How Darkest Dungeon II's developers evolved their Early Access process
What's the difference between Darkest Dungeon II and game development?
One is a long arduous journey defined by frequent bickering, stressful encounters, and demonic bosses. The other is Darkest Dungeon II.
With that perhaps too-obvious joke out of the way, let's move on to our usual business: exploring the very successful Early Access process behind Red Hook Studios' freshly released sequel. The first Darkest Dungeon was something of a game industry milestone: a Steam Early Access title that sold a bananas number of units (over 6 million copies since 2015) and a pioneer in how mid-sized developers can make the most of their presence on Steam.
For Darkest Dungeon II, Red Hook signed a deal with Epic to execute their Early Access journey on the Epic Games Store, and in the process have already managed to sell over 300,000 copies. Now that the game is fully released, we wanted to take a moment to check in with Red Hook's developers and see how their second run of Early Access went.
The answer? Very differently. Co-founders Chris Bourassa and Tyler Sigman took some time to explain how their team adjusted their methods for navigating this ever-evolving path of video game development.
In theory, the Early Access process is like beta testing. Players who participate are supposed to know they're working with an unfinished product, and as long as there's a certain level of shippable quality, they know they're there to give feedback and help make the game better.
The reality couldn't be further from that.
"We've kind of learned that you need an experimental branch of your Early Access game," Bourassa explained. "And then we have private test groups before we even go to the experimental branch, before we go to the main Early Access
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