Sunday, February 15, 2015

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Delving Into Narrative in Darkest Dungeons!



At first, Aungier didn't really stand out to me.  As a class, Grave Robber lacks the sexy propensity for reliable damage outputs that other back line fighters have, so even though she arrived during my second week at the manor she's spent most of her career since cooling her heels, occasionally stepping in when a party needed a second back-ranks damage dealer and no one else was available, or a Priest (misspelled as Vespel for some reason) was better off in the three-spot in party order because of her particular ability mix, instead of the four-spot, where Aungier excels.

It wasn't until she made a quick hop into the Warrens with a collection of other reserve adventurers, and Bohun, a reliable second choice healer who I thought might be well suited to keeping my band of haphazardly selected misfits alive while they limp-stepped through short dungeons to rank up, that I realized just how good she was at her job.  Aungier quietly hurled knives from the back ranks, danced forward for an opportune killing blow when she needed to and, above all else, kept her cool.  And for her efforts she was promoted before any of her partymates: not because of some flashy, last ditch maneuver that saved the day, or because I favored her heavily, but because she quietly did her job in the back ranks, using her knives to make sure that packs of spiders were weak enough to be killed by follow-up blows once they came into range of front line combatants.

That's also, in a real sense, why she's survived so far.  Other adventurers, adventurers I favored more heavily and threw into combat with more reckless abandon, adventurers I cared about more and thought were better at their jobs, like Tupperbell, Reynauld, Hall, and Paixdecouer, are dead now.  As my A team, I threw them at challenges well before I should have, challenges I didn't fully comprehend, challenges I should've walked away from.  Because of my attention, because of my belief in their competence and desire to see them succeed, they're dead now.  Aungier survives them because she escaped my attention until recently.  I often found myself forgetting who Aungier was when I was putting together critical or dire missions, missions where we lost people (like the great battle with the Wizened Hag and her cookpot, or that harrowing first Long Dungeon exploration).  And so she survived, and has now risen to prominence as one of a handful of adventurers cleared to go on Medium difficulty missions.

Now that she's drawn my attention, I've also got a better sense of just how much character Aungier developed while I wasn't watching.  See, she's one of the best Warren delvers around, adept at scouting that kind of terrain and dealing with the sort of denizens one is likely to find in a Warren, but therein lies the rub: Aungier actually hates being in Warrens.  They stress her out.  So every time I bring her skill set to bear, I'm forcing her to do a job she's good at, in a way that most people in my roster aren't, a job that she also hates.  She has, without me inserting one whit of narrative into her existence without the prompting of the game itself, become a portrait of long-suffering competence who has finally achieved a modicum of success, and is now finds herself in a dangerous position: she's cleared for more hazardous missions as part of a smaller, more elite team of soldiers within my growing army.  How will her story take shape from here?  Will Aungier continue to thrive with her quiet, workmanlike effiency?  Or will her competence become her undoing? 

This is the narrative pull of Darkest Dungeon.  It's not the sort of game that allows you to craft a narrative, the way that Dragon Age: Inquisition or Left4Dead might, with their responsive systems that permit you to make decisions within their limited frames that establish one of a set of known outcomes.  Darkest Dungeons is a set of total unknowns.  The dungeons themselves are just a backdrop, a setting for characters to develop.  The reality of the story taking shape in those dungeons is so much more profound.  That character who snaps and has a paranoid break in the middle of a crucial battle in the Weald might one day redeem himself.  After spending a night drinking heavily, trying to shake the feeling that everyone's watching him, he'll wake up with a nasty hangover.  Then I'll send him on a quick mission with some second-stringers, people I'm less attached to, while my primary party rests up for a more intense mission.  On that sortie that paranoid alcoholic, who once sat in a corner cutting himself instead of fighting with his party, will redeem himself by striking down that psychotic pig-man while one of his teammates teeters on death's door.  After that, he'll emerge from his adventure with a quality.  It could be something positive, like a propensity for dealing with stress, or ire for a particular kind of foe.  Or it could be something a little less positive, like a fascination with corpses, or a refusal to pray in light of the terrible things he's seen.  He'll grow, in part because of choices I make, but also because of how things beyond my control unfold, in and out of the dungeons.

Unlike other Rogue-a-likes, with their unforgiving and sudden swishes of fortune, Darkest Dungeon builds slow.  In Steam Marines, the other Rogue I've been spending too much time on, if I make a single misstep, my party is wiped.  Technicality-no-down-boo-over, wiped in a few turns by a handful of regular enemies I see in every fight on every floor.  If I accidentally turn the wrong way, or misread the terrain, or don't check ammo before I set up guard positions, or just run into something unexpected around a corner without enough action points to flee, it's game over in a few seconds.  The game wears this unforgiving nature on its sleeve, randomizing the names of its marines into ridiculous caricatures.  "Freeze" and "Point" aren't names you can get attached to.  Even "Mac" is barely serviceable.  Steam Marines is going to kill your party from the get-go, and it wants you to know it.  It wants you to get on board for the death-parade.  Its over-the-top dumb naming conventions, its achievements, aimed at letting you tick a new box each time you die in a new area.   When you play Steam Marines, there's no reason to get attached.

But in Darkest Dungeon, you're slowly growing with your stable of adventurers.  You're watching them learn, watching them grow and develop, succeed and fail.  When they die, sometimes it's because you just made one mistake, or there was a spat of bad luck.  Sometimes, it's because you overextended them, or because someone had a morale-break, which cascaded the rest of the party into oblivion, but whatever the cause of your wipe is, you're going to care.  Most adventurers start out as nothing.  You build them up by sending them out on adventures, equipping them with gear and training them in new and interesting skills as they go.  These aren't disposable tools that you break, then replace.  These are assets that you have to invest yourself in in order to build them up. 

And therein lies the rub.  There's some chatter from Rogue fans who find Darkest Dungeon too easy.  It is, in many ways, much more forgiving than other Rogues.  In Dungeons of Dredmore or Rogue Legacy, if my hero dies, whatever.  I get a cute little sentence about it, and they appear in a log of dead heroes, and I randomly generate a new hero to take on the world with.  That's a by-product of the unforgiving nature of Rogue-a-likes as a game type: there's no reason to get attached, since your character is almost certainly going to die, and you're just going to iterate on their story in an hour or two by making a new one.  Darkest Dungeon eschews this punishing cycle of violence, instead opting to ask players to slowly build up connections to their adventurers, sending them out on missions and, in the end, forcing them to sometimes overextend, or field inexperienced parties to complete particularly challenging missions.

So there are fewer character deaths overall, but when those deaths happen it's all the more meaningful.  When you lose that A-list party because you went up against a boss unprepared and exhausted, you're going to feel it a lot more than when you lost that awesome Ninja a few steps into a boss-fight in your fifth or sixth attempt to kill some giant, screaming, flaming skull.  And each death also becomes a learning experience.  I lost a character during the tutorial.  A highwayman ended up in the front line, taking hits instead of a crusader and, sure enough, he died.  Hard.  But that highwayman, whose name is lost (to me, not the game - Darkest Dungeon memorializes that shit to an impressive degree) taught me an important lesson about positioning party members, and the difference between front-line and back-line fighters.  If I'd kept him on the back line, he might still be with me today.  If I'd known to keep some healing items around so I could get up to full-health before boss-fights whenever possible, or if I'd been better at scouting, or if I'd controlled the skeletons that that necromancer threw at me a little better, my adventurers would be alive now.  And that's the power of Darkest Dungeon: it provides me with "never again" moment after "never again" moment, iterating on that tradition until I find myself here, with Aungier, learning an important lesson about keeping strong, reliable adventurers in the wings to fill out my party.  You never know when they might come in handy, after all.  And you never know who might break.  But we'll talk more on that later.

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