“Being an adventurer is a shit line of work.”
And yet this seems to have no appreciable effect on them, beyond their getting stronger.
Profoundly traumatic, I imagine.
And then you’re running out of food: that would be a horrible time.
So this idea of duress, stress and its effects on a small group of people."
“It explores heroism by contrast, really,” he says.
Band of Brothers was another inspiration.
“It’s not even a joke,” Bourassa says.
“You see what happens to people when they get very stressed out.
We’re no exception.
Some people rally and handle this distressing pressure really elegantly, other people kind of buckle.
Some people get loud, some people get quiet.
And by the idea of it being uncompromising as an experience - uncompromising but not specifically ‘hard’.
“It’s permanent consequences for decisions that you make under duress with imperfect information,” Bourassa says.
“That’s really the heart and soul of Darkest Dungeon.”
“Because ultimately,” Sigman says, “it’s a game about perseverance.”
And B, because these concepts weren’t - and aren’t - locked to a specific mechanical template.
They’re more high level, more broad.
Many of the mechanics of Darkest Dungeon weren’t even decided when they were thinking this stuff up.
For a while, Darkest Dungeon was a top-down, isometric kind of RPG.
it’s possible for you to see this ina talk Bourassa did at GDC in 2016.
But apparently the decision to move onto a sequel wasn’t a clear-cut thing.
“We were kind of tired of Darkest Dungeon,” Sigman says.
They’d been working on DD1 for years at that point.
But there was also a desire to do more with the characters and world.
In some respects, though, the idea had to work harderbecausethey’d done it before.
“We didn’t want to make the same game again,” Bourassa says.
It’s the same kind of experience but a fundamentally different one.
“That’s the beauty of what we’ve done,” Sigman says.
“Well, I shouldn’t say beauty - this is our strategy.”
“We don’t know if it’s beautiful yet,” Bourassa adds, and laughs.
Because of that, work on Darkest Dungeon 1 will cease, barring any suddenly needed patches.
We would like to make expansions for DD2, too, provided there’s an audience.”
And at that point, those other ideas we talked about earlier may resurface.
“Creatively, it would be nice to take a cycle off from Darkest Dungeon,” he says.
But we have no nothing firm in terms of what that would look like or when that would happen.
But we’re not really looking that far ahead just yet.
The time for idle daydreaming is not now."
Look for “Eurogamer Podcasts” there.
