Branded. beaten, and chained up for years, The Abomination has escaped his confinement and seeks refuge in the Hamlet! He is a tortured soul – a shapeshifting monstrosity with poison in his veins!

Some of you theorized that a shapeshifter might be in the works, and looks like your hunches were correct! We worked closely with our Lord Tier Kickstarter backer to craft this exciting and unique character, and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on him. The Abomination will go live for all our players in November, alongside two new backer-designed enemies – the Madman, and the Collector!

While I have you all here, let’s do a quick community update!

Since coming on board at Red Hook and getting up to speed, I’ve been able to interface with many of our active community members and also begin discussing the plans for the Darkest Dungeon community going forward.

A few weeks ago I hosted a discussion on the Class Tier List, where I asked the community to help rank the classes via Tiers. This served a multitude of purpose; 1. It helped me catch on quickly how everyone is feeling about the current class selection, and 2. It help foster a great discussion on feedback on what could make our game better.

In the recent run of discussions, we’ve talked a lot about features and balance concerns. Some of you feel that we are/have been ignoring your feedback, specifically as it relates to balance and tuning, but I want to say that nothing could be further from the truth. Just as past updates have included numerous gameplay adjustments, we expect to continue doing more of that on up to full release and even beyond. The nature of development is such that dependencies between depts (ie. Design, Art, Audio, etc) necessitate our focus presently be on getting the endgame content in place. This is our first priority. Once we’ve cleared the content hump, we’ll be able to cast a wider eye towards the game as a whole and see what improvements we are able to pursue before full release in light of your feedback. Every day we see awesome ideas being put forward by our community – we love it! Critiques, suggestions, praise, please continue to let us know whatever’s on your mind.

Darkest Dungeon has always been a passion project for us. We love our game, and we love working on it. You can expect us to continue refining, adding and enhancing the game experience well beyond our full release launch on January 19th 2016. Ultimately, our conversation and dialogue with our fans has helped us shape our game for the better. That’s what Early Access is all about: interacting with our community to help the game we want to make be the very best it can be.

I wish we could share more of content we are working on right now to give you a glimpse of the hellish terrors that await, but we feel it’s very important to keep everything related to the final chapter of the game a secret so January’s release is a fresh experience for everyone.

This naturally puts us in a tough spot because we love engaging and sharing what we are working on with our community!

However, here are some things I can confirm:

Subtitles will be in the final build

All game text content will be localized to a number of languages – exact list will be confirmed at a later date.

Regular Dev Streams will be starting back up!

Time allowing, we want to upgrade and enhance the behaviors and skills of some existing monsters, to bring them closer to the diversity of mechanics that we see happening in the Cove.

That big UI/UX/Tutorial thread had a good deal of actionable items we had our own concerns about but were echoed by our community. We are going to try to incorporate some of that feedback before launch, and will look for opportunities to improve other items post-launch as we roll out other updates and expansions.

More additions to the soundtrack at launch!

Sharpen your claws, and get ready for the Abomination next month!

~ John