Darkest Dungeon, which is currently in available through Steam’s Early Access program, has decided to make some unpopular features of the game optional, developer Red Hook announced in a Steam forum post.
In the “Corpse & Hound” patch released in July, Darkest Dungeon saw the addition of several new changes to combat in the game. Two changes of note were the addition of heart attacks and corpses, which many in the game’s community have detested as features that were not good for the game. With the July update, players’ characters could have heart attacks and die on the spot if their stress levels in the game grew too high. Additionally, with the update, when a player killed an enemy, that enemies corpse would remain on the field, impossible to pass through or over, creating frustrating moments of having to destroy the corpses simply in order to pass on to the next area.
Now, Red Hook has added to option to turn off heart attacks and corpses in the game’s options. The features will remain turned on by default, as Red Hook believes these features to be “important mechanics for the game.”
Writing in the aforementioned Steam forum post, Red Hook explained their decision to make heart attacks and corpses optional:
We believe that corpses and heart attacks are important mechanics for the game, not only for the reasons initially discussed in the Corpse & Hound design notes but reinforced by our observations since. However, today we are introducing a set of gameplay options (accessed via the normal Options menu) which allows you to turn them off.
Just as we were willing to experiment by adding these features, we are willing to experiment with ways to allow you to shape the DD experience a bit to your liking. As many of you know, we have been reluctant to add difficulty related options until now because focusing on our intended version of the game has been our number one priority and our experiments and changes during Early Access have all been in support of iterating on that. But it would be foolish for us to not consider the fact that the Darkest Dungeon community is now big enough to include diverse groups, some of which would like to play the game differently than we might have envisioned. Although we’ve always been unapologetic about how important it is that Darkest Dungeon is punishing, unforgiving, and sometimes not even “fair”…at the end of the day we want those of you who own it to have fun and that can’t be forgotten.
Earlier this year, Darkest Dungeon received another, large update that added several new classes, UI improvements, and more.
Currently, Darkest Dungeon is available through Steam’s Early Access program with plans to be released on PlayStation 4 after its Early Access period is over.
