As February wraps up, our internal discussions have been centered around the overall scope of the planned March 8th update, as well as the feedback we’ve been receiving from the community over the past few weeks. Based on those discussions, we’ve made some changes to our plans.
The original March 8th update was to include Town Events and The Antiquarian.
- The ‘Antiquarian’ is the final name for the ‘Merchant’ class – a hero designed to help make your runs more lucrative (treasure bonuses), but also a bit riskier due to the class being underpowered in combat.
- ‘Town Events’ are designed to add variety to the Hamlet over the course of a campaign. Upon returning from an expedition, there is a chance for a thematic event to trigger in town – this functions akin to a deck of event cards.
As always, we have been constantly reading all the feedback and discussions that happen on our community boards. There’s been a good amount of chatter around the potential of Town Events, but there has also been major discussions about the current state of end game grind. We know that there are pain points around getting the jump from Veteran to Champion as well as some difficulty in maintaining forward momentum after losing high level parties in the Darkest Dungeon.
We have decided to delay Town Events, for two major reasons.
- Community Input.Our community is incredible! Since starting up work on Town Events, we’ve been reading great suggestions and ideas. While the original plan would have been fine, there is increasing excitement around the feature and consequently, we want a little more time to make the system more robust. This will also allow us to look at implementing some of our community-generated ideas!
- Grind. Losing high level parties can be a big hurdle to come back from, and this discourages some people from continuing with the late game. While we fully intend to keep the overall deadliness in the game, there are a couple things we are looking at and we feel that it is important to take some action on that front prior to introducing new unrelated features. Specifically, we are looking at making some higher level heroes available in the Stagecoach in certain conditions, as well as some other tweaks.
So what does this mean?
Our March 8th update will now consist of The Antiquarian and some changes to help alleviate the end game grind. Town Events will be delayed until a later date, and will benefit from the additional development time. We can’t give an exact timeframe just yet, but it will be our primary focus for development after the GDC (Game Development Conference) wraps up in March.
As always, we thank you for your support and feedback as we continue to improve and expand the Darkest Dungeon experience!