Darkest Dungeon designers really aren’t sadists: ‘We’re realists’

GamesBeat: I’ve been playing RPGs since the early 1980s. The one thing I noticed is that, almost universally, systems are geared toward not holding the player back but toward encouraging player success. That’s completely the opposite with your game. How different is the mindset that you have to be in, as a developer, to do this?

Sigman: I think you have to remember what you set out to do. Because there’s lots of pressures during development, and certainly even now, to make the game easier across the board. Why are you penalizing for this? Why can’t I save or bring the hero back? That’s not what we set out to do. We set out to make you feel like there’s a cost. We didn’t set out to kill everybody. But I think—that’s something we’ve been able to do really well, is hold true to that vision. Even in times where you’re going to get feedback that’s like, are you sure you want to do that? You’re going to be alienating a lot of players. But we never really set out to make the game for everyone. In having that strong vision, we ended up making it appeal to more people than we ever thought.

Bourassa: Yeah, that’s a great way to say it. The game is fundamentally different. It takes a left when a lot of RPGs take a right, at the very start of the road. We’re not asking you to build one party and get attached to them. You shouldn’t have an expectation of being able to finish a quest. That’s not bad balance. That’s by design. Sometimes things go wrong. You should get in the dungeon and realize you’re outmatched. For whatever reason you’re not getting the rolls you want. You should cut and run. That’s a very foreign mindset for a lot of people who equate balance with progression, immediate moment-to-moment progression. We’re asking players to take a long view of the campaign and use their heroes as a means to an end, as opposed to ends in themselves. Having the two of us, Tyler and I, go back and forth on the game, having built it up from scratch together from a conceptual standpoint, we’ve been able to act as checks and balances to each other. There have been times where I’m like, I think we should make this easier, and Tyler’s like, no, remember this! Remember that! And there’s been the reverse, where something’s really important and I feel we have to keep it in because of our core vision. It’s one of the advantages in having two heads on the snake, I think. We’ve been able to keep close to what we initially set out to do, and incidentally promised to our Kickstarter backers.

Sigman: We talk about this a lot, too. Chris and I played so many classics as well. I’m in the same era as you, everything from D&D basic set — not Chainmail, I was just being born, but the Basic Set — there are just so many good products out there. Chris said that we’re not going to out-Torchlight Torchlight, which was a great Diablo—I don’t want to say knockoff, but in that vein. I’m not ripping it at all. It’s a cool game. Legend of Grimrock brought back Eye of the Beholder and all that stuff and did an awesome job. We love that space, but we didn’t want to enter it just trying to do something either slightly better than the last guy, or maybe not even as good, because some of those are really amazing games. Our love of RPGs in the classic way of doing it is what got us excited about adding a twist, really.

GamesBeat: When it comes to the names of a couple of characters as they come into the stagecoach, are those random, or did you make a list of names to attach to specific classes?

Sigman: They’re random, actually.

Bourassa: Yeah. I had a vestal called Roger.

GamesBeat: I just think it’s very funny. I had a bounty hunter whose name was “Gand.” Just to show how nerdy I am, one of the bounty hunters from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Zuckuss, was a Gand.

Bourassa: That’s hilarious. See, a lot of people will say, well, that means your RNG is broken. And I’m like, sometimes these weird coincidences that just happen

Sigman: There’s been a few things like that. I had plans for how it was going to distribute the names. They needed to be gender specific and all these sorts of things. Then the names we ended up pulling from was this great list of everything from Middle Ages on up to Victorian names. A lot of them are more like surnames. It actually works quite well regardless of gender. It’s one of those things we put in incrementally. I was thinking I’d need to make all these improvements, and then it just kind of worked.

GamesBeat: Each of you, what’s your favorite class and why?

Bourassa: You go first.

Sigman: He thinks I’m going to say the Hellion, but I’m not.

Bourassa: What?!

Sigman: I like the Leper. I can’t even remember when we came up with it, but it so embodied the game. He doesn’t have the flashiest mechanics or anything like that. He’s just an accuracy versus damage tradeoff. But his camping abilities—He’s basically a stress tank and a wrecker. Thematically he’s interesting. His camping abilities are all about sustaining himself. His own abilities are all about sustaining himself. He’s a loner, a solitary dude. I think that—I really like him. Chris’s design, the actual character design, is just amazing, with the mask. He’s just badass.

Bourassa: I like the Leper a lot too. I think he’s cool. But I think my favorite class is—I’m somewhere in this love triangle with the highwayman, the grave robber, and the bounty hunter, but I think I’d have to go with the grave robber, because I find it really satisfying to crit with the thrown dagger. I like really mobile parties, so I like constantly rolling over my front row. I like duelist advance with point-blank shot, and then you cycle that with lunge and shadow fade. Your front row is just this rolling monster grinder. That’s why I like her.

GamesBeat: What’s your favorite monster?

Bourassa: Wilbur!

Sigman: Wilbur is pretty cool.

Bourassa: Wilbur’s the best!

GamesBeat: And why is Wilbur the best?

Bourassa: Because, OK, I love the mechanic of the swine prince fight. I love hearing people who party wipe because they thought, oh, I’ll just grapple the small one. I just think it’s hilarious and awesome, because that’s what we intended. But then Wilbur is just like the last plot twist in the horror movie, where you think you’re okay and then the shadow’s in the window behind you and it cuts to the credits. You kill the swine prince and he tries to stun lock your whole party. If you’re almost dead, he can actually—it’s that last little threat you face. I think it’s just perfect.

Sigman: He’s not the flashiest, but I love the bone courtier and his tempting goblet. Again, because he came around early. It was just one of those things that solidified the mechanics of the game, the idea that he’s a stress archer. Of course, stress had been our central mechanic from the beginning, but just realizing that, okay, yes, we need to think in terms of classic archetypes, but with stress. We had melee stressors and stress archers and things like that. He sits back there in his little coat. It’s very Edgar Allan Poe-ish. Maybe they were feasting when everything went down. He has his little goblet with who knows what in it, and he throws it on you and stresses you out. He’s kind of cool.

Bourassa: I told you someone tweeted that her boyfriend had a cup of water and threw it on her and yelled, “Tempting goblet!” Someone posted that in the Steam forums and tweeted about it. I laughed so hard.