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In my honest opinion, there is no better game. It all just depends on what game you want. Do you want more relaxed, slow paced game with more expansion and fit for a completionist? Choose Gungeon. Do you want a more fast paced game with a more aggressive gameplay and very high difficulty? Choose Nuclear Throne. It all just depends on what you want out of a game.
I personally played and finished EtG first and only then NT, but I can't deny that the latter is the best one. EtG is more of a mix between TBoI and NT, that just does not work for me. Don't get me wrong; the humor, the design and the weapons are all pretty fun, but... the gameplay is a complete mess of RNG and unbalanced mechanics. Being good in EtG just means you grinded for the good unlocks and got lucky with the drops. There's very little you can do to influence the outcome of the run with your skill alone. If it goes bad, it goes bad, period. And while the same goes for TBoI, atleast that game is not DEMANDING in terms of skill, making it alot less frustrating and more casual. NT, on the other hand, relies on the player experience and strategy, making the RNG heavily influenced by it (excluding mutations). The only time you can feel cheated by it, is only when it rarely spawns you in a complete open area against tons of enemies (but even then, a good player can get out of it alive anyway). Plus, in NT there are no GOOD or BAD weapons, as they can all be useful and capable of leading you to victory if you are skilled enough. In short, EtG is quantity, while NT is quality; and, personally, I prefer a more balanced and actually skill demaning game. p.s. Shoutout to your wife for having to endure your gamer rage lmao
I love both but I think Enter the Gungeon has a funny and epic lore. Don't know much about Nuclear Throne lore though it's been awhile since I've played it
Great comparison and detail. Thank you for your thoughts. I've played 74 hours of Nuclear Throne and have still been unable to loop more than 5 times. It's just incredibly punishing. Looking forward to playing enter the gungeon.
I prefer gungeon. Nuclear Throne is truly too punishing in my opinion... mostly because of the RNG. instead of Gungeon which gives you well-designed, hand-crafted rooms (that might bore you sometimes), Nuclear Throne's Snow levels and Lab Levels can range WILDLY in difficulty even before doing any loops. like, literal 80% win rate vs 10% win rate kind of disparity, even on the same zone. Basically in NT if you get a lot of turns in the hallways, and a lot of covers / walls you can get back in behind after shooting stuff out, the levels are easy. But when they spawn huge areas with a lot of projectile-shooting enemies (mind you, with much quicker bullet speeds than gungeon!), it doesn't go well. Level design matters a lot, after all. But to add wound to the salt, the RNG in NT just feels rougher in general. The weapon drops table on the wiki does list the possible weapons, but as explained on top of the page about "Weapons", "Weapons are obtainable on the areas listed and all areas after (it)." So as you progress in NT, your pool gets diluted slowly with slightly better items overtime. Even though you want to get some good weapons, you can still see the 28 weapons in 1-1 to 2-1 out of ~90(!) weapons by the final zone chests, assuming all chances are the same, (or sadly, maybe no one bothered to code-dig and add the info of chances to the wiki). The pool gets worse when you loop, because 12 Golden Weapons that are minor upgrades to the original weak weapons dilute the pool, even though 6 plasma weapons possibly makes up for it. The bad thing about this is basically that your odds of getting bad weapons are only ever so slowly reduced per zone and basically stays at more than 30% on the final zone, not to mention the fact that you only get one weapon chest per floor iirc unless you skip some. Speaking about pickups, it does adapt to how many ammo you have, but running out on ammo is common in NT. Because you missing your health makes the chances of an ammo drop turning to a medkit instead gets higher, instead of rerolling health things separately on a separate drop. And you constantly have to switch to the gun with the higher ammo because you can only hold 2 at a time, not having enough reservoir to clear a good amount of enemies before getting another ammo drop that only fills your stuff partially when you get it, like 1/5ths of it. on the other hand, Gungeon has a lot of "smooth out the bad RNG possibility". First, look at the "Chest" page, on "Quality Frequency". From the starting floor, you can already get very good guns. The chances of getting a good chest (B tier or higher on my standard, which comfortably lets you clear even Forge, Final Zone enemies with no-hits) changes from 33%, to 53%, 72%, 78%, and 90(!!) on each floor consecutively. It does softly reset once you get A-tier or S-tier items (with the "Magnificence stat" which makes the chances of a next natural A/S-tier item get downgraded increase), but that's for game balance purposes. Regardless, your chances of getting a decent weapon before Dragun is still at 90% presumably even on the final floor, because Magnificence only removes the possibility of A or S tier items while D tier items stay at 10% on both chests. Each floor also gives you 2 chests + 1 boss reward all the time (with consistently better loot!!) and you can guarantee getting 2 guns if you don't obtain guns before beating the boss of the floor. Now, Check out the wiki for "Coolness" and you'll see that the amount of room rewards you get also depends on how unlucky you've been. Basically for every room you clear that didn't give you any rewards (hearts, armor, chest etc.), the chance to get it on the next room clear increases by like 9% constantly, up to 85%, and resets once you get one. However these additional pickup chances are SEPARATE from your usual Ammo drops (under the page "Pickups".). So you can get 6-9% chance of ammo per room clear on a baseline level, and an additional 3% ammo-weight-chance times 20% re-rolled separately as the general pickup which can drop Hearts or other pickups instead (including . Also, compared to nuclear throne, One Ammo pickups are often 100%-refilling your guns. Which never happens in Nuclear Throne.. with the alternative being the Spread Ammo (50% for currently held gun, 20% for all other guns). Clearly, the game is more generous than needed with the base percentages of good weapons and pickup rates. there's a huge difference here in how luck works. And having bad health never punishes your ammo, which still allows you to aim a bit more recklessly in general to focus on dodging. This, in my belief, is the core of good RNG game design. Gungeon excelled at it. As Nick Popovich (Slime Rancher Lead Dev) once stated in a maybe-now-deleted twitter thread, "Randomness should feel good; so make your drop rates for loot or whatever change overtime based on player effort". Clearing floors is "player effort". Beating bosses is player effort (And nuclear throne doesn't give additional chests after beating bosses while Gungeon does). And so players should have a slowly increasing chance of better luck overtime, balanced by whatever possible chance penalty you deem fit on overly good luck, but with the core rules trying to help unlucky players nonetheless. Some games do this (Slay the Spire's chance of Rare cards and Potion Drops, Necrodancer's Item Drops), but more definitely needs to be fine-tuned to minimize the odds of ultimate-bad-luck.
nuclear throne is in 4:3 aspect ratio so you don't have a big advantage in visibility on the sides on wider monitors. oh, and also: why did you have an old version as the gameplay footage? o:
you can play it at 60 fps if you select the openbeta branch, in the game properties. (in my/devs opinion it doesn't really matter since the resolution is so tiny. the mouse might feel a bit choppy at first, but you can also enable the native cursor in the options)
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In my honest opinion, there is no better game. It all just depends on what game you want.
Do you want more relaxed, slow paced game with more expansion and fit for a completionist? Choose Gungeon. Do you want a more fast paced game with a more aggressive gameplay and very high difficulty? Choose Nuclear Throne. It all just depends on what you want out of a game.
I personally played and finished EtG first and only then NT, but I can't deny that the latter is the best one.
EtG is more of a mix between TBoI and NT, that just does not work for me.
Don't get me wrong; the humor, the design and the weapons are all pretty fun, but... the gameplay is a complete mess of RNG and unbalanced mechanics.
Being good in EtG just means you grinded for the good unlocks and got lucky with the drops. There's very little you can do to influence the outcome of the run with your skill alone. If it goes bad, it goes bad, period.
And while the same goes for TBoI, atleast that game is not DEMANDING in terms of skill, making it alot less frustrating and more casual.
NT, on the other hand, relies on the player experience and strategy, making the RNG heavily influenced by it (excluding mutations). The only time you can feel cheated by it, is only when it rarely spawns you in a complete open area against tons of enemies (but even then, a good player can get out of it alive anyway).
Plus, in NT there are no GOOD or BAD weapons, as they can all be useful and capable of leading you to victory if you are skilled enough.
In short, EtG is quantity, while NT is quality; and, personally, I prefer a more balanced and actually skill demaning game.
p.s. Shoutout to your wife for having to endure your gamer rage lmao
Perfect comparison, D_Ray 👍
I love both but I think Enter the Gungeon has a funny and epic lore. Don't know much about Nuclear Throne lore though it's been awhile since I've played it
Great comparison and detail. Thank you for your thoughts. I've played 74 hours of Nuclear Throne and have still been unable to loop more than 5 times. It's just incredibly punishing. Looking forward to playing enter the gungeon.
I prefer gungeon.
Nuclear Throne is truly too punishing in my opinion... mostly because of the RNG.
instead of Gungeon which gives you well-designed, hand-crafted rooms (that might bore you sometimes), Nuclear Throne's Snow levels and Lab Levels can range WILDLY in difficulty even before doing any loops. like, literal 80% win rate vs 10% win rate kind of disparity, even on the same zone. Basically in NT if you get a lot of turns in the hallways, and a lot of covers / walls you can get back in behind after shooting stuff out, the levels are easy. But when they spawn huge areas with a lot of projectile-shooting enemies (mind you, with much quicker bullet speeds than gungeon!), it doesn't go well. Level design matters a lot, after all.
But to add wound to the salt, the RNG in NT just feels rougher in general. The weapon drops table on the wiki does list the possible weapons, but as explained on top of the page about "Weapons", "Weapons are obtainable on the areas listed and all areas after (it)." So as you progress in NT, your pool gets diluted slowly with slightly better items overtime. Even though you want to get some good weapons, you can still see the 28 weapons in 1-1 to 2-1 out of ~90(!) weapons by the final zone chests, assuming all chances are the same, (or sadly, maybe no one bothered to code-dig and add the info of chances to the wiki). The pool gets worse when you loop, because 12 Golden Weapons that are minor upgrades to the original weak weapons dilute the pool, even though 6 plasma weapons possibly makes up for it. The bad thing about this is basically that your odds of getting bad weapons are only ever so slowly reduced per zone and basically stays at more than 30% on the final zone, not to mention the fact that you only get one weapon chest per floor iirc unless you skip some. Speaking about pickups, it does adapt to how many ammo you have, but running out on ammo is common in NT. Because you missing your health makes the chances of an ammo drop turning to a medkit instead gets higher, instead of rerolling health things separately on a separate drop. And you constantly have to switch to the gun with the higher ammo because you can only hold 2 at a time, not having enough reservoir to clear a good amount of enemies before getting another ammo drop that only fills your stuff partially when you get it, like 1/5ths of it.
on the other hand, Gungeon has a lot of "smooth out the bad RNG possibility". First, look at the "Chest" page, on "Quality Frequency". From the starting floor, you can already get very good guns. The chances of getting a good chest (B tier or higher on my standard, which comfortably lets you clear even Forge, Final Zone enemies with no-hits) changes from 33%, to 53%, 72%, 78%, and 90(!!) on each floor consecutively. It does softly reset once you get A-tier or S-tier items (with the "Magnificence stat" which makes the chances of a next natural A/S-tier item get downgraded increase), but that's for game balance purposes. Regardless, your chances of getting a decent weapon before Dragun is still at 90% presumably even on the final floor, because Magnificence only removes the possibility of A or S tier items while D tier items stay at 10% on both chests. Each floor also gives you 2 chests + 1 boss reward all the time (with consistently better loot!!) and you can guarantee getting 2 guns if you don't obtain guns before beating the boss of the floor. Now, Check out the wiki for "Coolness" and you'll see that the amount of room rewards you get also depends on how unlucky you've been. Basically for every room you clear that didn't give you any rewards (hearts, armor, chest etc.), the chance to get it on the next room clear increases by like 9% constantly, up to 85%, and resets once you get one. However these additional pickup chances are SEPARATE from your usual Ammo drops (under the page "Pickups".). So you can get 6-9% chance of ammo per room clear on a baseline level, and an additional 3% ammo-weight-chance times 20% re-rolled separately as the general pickup which can drop Hearts or other pickups instead (including . Also, compared to nuclear throne, One Ammo pickups are often 100%-refilling your guns. Which never happens in Nuclear Throne.. with the alternative being the Spread Ammo (50% for currently held gun, 20% for all other guns). Clearly, the game is more generous than needed with the base percentages of good weapons and pickup rates. there's a huge difference here in how luck works. And having bad health never punishes your ammo, which still allows you to aim a bit more recklessly in general to focus on dodging.
This, in my belief, is the core of good RNG game design. Gungeon excelled at it. As Nick Popovich (Slime Rancher Lead Dev) once stated in a maybe-now-deleted twitter thread, "Randomness should feel good; so make your drop rates for loot or whatever change overtime based on player effort". Clearing floors is "player effort". Beating bosses is player effort (And nuclear throne doesn't give additional chests after beating bosses while Gungeon does). And so players should have a slowly increasing chance of better luck overtime, balanced by whatever possible chance penalty you deem fit on overly good luck, but with the core rules trying to help unlucky players nonetheless. Some games do this (Slay the Spire's chance of Rare cards and Potion Drops, Necrodancer's Item Drops), but more definitely needs to be fine-tuned to minimize the odds of ultimate-bad-luck.
Nt
Agree
agree
nuclear throne easily
Nuclear Throne walked so Gungeon could RUN
Nuclear. Say it with me now. New-clear.
nuclear throne is in 4:3 aspect ratio so you don't have a big advantage in visibility on the sides on wider monitors.
oh, and also: why did you have an old version as the gameplay footage? o:
I prefer Gungeon!
Etg easily
Gameplay: Throne
Aesthetics: Gungeon
Replayability: Tie
Sound Design: Throne
Narrative: Gungeon
Weapon Variety: Gungeon
Character Design: Throne
Enemy Design: Tie
Boss Design: Gungeon
Challenge: Throne
UI: Throne
Co-Op: Tie
By my metrics:
Throne: 5 (Winner)
Gungeon: 4
People actually wanna play at 30fps?
you can play it at 60 fps if you select the openbeta branch, in the game properties. (in my/devs opinion it doesn't really matter since the resolution is so tiny. the mouse might feel a bit choppy at first, but you can also enable the native cursor in the options)
I Haven,t played nuclear clone so enter the gungeon is my Pick
None
* cue "Can You Feel My Heart" in the background *