Dungeon Defenders: Awakened

slippery said:

New dungeon defenders game. This was Kickstarter some time ago and is in a 3 week beta right, with planned launch in February. Trendy is no more, they basically moved on from parent company and reformed as Chromatic Games. They are trying to go back to their roots with this game. It is very reminiscent of DD1.

In beta there are currently the 4 characters they will launch with, Squire Monk Huntress Apprentice. 4 maps and up to insane difficulty. They have a shot ton more planned for launch.

I have been playing so much I've forgotten to check other stuff on the internet. The game is pretty great, I highly recommend it if you liked DD1, other tower defense games, or even ARPGs

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Loved the first one, bounced off the second really hard it was pure pay to win and the unlocks behind time walls were fucking lame. Will give this one a go.

Ive always wanted to love the DD series and i like these types of games in general but....trendy. I did the 35$ kickstarter and i bought the old ones as well. All said and done i got my moneys worth so no huge complaints but trendy just drops the same ball over and over again. They simply dont get it.

I know its pre release so ill keep an open mind over the next few weeks but its off to a terrible start compared to other steam early release titles

• Once again “secret stats”. They dont show what anything does or what gains you get. All this does is annoy new people and prevent growth while mix/maxers will have the formulas figured out and on wiki in another week
• Inventory is garbage. Im fine with the loot grind and treadmill, thats always been this games shtick, every game has one. But to couple that with a completely garbage inventory, filtering system, upgrade determination/comparisons, management, selling, and upgrading process just baffles me. One would think theyd focus on this considering their past
• Multiplayer hurts you unless you are extremely coordinated and focused. This makes joining anything but premade groups garbage where people join and can troll you or through pure suck, do more harm than good.....on average! Bad players suck in all games, i get it. But you can carry an idiot in most groups if the rest are ok, in thia game one bad dude can cause mana fights, stronger monsters which overpower and player aggro means monsters will go chase someone down and because they are stupid they lure shit into towers

Ill ignore the balance for now giving them some benefit of early release and they will work on it, but the above concerns me. Its actually quite sad that this is their 3rd(4th?) try at this assuming you ignore their completely failed attempt at cashing in on moba a few years ago. I feel like they, or someone at the top, has this vision and they force compliance and prevent growth in their own game. They were kinda close with DD 2 and should have fixed that but ohh well.

I put hours into the other two and ill play this one for a bit too. I think that all my suspecisions were confirmed upon my first download and play though. It should be way further along and they have shown zero focus into the things that matter.

DD1 was great until they released that mythic shit where unupgraded trash drops made stuff you grinded and upgraded your ass off for completely obsolete. It was worse than when WoW would release an expansion and made all your previous stuff junk.

Even that, while annoying i can tolerate as the point of playing was grinding harder maps and gear upgrades. But at least they made it easy.

For example: in dd1 any loot you didnt pick up turned in to mana and mana was the currency and then you could upgrade the gear. A grind: yes. A reset of hard work: yes. But the process was simple and part of the game

In dd2: grind gear, but its mostly useless. Needed to farm random and rare gems to put in gear. Then gear sells for gold(not automatically) and gold upgrades gear along with components. So they obfuscated the entire process, kept the grind, but made it annoying because now you had to farm specific things instead of whatever you liked or was challenging.

Watch how the screw it up in this one too. Its almost like they try to make the upgrade process interesting, but all they really do is add an annoying layer, which isnt interesting, and just makes upgrading 3 steps instead of 1

They could do so much with the game if they did certain basic things better. Ive always loved the idea of a TD MMO where you could have giant raids with horde armies or big bosses, etc. no one has done it yet. Think wow or eq meets kings rush td or something.

Like i said. Ill give it an honest shot but for a steam early release its showing all the same shitty signs the previous 2 suffered from.
My two biggest issues with this game have always been the stupid secrecy around stats and what they do and how they can make a game 100% about farming loot and then not pit some damn effort into an inventory system to support it.
Played a bit today and its already frustrating on many levels. The ui is hideous and the controls/camera just dont feel right somehow.
I crave the TD style games so ill play but im fairly confident time will reveal this to be yet another turd by a company that should be succeeding

Im gonna have to disagree. All my major complaints still stand. They have such a niche market and they fail at it so badly

Have they said anything about p2w? I couldn't get into the 2nd one because it was almost like a mobile game with all the shit to buy.

My wife loved the other two. Prob be getting this at some point. Curious to hear what those of you that bought it think.

Delly said:

Have they said anything about p2w? I couldn't get into the 2nd one because it was almost like a mobile game with all the shit to buy.

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That's actually what this entire thing is about - apparently they had a fight with their publisher about it, then broke up and did their own version with no microtransactions.

We'll see if they manage to stay away from the sweet, sweet lure of the cash shop after they release though ;p

Ironically, DD1 had the best implementation of funding I've run across, where they only sold new characters. That works even better than expansions for me, because it doesn't take away anything from the base game, making effectively truly optional, and also something you'd want to buy, as opposed to feeling you have to to keep up. They released new maps etc to everyone.

velk said:

That's actually what this entire thing is about - apparently they had a fight with their publisher about it, then broke up and did their own version with no microtransactions.

We'll see if they manage to stay away from the sweet, sweet lure of the cash shop after they release though ;p

Ironically, DD1 had the best implementation of funding I've run across, where they only sold new characters. That works even better than expansions for me, because it doesn't take away anything from the base game, making effectively truly optional, and also something you'd want to buy, as opposed to feeling you have to to keep up. They released new maps etc to everyone.

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Yea except the new characters they offered were op as fuck! Lol

Summoner, Robot, and Jester all had some sweet uses. I spent a good 100 hours figuring out all the optimal farm spots. Was a ton of fun and if they had a little better loot management system I think I'd still be playing it today.

I loved dungeon defenders 1 but 2 was a mess. It started out okay but after finishing the campaign I took a break and came back and they had revamped everything to a point it was almost not the same game. It was so confusing I had trouble figuring out where I needed to start advancing again. They even changed how the currency system worked. I eventually figured it out but my wife had checked out by then. Hoping this one is more like the first.