Darkest Dungeon II Interview

With Red Hook Studios gearing up to launch Darkest Dungeon II into early access on the Epic Games Store, we get this massive PC Gamer interview with the game’s creative director Chris Bourassa and design director Tyler Sigman.

If you’d like to know all there is to know about Darkest Dungeon II at this point, you should definitely check this interview out, as it covers a lot of ground, including the game’s new and returning features and characters, its updated 3D look, the new story direction, and much more.

Here’s a couple of sample questions:

The biggest thing we see in the latest trailer is the apparent switch to 3D characters. It kind of surprised me because Darkest Dungeon’s 2D art is so singular. Is this just an aesthetic change or is there a deeper purpose?

CB: It’s a couple of things. Pragmatically from a craftsmanship standpoint, people have consumed the art that I drew for 1.0 and the art that the team made beyond that in the DLCs along with me. And so we had to look for a way of invigorating this game, and giving it legs, and generating a similar kind of excitement, and I’m speaking purely visually for this.

So that was one of the main practical considerations. But the most important thing above all is to maintain the distinctive style of the game, and only leverage technology and sort of 3D modeling animation effects if they are enhancing that style or evolving it, not trampling on it. And so we did a bunch of research, and experimentation, and played around, and the result is in the teaser. Those are in-game models captured out of Unity, which is the game engine, so there’s no post processing other than color correction on one or two of them. But that’s what we’re working with, and it was important to just try to even grow the characters up a little bit.

And what impact will the move to 3D have on the combat mechanics? Should I expect to be fighting in a similar way, is that experience intact?

TS: We didn’t want to throw everything out and rebuild the game from scratch. We think Darkest Dungeon combat is still really cool. The side-on positional skills is just part of the game’s identity, and so that’s staying.

Some of the mechanics, some of the stats, they’re kind of different. We’re handling accuracy in a different way because some of the stuff that was maybe either clunky or we wanted to improve… I think interpretation of the combat is really important, and so we wanted to try to push things forward a little bit in terms of finding ways to refine the mechanics, strengthen them, and tighten those up.