izigame.me

I come from the Epic games, about 100 hours, let me list what i dislike about the game and maybe this will resonate with you or not.
- Meta Progression
This is a big one, usually rogue likes tend to implement some form of Meta progression, be it the least harmful way where you get unlockables items which are most harmless and easy/fast to acquire To all the way up to unlocking entire MECHANICS and STATS, which is the worst form of Meta Progression, since the developers expect you to grind your defeats until you unlock upgrades or mechanics enough so you can have a chance while going at it.
As you can figure Darkest Dungeon 2 implements... Well all of it, trinkets have to be unlocked, stage coach upgrades, Inn consumables, combat items (consumables as well), characters, characters playstyles (called paths, which change a bit the orientation of the character and focuses it on a specific task), being able to keep one character from a successful run to another has to be unlocked too, skins, the hard modes of the game as well have to be unlocked And the worst offender of all of course, stats are unlockables as well, for example, the difference between a 0% character to a 100% one is a 15% deaths door difference, because that is simply locked in the "character meta progression tree".
Now all of that sounds a bit vague, yeah there are a lot of unlockables in the game but how long would it take to unlock everything you might ask? Well in the game you use the currency called "candles" that you get in very small amounts through the run and it is the Meta currency. As i mentioned in the beginning i have 80 hours of gameplay, at 60 hours i just gave up and cheated candles on my save file because i was tired of having to always go for the "path that gives more candles" or making the small boring "quests" that give a bit of candle as well like "Vestal must deal the killing blow to 0/8 enemies of " or "Dismas wants to visit a Hospital".
In conclusion the meta progression in this game is HORRIBLE, it will take you a 100 hours or more to unlock everything, it heavily impacts the outcome of your game weighting more to "having things unlocked" VS "knowing the game" and the way to acquire the currency is just awful, i just suggest cheating candles in your save file from the get go and not wasting your time having a butchered experience for the sake of the developers
- Heal and Stress Thresholds
In this game it was implemented a system where you cannot use heals and stress-heal abilities if you're not under a certain % of HP/stress. I still dont understand why this was implemented, i still have no idea why it was implemented, i understand that the devs had a issue with stalling fights on DD1 to heal, which they already fixed in this game by implementing cooldowns on the skills and limited uses, and as well by nerfing pretty much every source of heal in half compared to the first game. Anyway, this means that if you feel like healing someone with your Vestal and that someone is sitting at 26% of hp you wont be able to, since Vestal heal is limited only to 25% or less HP, same for characters like Hellion, Flagellant, Plague Doctor .
-Final Bosses balancement (lair bosses are fine)
This is how it works, you get to a final boss, he will usually do an AoE which will hit be it 2 or 4 of your characters, all of your squishy characters will lose from 95% to 100% of their health and get in to deaths door, then you get reminded that since this is a 1v4 the boss gets 4 turns p/round, so he will often do 4 AoE's per round that deal roughly 100% of your squishy characters health bar... And paired with how the devs handled the "heal issue", you cant really heal them back to a 100% hp or even 50%, you're most of the time just Deaths Door gating them out of it and hopping that every hit isnt the last, since you get a DD penalty everytime you enter it...
Now to be fair most of the bosses are doable/ok if you know everything he does, have the right composition, trinkets, consumables and last but not least the right "trophy" (stagecoach equippable item that grants a buff to your whole team, often meaningless or even bad, but extremely important in some fights). The problem here is that the developers decided to implement the same idea from DD1 in DD2 where you went in to a Boss Dungeon with a sacrifice squad for the sake of learning the boss attacks and mechanics, then you went back in with your highly trained disposal unity, you would often lose a bunch of random and meaningless heroes, 30 minutes and a few resources, but that was it, you would just come back with your kickass/optimized party and would wipe the boss. Now in DD2 this is NOT possible, your runs will roughly last 3 to 4 hours, getting to the final boss just to get crushed while you were having a god run is NOT cool, you're literally just getting demolished because hey, you brought a Blight comp to a boss that have very high blight resist, or maybe you brought a High damage comp to a boss that spams 75% defense tokens every turn he gets and even at the start of the round (which you cant do anything about it). That is just not okay, that is frustrating and bad, wasting people 3 - 4 hours because you wanted to implement funky mechanics in the final bosses were people cant really experiment with.
-Relationship system
The relationship system right now is fully mathematical, if your relation points is under X then you get a chance of getting a bad relation, if its under X2 you get a huge change of getting a bad relation, the opposite is also true, above Y and Y2 you get a chance of a positive relation and then a huge chance. The way you increase the relationship of your characters is mainly through spamming relationship items in the Inn were you have to constantly open and close the relations window to mathematically chose which hero is closer to having a good relation or saving another from getting in the range to get a bad relation, that is all so far to the "management", its not organic neither engaging.
The real problem is how you interact with the outcomes with the relation. The game will chose a →random← ability of the 2 characters that got in a relation and give those abilities a buff or a debuff to each other based on which relation they got, if they're Hopeful it is a stress reduction when used, if its amorous it is a 10% heal when used .
Now remember when i said "random" up there? Yeah, you can get a relation trigger in a ability that you're not using, this isnt that bad if it is a good relationship, you're just abiding from a small buff, its whatever. The problem comes when you get a bad relation trigger in a ability that you're NOT using, the game will unequip a random ability of your character and equip the chosen ability and it will lock given ability in your kit until you arrive to the next Inn and get a re roll in the relationships. This means that if you're really unlucky as i was, you can get 4 bad relationships and end up an entire shuffled up kit that not only you cannot change, but you will be punished for using said skills, be it giving someone on your team a blind, or a fragile + taunt token, or a +1 stress every use and so forth, this is absolute dogshit and makes me want to reset the run whenever i get a bad relation, the game just becomes unplayable when stuff like this happens.
-Conclusion
With all of that said you can notice i've bought the game on Epic release and now here i am buying it on steam again (f*ck you epic dogshitgames trash service). The game is good, the art is amazing, the soundtracks are impecable, it is cool to see the hero stories, getting more skills to the other heroes, the paths that change their playstyles.
DD2 is a good game, you can have fun with it, but i just feel that the developers for a long time now just went for the direction of "we are going to punish the player because he got punished for mistake he didnt made".