Darkest Dungeon: The Color of Madness Released
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The Color of Madness, the latest piece of DLC for Red Hook Studios' side-scrolling RPG Darkest Dungeon is now available on Steam for $4.99 or your regional equivalent, adding a new region, an endless mode, and a heap of new content. And as a bonus, you can also grab this free piece of DLC that will add the Musketeer to your game, a new skin of sorts for the Arbalest class, previously available exclusively to Darkest Dungeon's Kickstarter backers.
Along with these DLC, the base game got a sizable update as well. This update fine tunes the game's classes, trinkets, and encounters, while also revamping some of its core mechanics like critical strikes, stuns, and Virtues. You can find some additional details in this developer post on the game's website, together with the complete patch notes.
Here's an update overview, and you can take it from there:
Darkest Dungeon started out as an Early Access game with frequent updates, but has since gone on to have a number of free updates throughout its life as a “Finished Game.” We are pleased to announce that we are deploying a large balance update to the core game on Tuesday June 19th, to coincide with release of the new Color of Madness DLC.
Over the last couple months, we’ve taken a comprehensive look through all classes in the game since it had been some time since we previously did so. Related to that, we also wanted to assess combat as a whole and see if there were any general balance adjustments we could make to improve the game.
In making these changes, we consulted extensively with members of the Darkest Dungeon player community, and ultimately went through over three complete rounds of changes, complete with playtesting and fierce debates. Special thanks to Marvin Seo and Clair de Lune for their assistance with this update, in particular with class and trinket adjustments. They were the source of many ideas, and also provided endless enthusiasm for stress testing (har har) the changes themselves.
Clair was also instrumental in compiling the final changelist, by referencing things against the live game. Thanks for saving me some work!
It’s the nature of the beast that not all changes will be loved by all players. We know that, on occasion, something you love might be altered in a way you don’t like
The working philosophy for this giant balance update was that we wanted to shore up *weak* classes/skills/trinkets more than we wanted to nerf strong ones. Yes, there are some nerfs, but I think you’ll find that those changes are much less frequent than buffs. Where possible, we tried to correct dominant strategies by providing alternatives that are similarly exciting.
We are pleased to roll these changes out and hope that each of you find the majority of them to be exciting and welcome!
–Red Hook Tyler (on behalf of the Darkest Dungeon team)
