Comment on

simple@piefed.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• you_are_dust@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is actually the reason I never finished the game. I pretty quickly got sick of looking every item up and/or constantly stopping to take notes about what items did. And I really like roguelikes a lot. But it felt like there was so much to have to memorize and for me in broke the otherwise fast pace of the game. Another victory for patient gaming!

  source

  • dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    All of the updates and content expansions and so on and so forth have really made Isaac unmanageable in that regard. Throw in the fact that there are quite a few item drops that are objectively detrimental in basically every situation so that a not insignificant fraction of the item pool is just trash drops that nobody in their right mind would ever pick up, and it gets ridiculous quickly. Once you have enough unlocked that you’re regularly getting runs down into the lower sub-basements of hell, unless you’re an absolute guru the meta is literally just to meta. Know a couple of the game-breaking combinations off the top of your head and cross your fingers that you’ll run across all of the components.

    This is in stark contrast to e.g. Dead Cells, which is why I’ve got such an immense respect for the latter. If you’re willing to adjust your play style slightly, every single drop in Dead Cells is a viable weapon that can be deadly in the right hands. You could be wielding a legendary golden abyssal trident, sure, but you can also just as well beat the shit out of all the boss monsters with a pair of frying pans tied together with some rope. It must have taken an immense amount of work to get all of that even vaguely balanced and ensure that there were no duds, wheras Isaac’s strategy seems to be more just throwing shit at the wall (probably literally…) to see what sticks, with a salting of deliberately adding things to troll the player for the lulz.

    source

    • you_are_dust@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I really like Dead Cells but I never got that run where I was able to finish it. I need to get back to that game as well.

      source
  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Same, I enjoyed the gameplay but every item drop was far less exciting because I’d need to pause and consult a wiki before making a choice.

    source
• MudMan@fedia.io ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The vast majority of people to be read as "a tiny fraction of players". It's just probably the players more likely to be part of the online community around the game or to play it consistently this long after release. I wouldn't be surprised if only a very, very small percentage of the twenty thousand people playing the game right now ever had installed any mods at all.

  While I don't have hard data on this, I can tell you I've played the game since the Flash days and certainly never modded it for this reason or even considered it. Wiki page open onthe side just in case? Sure. Mods? Nope.

  Intuitive perception on this stuff gets weird.

  source
• dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I believe initially this was supposed to be part of the appeal. Any item may or may not screw you over if you don’t know what it does which is in keeping with Isaac’s theme of being beat down by your circumstances. Part of gutting gud was intended to be memorizing what the often idiosyncratic items actually did. Except now with years of updates and content expansions there are so many items it’s unrealistic to keep track of it all anymore. In the early days I might have disagreed with this but now it makes sense.

  At least according to the patch notes you still have to collect an item the first time to get its full description, and the new descriptions don’t show at all until you beat Mom for the first time (i.e. you clear at least one basic run), so new players still get to experience the Fun and excitement of potentially getting hosed by an unfamiliar pickup.

  source

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah i think it should be an option to turn off. And like at my most addicted I would say git gud. But I come back for a few runs every few years and while I can remember some bs like soy milk + libra breaks the game in your favor but soy milk + brimstone is fucking unplayable. There’s so many items

    source
  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    To elaborate:

    One of the foundational elements of Rogue and Roguelikes (that is so polarizing it isn’t part of The Berlin Interpretation) is the idea of randomized and unknown item effects. It goes back to tabletop gaming where you would find a potion and have no idea what it does, so you would give a sample to a rat you keep in a cage or splash it on a goblin prisoner. For obvious reasons, that shit went away in favor of skill checks.

    The BoI items were very much in that vein. Theoretically you would memorize them over the course of runs and learn the synergies that helped you. In practice… ain’t nobody had time for that shit.

    But it is a design philosophy that wasn’t uncommon for roguelites/likes of the era.

    source

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It is maintained through pills and cards (potions and scrolls in other rougelikes). Pills are randomized at the start of the run, cards you have to remember what each does. But also tabletop rpgs have changed since then. 2e era fantasy Vietnam isn’t what most people want to play anymore and so while random potions still exist these days you’re more likely to be able to figure what they do before being turned into a chicken

      source
    • dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Binding of Isaac items are explicitly in that vein, in fact, given that its version of potions (pills) are indeed randomized on every run. I haven’t checked out the new update yet but insofar as I’m aware those still are.

      source
  • simple@piefed.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Except now with years of updates and content expansions there are so many items it's unrealistic to keep track of it all anymore.

    This. It made sense in Flash isaac when there were maybe 100 items, but now in Repentance+ there are just too many to count with many items looking very similar to others. Not including vague trinkets and run ending decisions like devil deals.

    source
  • cRazi_man@europe.pub ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah I got the impression that’s how they intended for the game to be played. I’ve had a BoI app on my phone for years to get around this.

    source