The gothic roguelike turn-based RPG style of Darkest Dungeon 2 is a crowd-pleaser, but extending its release to other platforms could bolster its market standing. The origins of the Darkest Dungeon series harken back to the release of the original title, Darkest Dungeon, in 2016. The creation of this game was the outcome of the work put in by Red Hook Studios, a Canadian-based indie game developer. It soared to fame for its dark narrative, complex gameplay mechanics, and striking art style. The first title premise revolves around the player inheriting an estate from a relative who has unearthed dark and ancient evils beneath their family’s ancestral home.
Players must recruit and manage a team of adventurers, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and quirks, to explore the depths of the estate and confront the eldritch horrors lurking within. Key elements of gameplay include turn-based combat, resource management, party composition, and the stress mechanic, which simulates the psychological toll of facing terrifying adversaries. The studio behind the original game returns to bring us Darkest Dungeon 2, its sequel. Darkest Dungeon 2 entered the early access phase on the Epic Games Store in 2021. This granted players the opportunity to experience the game’s development process and provide feedback to the developers. Two years on the clock, the final release was months later than expected.
The PC Version of Darkest Dungeon 2 Has Its Merits, but It’s Not Perfect by Any Means
Although dubbed a sequel, Darkest Dungeon 2 feels more like a re-envisioning or reworking of the original game rather than a direct extension. While it retains the dark and gritty atmosphere of its predecessor, it introduces several significant changes to gameplay mechanics and structure. Except for that, subpar PC optimization is what made it average at best. As soon as its full release in 2023, there has been a barrage of complaints from different forums about the underwhelming performance that even its promising gameplay mechanics couldn’t redeem.
Specific areas like The Tangle are among the most vexing elements for players, as they seem to exhibit particularly poor performance, with constant stuttering and low FPS. Similar to most RPGs, the PC version of Darkest Dungeon 2 comes with specific minimum and recommended system requirements to guarantee smooth performance. Meet the minimum requirements with 8 GB of RAM, an AMD Radeon R7 370 GPU, an Intel Core i5-4460 processor, and about 6 GB of free space on your hard drive.
The recommended specs to make the most out of the game, as they say, are 16 GB of memory, an NVIDIA GeForce 510 graphics card, and an Intel Core i7-6700K CPU. With that said, players who own modern gaming rigs shouldn’t have any doubts about its performance. But that’s until more and more players, even those with high-end PCs, began to complain about stuttering and FPS drops. Even more so for those playing on older or mid-range GPUs, the game would be a complete disaster. Some players even suspect memory leaks due to the observed degradation in performance over time and eventual crashes.
The Trend for Darkest Dungeon 2 to Arrive on the Gaming Giants’ Consoles Is Leaning Towards a “Yes”
The subpar performance of the PC version was enough for some players to turn their backs on the game for good. But the prospect of it branching out to other platforms is also tempting enough for most to give it another shot. Consoles have standardized hardware, enabling developers to optimize games efficiently for specific models and handle performance issues in a timelier manner. Compared to PCs, which have a wide range of hardware configurations, the abundance of options makes it complex to optimize performance for every possible setup.
Execution-wise, Darkest Dungeon 2 offers a clever and robust reinvention of the series, all while retaining the same emotional highs and lows as its predecessor. The developers have always been open about their plans to make Darkest Dungeon 2 available on other platforms, but speculation began with publicly available data being exposed. Gematsu revealed that a listing on Brazil’s National Press website showed age ratings had been granted to the PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S versions of the game.
Neither of the console versions of Darkest Dungeon 2 had a release date specified in the report. Red Hook Studios chose to break their silence and make an official announcement one month after the government records were uncovered. Confirmation has been made for The Darkest Dungeon 2 to release on both PS4 and PS5, slated for debut on July 15, 2024. They also mentioned that launching on PlayStation has enabled them to make the most out of the tactile DualSense features. But there hasn’t been any mention of the release on either Xbox or Switch.
This has made some fans curious about whether Sony “sponsored” the port. A developer chimed in on the comment thread, but they skirted around the question. However, they did mention that they’re not currently able to discuss the game’s availability on consoles other than PlayStation. Even then, other console versions aren’t entirely ruled out, given the developer’s assurance of “further announcements in the future.” Moving on, discover whether Overwatch 2 has implemented a player banning system here.
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