Above: Seeing an entire group of monsters dodge your attacks builds up stress (and for me, tears).
GamesBeat: You funded this on Kickstarter. Did all the money come from there, or did you have another source?
Bourassa: No, we were all just bootstrapping. Kickstarter helped us go to shows like PAX. It kept us going. But we were bootstrapping before that and we’ve been bootstrapping since. Our Early Access launch was the first time that we were in a position to start paying ourselves salaries.
GamesBeat: One thing I’ve noticed is that you’re still really high up there in sales on Steam. Have you sold more copies through Steam than through Kickstarter at this point?
Sigman: Far more on Steam. We’ve been blown away. We’re not quite ready to release numbers. We may at some point, because some other developers out there have released numbers and it’s been really helpful. But we’re still just taking it in. Kickstarter is interesting, because you also sell at a higher average price. You have external rewards. We’re going to be delivering artbooks and prints and things like that. I think we sold around 9,600 on Kickstarter. We took pre-orders on Humble, which was maybe another 1,000 copies combined. But we’ve done a lot more than that on Steam so far.
Bourassa: We’ll release a number at some point. We don’t want to speculate. It’s only been a week and a half, too. I don’t want to call the shot just yet.
Above: Darkest Dungeon may not be Ravenloft, but Strahd von Zarovich would feel right at home in its horror setting.
GamesBeat: Of course everyone keeps saying Lovecraft when they talk about this game. I think about Ravenloft, from Dungeons & Dragons. Did you guys play that at all?
Bourassa: I had a Ravenloft module. I never really learned how to play D&D properly, but I read it cover to cover several times. That might be in there somewhere. Really, the central idea was to try to bring Lovecraft into the Middle Ages, to get him out of the 1920s.
Sigman: Yeah. Definitely played some Ravenloft in the past, in my pen and paper days, but it never came to mind in our discussion. A lot of those things — even traditional high fantasy didn’t really guide — I suppose it guided us a bit in the sense that we knew from the beginning we didn’t want to do fireball spells and healing potions. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it just that there are so many RPGs out there doing that. We wanted to steer away from that. The other thing is, some of those powerful magics and instant heals, it kind of goes against what we’re trying to make you feel, which is that adventuring has a cost. It has a mortality and a peril and a cost. If you can just quaff healing potions every time your globe gets almost empty, the only threat you’re feeling is a reactionary, dexterity threat. Can I hit the potion button fast enough? Darkest Dungeon is more about the slog and the long peril and how far you can push before it’s too late.
GamesBeat: This felt so pen and paper-y to me that I thought it was actually based on a campaign you might have run. But it’s not?
Bourassa: We took a lot of inspiration from board games and some pen-and-paper stuff. We had the Mordheim book kicking around for a while. So yeah, there’s definitely a strong tabletop current in the game.
GamesBeat: As you make tweaks during Early Access, do you ever feel like you’re kind of pulling the ball away from Charlie Brown?
Bourassa: I think we’re actually adding more balls. As we refine the balance, especially, new tactics will open up. We want to give people a sandbox to play in. We only really want to shut the doors that we feel are exploitative, that undermine our intended experience coming out of the game. We’ve seen a lot of people do dark runs and things like that. Looking at that, there might be some opportunity to add even more tools to the toolbox, just based on what we’ve seen. It’s going to be an exciting early access from that standpoint.
Sigman: We definitely don’t want to take away things that work, if that makes sense. The stun locking was a pure exploit that goes against the DNA of the game. But if someone has a good tactic – hey, here’s a really good way to tackle the swine prince or the hag, you bring this particular party and make sure to get trinkets that do this, bring these particular skills, camp right before and have the bounty hunter prepare for the big battle – that’s exactly what we want people to do.
Bourassa: If you can wreck the boss by doing that, you deserve to wreck the boss.
Above: The Hellion nerf stressed out tens of thousands of delvers.
GamesBeat: One thing I’ve noticed on social media and forums after the tweak is that people seem to be taking it in the spirit that you intended. It’s not that you’re taking something away, just that you’re trying to keep the game true to your vision. I don’t see anyone really getting mad or yelling all that much. Has that been your experience?
Bourassa: There was a little bit of noise at first. It feels good to land crits in our game. I’m really happy about that. People were feeling good in the dark with three Hellions just wrecking shop. There was a bit of backlash against maybe not being able to do that as much. But yeah, like Tyler said, we’re in early access for that exact reason. We’re going to try all kinds of stuff. We’ll play with balance and tune numbers. For a week maybe you’re not going to crit that much and then next week you’ll crit a lot. I don’t know what we’re going to do, but it’ll be in service of the central vision of the game we have. We’re hoping that our players will have fun enjoying and experimenting with these changes and giving us feedback. That’s the essence of why we wanted to bring something so polished and mostly feature complete to early access, so we could spend time with our community trying new stuff, experimenting with different balance numbers, that kind of thing.
Sigman: A lot of people have taken it — they know this happens. There always may be some people who are married to some particular thing and feel like you’re taking it away. Northernlion’s comment there was a kind of sarcastic joke. He’s like, of course you guys need to do this. But why did you have to do it right now before I kill this monster? Someone said something yesterday because we nerfed the Hellion a little bit. She’s still very powerful, but we nerfed her a little bit. Someone sent us a collage, what was it?
Bourassa: Oh, yeah. It was like, Red Hook, why you no keep Hellion? And it was the lyrics to some awful ‘80s song with Batman crying in the rain.
Sigman: Sarah McLachlan!
Bourassa: That’s right. It was “I Will Remember You.”
Sigman: It was really funny.