivery a new party boss to engagement when you reach the mountain. It'll launch with play one.

You can have your characters share a secret plan of cards operating room a bottle of drink

There testament be four regions to struggle through at first, but the roguelike anatomical structure makes information technology easy to add more—likely in themed releases similar to the first game's. I imagine Darkest Dungeon 2 in its final form like a version of Mad Max Frenzy Road, where you find an epic trinket in the Hummer Farm on peerless run and die of plague in Blow Town on the next one.

IT's hard to believe that the primary lame was built by a sum team of just v populate. Thanks to its success much 20 are today workings on the sequel. The bigger team agency thither are designers focused solely on creating monsters or heroes or skills, tasks Sigman once juggled while also managing payroll. Artists and animators are doing things with the new 3D models that would require more illustrations than Bourassa could've ever created by reach. But they're both still in the trenches.

"IT was important we own it and have our workforce right in it," says Bourassa. "Wholly we know how to ut is what we did the last clock. If we throw all that out and take a bigshot producer from EA to equitable run the whole thing, we wear't love where that leads, right? Entirely we really know is the experience we had together. So we tried to bear on as more of that as practical and still create inroads and possession for the team on the way. It really stems from, we get into't want to fuck information technology sprouted, quite frankly."

In our hours of talk about Darkest Dungeon 2, neither of them belaboured the joining 'tween its more hopeful metaphor and their own intense creative procedure – that they both feel the need to take risks to make a videogame that satisfies them. Simply when my first run inevitably goes to hell and I contemplate leaving my petty egomaniac plague doctor by the broadside of the road, I know I'll think back to how Chris Bourassa describes the impression he hopes this subsequence tush stir aft Darkest Dungeon's bottomless nihilism.

"This halt is more near trying to swim up, hoping you have plenty air to break the surface, and the fear that you experience when you take in that IT's just a bit further unreachable each time," atomic number 2 says. "IT's just about trying to surface and trying to fare to grips with your failures. But if you send away manage to do it, in that location is a path to a better future." Or, at least, a path to a better trinket.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more 10 years, premier at tech sites the like The Wirecutter and Tested before connection the PC Gamer team in 2022. Wes plays a trifle bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games. When he's not compulsively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's actually becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old RPG Beaver State some milklike ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and redaction features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its recession communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).