Where Darkest Dungeon came from, and where it goes now
"Being an adventurer is a shit line of work."
What I find fascinating about Darkest Dungeon, and what I've always found fascinating about it, is how the series rethinks the experience of what being a fantasy adventurer would actually be like.
We take so much of it for granted, that experience, because we've seen it so many times. Take an adventurer - or a party of adventurers - down into a dungeon and have them overcome incredible odds to defeat hundreds if not thousands of monsters, some as big as houses and as terrifying as nightmares. And yet this seems to have no appreciable effect on them, beyond their getting stronger.
But what would that experience really be like to an adventurer, to see all of those things, to do all of those things - to encounter those horrors, and to see those terrible injuries, that anguish, that death? Profoundly traumatic, I imagine. And it's here, in this thought, Darkest Dungeon as an idea, as a concept, was born. "The central thesis that being an adventurer is a shit line of work," Darkest Dungeon co-creator Chris Bourassa tells me.
"So instead of the glory-seeking and the pauldron growth that you get in a lot of other titles, we wanted to celebrate the small things. Finding a ruby in the chest of a skeleton: that would cause you stress, that would be a horrible time. 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."
A major inspiration for this was the film Aliens, which Bourassa reckons is "one of the best ensemble films of all time". "It explores heroism by contrast, really," he says. "And that became another central tenet of the game, where you're not owed a valiant victory but they do exist." Band of Brothers was another inspiration. "Just any kind of situation where people were put under extreme pressure and [you see] that character arc of suffer, suffer, suffer, suffer and then sometimes people rally and hold themselves together."
Bourassa and his fellow Red Hook Studios co-founder Tyler Sigman also drew on their experience managing people to influence their design.
"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 we were like: there's a real opportunity to explore these ideas within a familiar kind of fantasy setting."
The concept was also influenced by conversations like: "Imagine you're sitting around the campfire and the Ranger hates the Priest, and then they go to sleep and they wake up furious at each other," Bourassa says. 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."
"Darkest Dungeon is the DM that rolls in the open." -Tyler Sigman
As Tyler Sigman puts it: "Darkest Dungeon is the [Dungeon Master] that rolls in the open." Sometimes the DM rolls well and it means bad things happen to you, the player, but that's okay because RPGs are more interesting when things go wrong, and dealing with them is another fundamental part of what Darkest Dungeon is about. "Because ultimately," Sigman says, "it's a game about perseverance."
What I love about hearing this is A, I love hearing anyone approach fantasy role-playing experiences from a different angle - and doing so is, after all, a large part of why Darkest Dungeon was such a breath of foul air when it came out. 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. You can see this in a talk Bourassa did at GDC in 2016. He was also very keen, Sigman says, on "a rotating blob" kind of idea where you had your front and backline fighters and you were being attacked from multiple sides, and had to keep turning around to protect your squishier sides.
But eventually the side-on presentation was implemented so you got closer to the characters and the art Bourassa was making, and the side-on, positional, turn-based combat came out of that - a very happy, iconic, coincidence.
These fundamental ideas being higher level and unattached to specific templates also meant there was room for them to be reinterpreted for Darkest Dungeon 2, the sequel that just been released. But apparently the decision to move onto a sequel wasn't a clear-cut thing.
The pair started talking about needing to do something new in the autumn of 2018, two years after the full release of the original game. "We entertained a lot of different ideas," Bourassa says, "and some of them weren't even Darkest Dungeon at all."
"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 harder because they'd done it before. Sigman talks about their having to pass a "threshold" of excitement before they agreed to do it, and even when they did, it was imperative they make sweeping changes to the experience. "We didn't want to make the same game again," Bourassa says.
Darkest Dungeon 2, then, does feel significantly different to Darkest Dungeon 1, which is something Edwin captures really elegantly in his extensive Darkest Dungeon 2 review. It's a have-another-go Roguelike for four characters on a road trip, whereas Darkest Dungeon 1 has you rooted to a hamlet where you build your base and employ a huge roster of characters. It's the same kind of experience but a fundamentally different one.
The good thing is, if you don't like it - or if you prefer the DD1 way of doing things - that's okay: that game still exists. "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.
But the focus for Red Hook now is unequivocally Darkest Dungeon 2 and getting it to the kind of place DD1 is at now, after years of additional content and updates and expansions.
"We also need to do the console versions..." -Tyler Sigman
Because of that, work on Darkest Dungeon 1 will cease, barring any suddenly needed patches. "We don't have plans to add more to it," Bourassa says, "although we recognise that we could and there are days where we feel like maybe we want to, but it would be a mistake from a resource allocation standpoint to rob from DD2 to give to DD1 at this particular time."
"We also need to do the console versions," Sigman adds, referring to Darkest Dungeon 2, "which we haven't announced yet but I'm sure people can infer that they're coming. We would like to make expansions for DD2, too, provided there's an audience."
Once all that's done, "It would be a really fun time to get together and start talking about what could be next," Bourassa says. 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. "I'm probably always going to end up using black when I draw but it would be nice to explore something else. But we have no nothing firm in terms of what that would look like or when that would happen.
"But I can say with fair certainty that we're not going to wrap up the final DLC on DD2 in five years and then start Darkest Dungeon 3, at least as far as we've discussed right now. But we're not really looking that far ahead just yet. The time for idle daydreaming is not now."
The full interview with Tyler Sigman and Chris Bourassa, in which they recount the making of Darkest Dungeon - and cover a lot more than I've covered here - is available now as a podcast wherever you listen to them. Look for "Eurogamer Podcasts" there.