Balatro's 'Cursed' Design Problem
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- Опубліковано 1 кві 2024
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Balatro is the current game design darling. But even the designer is aware of a ‘fundamental design flaw’. What is it, can it be fixed, and what does it teach us about making games for people?
=== Sources and Resources ===
- Sources
[1] [AMA] I am localthunk, developer and artist for Balatro. Ask me anything! | Reddit
/ ama_i_am_localthunk_de...
[2] GD Column 17: Water Finds a Crack | Designer Notes
www.designer-notes.com/game-de...
[3] 136: Going in Blind with Balatro | Eggplant
eggplant.show/136-going-in-bl...
[4] Postmortem: McMillen and Himsl's The Binding of Isaac | Game Developer
www.gamedeveloper.com/busines...
[5] Isaac vs Mewgenics | Steam
store.steampowered.com/news/a...
[6] External Item Descriptions | Steam Workshop
steamcommunity.com/sharedfile...
=== Credits ===
Music provided by Epidemic Sound - www.epidemicsound.com/referra... (Referral Link)
=== Subtitles ===
Contribute translated subtitles - amara.org/videos/qZaMrU6iDy4J/ - Ігри
Amusingly, mods have already done what you've described: there's a mod out there that adds a bunch of new jokers, and one of them is Scouter - and all it does is show you how many points you're going to score. Making it a Joker is also really interesting because it means you're not using that Joker slot for something that actually provides a mechanical benefit, so there's an inherent trade-off to having that information available.
Just slap the wheel of fortune negative on it gamer style
But there's no real benefit to calculating exactly how much in 99.9% of cases. You only need to find the highest scoring hand you can make and you don't need to calculate it exactly to know that. You have to be completely inept to not realize which hand would score higher and roughly how valuable it is.
ultimately i'm very glad James hasn't used his insane coding skills to turn his Scouter Joker into a mod that just does the score preview without the Joker, for basically all the reasons stated in the video here
even then, if such a thing were to exist, it wouldn't be perfect: the Scouter Joker calculates what a hand will do, BUT for random elements (Bloodstone, Misprint, Lucky cards), it just calculates what *can* happen; if you have any of those, then there is a very real chance the Scouter Joker will display an inaccurate score.
this is probably the biggest thing preventing a mod from having a score preview--but also one of the biggest reasons why you SHOULDN'T have it, because if a score preview COULD work, and it would tell you the exact amount of Bloodstone procs you would get, or how many Lucky cards would trigger, that would be a pretty big problem
@@dingochungis6814 you should mention that typically the "random" elements are completely seeded, meaning a mechanic like scouter joker would be able to pick up on when your lucky cards would proc. But, that's no fun, nor is it very useful outside of heavily analyzed seeded runs. Like you said, that would be a very big problem.
@@albert2006xp I mean it is called The Scouter and presumably is based on the Frieza Force Scouters from Dragon Ball
whose main narrative role was to show that numerically quantifying fighting prowess isn't as huge of a boon as it's thought to be, used primarily as a diplomatic deterrence device for subjugated planets, and in fact made Lord Frieza's army WEAKER through its usage once they were up against enemies and powers who did not fit in the scaling system they had in place
This is also a famous problem in board games, typically referred to as "hidden but trackable information." The classic example is Catan, where player's hands are considered secret, even though every player knows exactly what is gained by each player and what cards each player spends, so a player with a pad of paper or a good memory can remember all of it.
Despite massive player push back, the designer of Catan has held firm on this rule. He said that the game just gets too slow and dull without it, as always knowing exactly what every other player has in hand means players can math out the game too precisely.
Interestingly, instead of allowing players to get around this rule, it is actually enforced in competitive Catan play (and players are not allowed to use paper to track). In effect, it adds a memory or deduction element to the game. According to top Catan players, logical deduction typically gets them close enough that very few players actually bother with trying to track every card draw and discard.
Just an interesting note that despite massive push back from the part of the player base that wants to "optimize" this rule away, it has remained. And that even the competitive community has ended up embracing it.
It's especially cool to hear that the top players don't bother to memorize draws/discards. If memorization were incentived too heavily, it would fundamentally change what kind of game it is. I think most designers like having an element of paying attention, without necessarily wanting the whole experience to devolve into a game of Memory.
Catan doesn't have 100% trackable resources. When you steal from an opponent it's random and secret from the other players.
This is also basically what several HUD mods in Payday 2 do. Provide information that is technically public but in a convenient way without tabbing out and look it up for example. It even goes so far as to not show potential loot until you find it open it because that is actually random and not public knowledge. My friends accused me of cheating for using it though haha. Nothing serious as it’s PVE anyways.
Similar to the Catan example, another really interesting case of this is in the Dune board game. There are hidden but trackable card hands in that game too, but only if you play as House Atreides are you allowed to write down which cards the other players have, with the in-universe reason being their strong familiarity with the mind-enhancing abilities of the spice.
Why is having a skill a problem in board games? If someone has attained enough skill to be able to track opponent resources, then why is that considered problematic, but other areas of board games, like logical deducation or foreplanning, are not considered problematic? Wouldn't that mean that the entire game had to have absolutely random outcomes for each system each time, in order to produce a fair board game?
To me, not being able to preview the score is one of the game's greatest strengths, but the ability to calculate it yourself as a last resort is exactly what makes Balatro an all timer. Sure, you can mostly rely on rough estimation without thinking too hard about everything, but there's also an undeniable magic in the adrenaline of having only 1 hand to cover a ton of points and having to desperately pull out your calculator to figure out what combination of jokers, card order or hand type can get you through.
Plus, even when I do so, there's been so many times when, in the heat of the moment, I fail to take card interactions, debuffs, effects, or boss abilities into consideration in my calculations and end up failing miserably when I was so confident, or crushing the blind when I thought all hope was lost, and it is extremely fun no matter the outcome.
To me, the only thing that would suck the fun out of it is using the dedicated hand calculator, but even then, if someone chooses to play like that and still gets a fun and rewarding experience out of it, then it's still a net positive.
This exactly. See also my toplevel comment
People seem to be forgetting that at its core, Balatro is a gambling game cleverly disguised as a roguelike. Every action you take, whether it's skipping a blind or buying a booster pack, is a choice that could gimp your run just as much as it could help you. Showing the score would just remove another layer of that uncertainty that makes the game so addicting in the first place, imo.
Bingo.
There's been moments where I'm on my very last hand to try to get the dub... it's in reach and I'm running about 100 calculations in my head, trying to see if it works out... and eventually I just say "ah screw it" and play it. It's that moment where you're in this area of "come on, come on, come on" that is INCREDIBLE when it works, and heart wrenching when it doesn't.
But then you think... "let's try that again".
A score calculator seems like it would take that heart pounding feeling away entirely.
Though, the mod that offers a Joker that will calculate your score is actually pretty brilliant. Giving up a spot for jokers to have such a utilitarian card has been done in other games, and I think this would be a great compromise.
I agree. Usually, I'll just throw out the hand with a rough guess of what it'll be, but in a pinch situation I'll do the math and it's satisfying to get it right.
it's also good for becoming better at math if you just don't use a calculator
I think Isaac's "figure it out" approach worked at the start because there were less 200 of them and most of them had a a pretty immediate effect. Nowadays there's over 700 of them, and some of them have really weird effects and/or only activate under specific circumstances. Especially with trinkets, I have over 1000 hours in the game and I really just do not remember what half of them do. Without Item Descriptions, a lot of trinkets just become "thing I pick up and then replace with something that I actually know about without ever seeing their effect activate".
I like the method used in The Void Rains Upon Her Heart. Item pick ups are initially kept hidden to the player, but after picking one up, you can unlock their description. Something like that in Isaac would be a nice compromise.
Exactly, the discovery part in isaac is actually quite fun, and I had a blast debating what things did with friends back when both the original tboi and rebirth came out. Many of the later effects are just too wild for that same philosophy is all.
Maybe something like beating the game with an item unlocks the description on future runs? That sounds fun
Trinkets in particular are pretty bad about not even making it obvious what they do _even as you're using them._
Trinkets are really bad. I started using the item description mod because I realized that even after playing hundreds of times, *I still had no idea what the vast majority of trinkets actually do*.
And also, because with half a dozen massive expansions now you are often going like ten hours between seeing the same items. I wasn't really able to remember what most of them do even despite having seen them a dozen times. A lot of the interesting decisions you make in Isaac don't apply if you don't remember what anything does.
And add on that a lot of item icons are very similar to each other. In addition to remembering all of the effects you have to remember if this specific eyeball, or cat, or fly, or zodiac sign is the one that may ruin your run or if it is the one that makes you overpowered. The mystery was a fun aspect of the game, until it got so complex that it wasn't anymore.
Fun fact: Balatro is actually an old word for jester or joker, which was used frequently in Ancient Rome
I've been curious where the name came from! Thanks!
It's also the Finnish word for witch
Thats actually a cool fun fact, thx
I was almost gonna google that
It doesn't sound like Latin though
The thing with Binding of Isaac is, there's literally over 300 different items you can collect. And some of their effects can be pretty niche. I've been using the "item description mod" for as long as I can remember. Makes playing the game so much more fun when you can actually understand what you're getting. Maybe when BoI first came out, not having items described made sense. But now? After like 4 expansions and a ton of free updates? There's too much for any player to possibly remember. And it's just not that fun.
ESPECIALLY because so many power-ups can actually be detrimental to your playthrough. I have had a few runs end because I picked up a power-up that really fucked my guy over.
Imagine in Balatro if your Joker cards didn't tell you what they did until you used them. It would make the game unplayable.
Aye, I also made a comment saying much the same thing. Balatro lacking a score preview makes it very hard to play the game *optimally*, but its not hard to play the game *pretty well*. Not knowing what the items in Binding of Isaac do makes it very hard, and often frustrating, to play the game remotely well in the first place. That's a huuuuuge difference.
Wonderfully put 👍
300 ? Repentance is 700+ total items ! I totally agree, I've played BoI since the base release in Flash and it totally made sense at the time to go blind, but now, it's just annoying to play without the item descriptions because there are so many of them that, even if you try to pick one blindly once, since, maybe you won't see it a second time for 10h of playtime, you just forget about its effect, take it again and then remember.... how shitty it was for your current build. It's not a run destroyed with a funny surprise, just a run destroyed because you just can't remember them all...
And it became even worse with the introduction of trinkets some versions ago, some of them, you won't undersand what they do even after picking them up blindly 10 times because they just do something oddly specific, like raising the luck of something dropping a little or that kind of thing you just can't figure out for yourself without thousand of hours of game experience.
The original game was well designed with that lack of information in mind, but what it is today, is a totally different game.
Actually I think it was an error to want to add more and more and more. I think it makes the game very difficult to pick up and play for the first time today if you haven't been playing it for years and see it grows batch of content, after batch of content. I don't play it anymore, I find it a lot less fun than when it was simpler
Yea this comparison just feels like "a good youtube content idea" more than an argument.
yep, and this is basically exactly what McMillen said in the quote that was briefly on screen. It worked when there were 100 items, and none of their behaviors were too obscure or interconnected. But now there's nearly 10 times as many, and some of them would basically be impossible to deduce on your own or even in a small group.
If people knew they would win before gambling, then it would be significantly less popular.
The adrenaline rush of not knowing a result until the ball drops is what keeps people playing. Seeing that before you even hit "Go" would definitely make Balatro far less popular than it currently is.
Not for me. Winning is expected, so finding you lost is a sudden
disappointment.
@@PikaPenny17 cool
The game does not give you your score, but it gives you enough info that you can reliably estimate pretty quick. The scores in Balatro are so bonkers anyway that you rarely need to calculate them precisely, but with a little experience you can ballpark them in a bracket narrow enough that you don't need to worry. And anyways this is not the kind of game where you have a lot of different ways to play the cards in your hand, so even if a hand is not enough there's probably nothing you can do better with what you have. To me the most fun about Balatro is to set this little formula in your head and tweak it to maximise your score, it's a really fun game for people that like mental mathematics and a score display would take that away.
I'm really bad at mental mathematics so maybe this can be introduced as an accessibility option. I mean, that's kind of how it was in Isaac.
@@evandrofilipe1526 you dont even need to be doing rough estimates past the first ante though, imo. The 1st small blind can be beat in one hand with a high enough flush, straight, or full house, and any combination of those same hands will 2-shot the boss. In ante 2 you should hopefully have enough scoring jokers to easily one or two-shot all the blinds regardless of what you play, and by the time you're in ante 3 and 4 you should be getting your deck narrowed down enough that you're pretty much just playing your strongest hand every time. At that point i just worry about whether or not I'm one-shotting the small blinds and do some rough estimation. For example, let's say the small blind requires 300k points and the boss requires 600k (ante 6). If you can beat the small blind in one hand then you know you should be able to beat the boss in 2 hands, assuming you don't get super unlucky.
Tl;dr: just make a mental note of how much you're scoring with a strong hand and use that to estimate how many hands it will take to beat the boss
So i realize i kinda contradicted myself back there lol, but the main point is you really don't need to do any difficult math to get a decently accurate estimate, even in the higher antes you really just need to be adding three digit numbers
@@yellowsaurus4895 I know that but thanks and also, I think you've been playing higher difficulties because I don't know in what world ante 6 small blind is 600k
@@evandrofilipe1526 the boss on ante 6 is 600k, not the small blind :) I definitely have not been playing on higher difficulties, I just barely got my first red stake win yesterday haha
For Isaac, I always thought the easiest thing to do was to add full item description after you tried said item at least once. That way, I feel like players would be more willing to experiment.
In the past yes, now with hundreds of items, that wouldn't be good enough for new players. Also a problem after you reinstall the game and lost your save.
Maybe the beastiary style solution:
-First pickup: no name, no description, no stats, no synergies, just an icon
-Second pickup: Brimstone, no description, no stats, no synergies, Icon
...
-5th pickup: Brimstone, Shoots a blood laser barrage, Deals x0.3 Isaac's tear damage per tick and tick rate scales with tears, Has a synergy with 2 items in your inventory, Icon
@@gameplayfirst6548 Losing your save should never be taken into consideration with any features being added since that would discourage the devs from ever adding unlockable content if that was the case.
Or after completing a run with the item. Give people a reason to try some of the less popular things even if they look up what they do.
@@gameplayfirst6548 why tho? new players should explore the game. not knowing what comes next. In such game id rather not know what am I going to fight with than know precisely what each thing does
One possible solution in a game like Binding of Isaac would be to implement an in-game knowledge database you could fill up as you learn mechanics. The game would reflect this in the HUD by only providing you the info that you've already learned.
I love that. Gives completionists even more of an incentive to collect everything
Also you could implement a randomizer to the names of the items making sure everyone who googles an item doesn't get the same features
I agree with this. A lot of games that prioritize the sense of discovery fails to realize how annoying it is for the player to have to remember a bunch of info for a task they’ve already completed. Hence the wiki searches.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this implemented in a game or mod before, and I absolutely love the idea!
This is such a basic game design idea that even I thought of it before, so there's no way the developers didn't.
I kinda disagree with your conclusion here. I think the solution Balatro arrived at is awesome, because it's easy to "guesstimate" your score, which is a major strategy factor...but it's hard to precisely calculate it. Often not quite "impossible" but still...Thus, for me at least, the score preview provides guidelines, and I usually find it more interesting and efficient to experiment with different hands at various points in order to test or confirm what actually works best for my current deck and joker loadout.
If your game has a "ruin fun" button (using external tools to calculate everything and remove suspense) but you manage to design the game so that only a tiny percentage of players actually bother pressing it, then that's good design right? I get that from a purely objective lens the game has something you could describe as a game design flaw, but it's also something that most people won't encounter. Effort and time are resources too even if they aren't in the code, and this time the game has been balanced in a way where the time/effort to calculate your hand just isn't worth it to most players so in my eyes the problem has been solved.
It's a thing that the small percentage of people think they want but actually don't. BOI is an amazingly bad comparative, but in Balatro, having a score preview be anything other than a rare joker (That would then actually take up a slot and make it impossible to beat the base game for anyone that needs the score preview), would ruin fun. It would be an effective "Ruin fun" button that some people would press, think is cool, then never play the game after 2hours
On the subject of issac, I think one of the biggest issues with not giving info was the fact you have a fair amount of items with tradeoffs, negative effects, and anti-synergies. So times looking stuff up felt less like "which of these options is optimal" and "will taking this item ruin my run." Ironically, Issac Pills feel like a better implementation of "hidden information" - each run they're randomized, so you can't just wiki it. (and I think once you checked a pill, you'd know what it'd do for the rest of a run)
That's actually a core feature in a couple of older roguelikes. Usually see in in the dungeon crawlers. Nethack is a great example. Rings, wands, potions, and a couple other classes of items will have a set of appearances and effects, but the pairs are shuffled per run. A red potion could be healing in one run, but acid in another, so you have to try and figure out what does what in each run. You have a bunch of ways of figuring them out too, so you aren't forced to just tank the bad outcomes (eg baiting enemies into drinking potions and seeing what happens).
Isaacs bigger issue, to me, is a lack of an ingame means of collecting the information you discover. Balatro tells you how jokers work + has a collection tab where you can review every joker you have unlocked, if you need a refresher on what you could draw. Isaac forces you to do it yourself.
@@gamemaniac2013 Streets of Rogue does this with all the potions in the game if I remember correctly. If you're not sure what a potion does, you can drink it, but also do things like load it into a syringe gun and hit someone with it, or vaporise it into a building's ductwork. Once you see it affect someone, you learn the potion and can see in the future which one it is.
This is why I bounced off Isaac both times I tried it (original and rebirth). It just felt like I was being punished for experimenting. I understand the decision to make the game more 'mysterious', but the lack of information just made the game more frustrating to me.
Yeah, it's fun to learn "oh, Trisagion is a piercing attack, like a beam!" but it's not fun to have to memorise "Trisagion combos with this item, combos secretly with that item, overwrites another item, dumps your damage with yet another item, and kills you if you pick up that particular item".
It's. Spelled. I s a a c. 2 A's.
I love that Balatro doesn't have the score preview for all the reasons you/localthunk have stated, I think an additional advantage is that it allows you to get a different feeling/intuition about each run, instead of having to do a calculation most of the time you can draw on your past experience in the run and just make an approximation of if the hand you're about to play is good enough based on your recent history.
this is exactly how i play. there are times where i want to vibe and i just play based on experience. other times i’m super sweaty and i start doing all the math. without an explicit score preview, i love having *the option* to play either casually or sweaty, depending on my mood.
@@unconcernedsalad2 same, I will usually make hand builds and try for example to max out 2-3 card hands levels with planet cards and the best jokers for these specific hands.
I can then ballpark the points and I know I can win rounds in 1-3 hands until a certain blind level.
@@r3dsnow757yeah eventually you can just look at a hand and be like “eh i’ll probably be fine”
yeah the issue of calculation only really comes up when you aren't just trying to win in as few hands as possible. Needing to get >100k in as few hands as possible is easy to deal with - you can just calculate the differences between hands and see what is bigger. Needing to average 25k to win in 4 hands exactly is a lot harder to calculate (and very variable - do you score 1000-1000-1000-150k, or 20k-20k-20k-50k).
It also helps that the required scores grow exponentially. Since we aren’t great at estimating big numbers, eventually you just try to “feel it”
Cool mechanics and fun gameplay aside, can we talk about the art for the joker cards for a minute?
Look at the subtle smirk on their faces, the tasteful sheen of their foil. Oh my god, they even follow your cursor when you mouse over them.
It's not quite the same vibe, but as a designer myself who likes thinking about combinatorics and the action economy of a game? I absolutely calculated my Balatro turns in advance starting from my very first session. The DIFFERENCE is that I don't pull out a calculator, I just kinda roughly eyeball it and make sure I'm landing where I want it to. It keeps a lot of the thrill of not knowing just HOW big it will be, while still giving me the assurance I'm not making a tactically stupid decision.
I know this is a month late but eyeballing it past a certain level or doing so on EVERY important hand takes the fun out. Royally fucking up is one of the things that makes rogue lites so fun, it's up to you to throw the whole run or pull off the greatest run ever and I think it's always preferable to not know which one you're headed towards quite.. People avoid screw ups because of perfectionism and that's its own ball of trauma and fear of failure that sucks away happiness in life irl or in games
@@connorking984for some people, part of the fun IS eyeballing the scores, or running the math to figure out what you need to do to win.
Rougelites can be lots of fun when it's a mechanical challenge that you have to skill your way through. When it's rolling dice to see if you win, why not just play a slot machine endlessly.
Lol exactly. I got it the other day and I’m just like “ehh this one looks better than this, hope i’m right!”
I think Binding of Isaac is kind of a different case. The game has like 1000 items and not knowing what they do is frustrating. Half of them have effects that you would NEVER figure out unless you looked it up, and others will instantly destroy your nice build that you spent an entire run making. The item description mod has in my opinion been the best thing to ever happen to the game.
Risk of Rain 2 does it quite well IMO, it doesn't explain item scaling or mechanics when you pick up an item, but they generally give an idea of what it does. Then you can look up in the codex how the numbers work. Also helps that with very rare exception all RoR2 items are positive.
As Sam o’ nella said, ambiguity is the worst thing in rougelikes.
Agreed, very different risk/reward tradeoff. In Balatro people know if it's down to the wire that they can do the math, but rarely does it come down to this and thus there is ample opportunity for surprise in both directions when that Joker ordering of operations ends up behaving differently to your expectations.
Depends on the player. As Edmund mentioned, he wanted to recreate the mystery from his childhood. Players who aren't in a rush to complete things may appreciate the wonder and whimsy of experimentation, and find the runs that end because of weird items to be funny, rather than frustrating. I think the majority of modern gamers prefer to have the descriptions though.
@@furgel7717 agreed
Of course Mark makes a video entirely based on the game he's been addicted to throughout developing his game
He's only got 30 hours in it tho
@@Dharengo _only_
@@Jacob-Jack Yes? Why the italics?
@@Dharengojoking around
@@Jacob-Jack What's the joke? Sorry if my sense of humor is insufficient.
When Tunic nerfed an overpowered item combination (increasing its mana cost from 1 to 4), they also added a code that reverts the nerf for 80 seconds, specifically because the speedrun depended on the cheaper mana cost. I can't remember if this code is alluded to in-game.
I think the specific issue that high level very optimization focused players have in balatro is that there are some strategies that don't rely on beating every blind in as few hands as possible. While that is the default play pattern due to safety, convenience and the gold you get for doing it, sometimes it's better to play hands rather than just finish the blind.
This makes your calculation requirements much much harder. If all you need to do is win is as few hands as possible, it's fairly simple to just figure out what your biggest scoring hand will be, even if you don't calculate exactly how big it'll be, and just play it out. If you have an ambiguous situation where you need multiple hands it's a bit trickier to work out whether your biggest scoring hand is worth playing versus maybe playing something that scores less and saves important cards, but doable. If you are trying to squeeze all four or five of your hands out of every round without accidentally busting or spending too few hands it becomes very tedious to calculate your score (and much more important, because you're a lot more likely to make mistakes that lose the run than if you are score maximizing).
Yes, exactly what i was thinking.
Ngl, i only calculate my score on the boss bind where you are allowed one hand.
I calculate on that one, The Needle, or the Violet Vessel, the one with the massive blind. In every other situation if I lose, I lose lol
I also calculate my score only for the very first small blind just to see if I'll oneshot it. Otherwise I just play because it's more fun that way, and usually I'll be fine or die regardless!
I do too, and always have this moment of reflection when I realized I messed up in the run before playing that doomed hand.
Occasionally, I'm totally lucky and I get saved by Mr Bones which I always forget when I have it.
The Needle gets me every time I play while I smoke. Every time.
@@MelodiCat753 I did at one point but I can intuition what hands will one shot the first small blind. It's normally 5 card hand with high cards, so high straight/high flush kind of hands.
In magic the gathering, the information in between "hidden" and "public" is "derived information".
"Public information" is everything a player is required to share to his opponent about his card on demand, things like amount of cards in hand, life total and others.
"Hidden" is every information unkown to one or both player, like what cards are in your hands, what is the order of cards in your library.
"Derived" Is everything you can deduce from public information, if a player returns a card from play to their hand, they are in no obligation to reveal that this card is now in their hand because it's a "hidden" zone, but a skilled opponent will remember this "derived" information.
I think it's a pretty good naming convention for this "in between" for information technically public but not easily available.
I was just thinking about MTG. A direct parallel to the Balatro score thing is what's in the opponent's hand. Like you say, if player 1 returns a Merfolk Trickster to their hand, and doesn't discard/exile face down/return to library anything, player 2 knows with 100% certainty that Merfolk Trickster is there. For this reason, some implementations like Magic Arena will actually show player 2 the card for as long as it is "derivable" that p1 has the Trickster. But this is not uncontroversial; some players feel that the game shouldn't "aid" you like this, especially when the rules of the game when played in paper offer no such aid.
notably, legends of runeterra shows you how much life total players will lose after the resolution of a spell or attack, and there's an icon that you can mouse over that will also show you the entirety of the board state, including lost creature health and generated cards in hand.
On mtg arena, the game will help you to remember this derived information. For example, by adding a little eye icon to cards in your hand that have been revealed to the opponent.
This makes sure that tryhard players that make notes on paper do not have an advantage over casual players.
It also makes games faster, as players don't have to spend time and energy playing a memory mini-game and can focus on the important aspects of the game instead.
do people still play magic in 2024? wizards has fallen so far, it's hard to believe it's still popular.
@@leshtricity I mean kitchen table Magic is a concept that exists
I wonder if McMillen only rented Zelda as a kid? The game came with an instruction booklet that explained all the items.
This does bring up something I think a lot of young people playing retro games don't always understand, which is that the instruction booklet was part of the experience back then. Thanks to memory and technical limitations, there were rarely in-game tutorials, so you were expected to reference the book. Of course, many games were also intentionally obtuse beyond that.
Every time I got a new game, I was always super excited to read the story section of the booklet. I kinda miss that feeling.
Man, I remember those days. I would just sit down and read through the instruction manuals of my games. They were made to be really thematic and fun, too - almost like a little magazine that immersed you in your game's world. I miss those days. 🥲
Ffffeh... you _say_ that, but at least in respects to Nintendo games of the era, the instruction book was genuinely 100% optional, and a lot of people didn't read them. Nintendo designs their games in such a way that learning the mechanics is an inevitable result of simple experimentation; for example, in SMB1, you *cannot* progress without learning how to jump, because there's a goomba in your way. You will almost certainly learn about power-ups, because the first bricks and ?-blocks you encounter are placed in such a way that, as a result of evading the next goomba, hitting the ?-block is the most likely outcome.
Now, granted, Zelda is a lot more freeform than SMB games are, but the same rules still apply. When you first start a game of Zelda and you're on the first screen, in almost all cases, you _will_ enter the first cave and get the the sword from the old man. Sure, you can technically leave that screen without it, but that's just something that doesn't happen lmao, because that first cave entrance is placed so as to be the most obvious element, and thus the path of least resistance.
@@technoturnovers7072 Obviously, they're optional of course. And a well designed game will lead you to discover the mechanics in a natural fashion. My point is that booklets fleshed out the experience in an era when space and fidelity were extremely limited.
For example, even though Zelda has some story in the game when you let the title screen sit, the booklet further fleshes it out by telling about Impa's flight from Ganon's forces to find Link. It adds some extra worldbuilding.
I'm (mostly) on team "leave it the way it is". I've had a handful of Balatro moments where I've cleared the blind by the skin of my teeth, came just shy of the point total, or completely miscalculated and either blew the blind out of the water or fumbled the bag. Trackable information isn't necessarily a design flaw, as it gives players an analog choice: Some will ignore the idea entirely, some will brute force it with calculators or mods, and some like myself will do something in the middle.
Face down cards (and I think stone cards as well?) can have their information sussed out by sorting by rank or suit and comparing their position to neighboring cards. Usually I don't go to great lengths to identify anything beyond suit (flush gang where you at), but sometimes you gotta do some heavy tracking and logic puzzling to nail that one straight so you don't die to a stray boss blind. I'll even slow the game down back to 1x just to track face down jokers and reshuffle them back into their proper order.
The key thing here is letting players discover and manipulate the game the way they see fit. Adding the score calculator or a hand scoring preview could be an assist feature for players who aren't fans of math, but I don't think it has any place in affecting the core game.
3:38 "Stern spreadsheet style strategy" is my new favorite vocal warmup
XD
Happy to see "streamed by pretty much everyone" = Northenlion
The egg rises!
Egg mentioned, we stay winning
Stay pegged everyone
@@int3r4ct Many people are saying this
He lost me when he turned casual.
Some ASCII roguelikes have solved this problem by hiding what an item can do until you use (or identify) it. In Nethack for example, a "Pink Potion" or "A Scroll that says Abhfbshdjfj" could heal you in one playthru, but explode in your face the next. This leads to fantastic moments of tension where the only way to identify something is to use it and hope it's what you need.
There's a finite number of things a potion or scroll can do, so it's still possible to know what an unidentified item does by process of elimination. But it gets you 90% of the way there, while still rewarding players with expert knowledge.
That's actually a staple of rogues and roguelikes: having a generic item that contains one among a pool of effects so that you have to discover it mid-run instead of being able to know it beforehand. TBoI itself has a system like that through its pills.
@@Willie6785 Oh that's cool. I haven't played Isaac yet so that'll be fun to see for myself
I learned this lesson a couple of years ago when my ex taught me mahjong. Poker and shithead can be calculated, but things like mahjong require you to maintain a risk for much longer, to pick a hand early and commit, to risk changing, to reveal your plans early. The most important thing for a player of mahjong is not, and Balatro too, giving or hiding information, but teaching what information can or should be ignored. The most crucial tip that I ever received was "try to play fast. Trust your gut. Overthinking and over analysing actually reveals you more than it furthers your interests." Turned my results around completely. Balatro works on the same premise. Riskier play is more fun and more rewarding, because you learn what risks you can and can't take.
I'd say Balatro nailed that mechanic when it comes to my style of gameplay - I'm not crazy or sweaty enough to calculate exact score, but available info is still useful to calculate approximate result in your head.
Then it's just a matter of tens of tokens, that's the uncertainty, the "slot machine" feeling. I love this game for that.
Yeah, like you can often “feel” things like “this should… have a 60% chance of slaying this ante?”
Feels like shooting a rocket launcher at a tank. You know what the likely results are, but before the smoke settles down, there is a tension of “did it work?”
Yeah that's exactly how I approach it too. You can do a quick rough calculation in your head without being spot-on per se, and going off of that
I think the average player, especially someone who just heard about the game and tried it for themselves, just isn't that bright, and part of the game's design plays on Clarke's Third Law. If you're bad at math or just not that bright in general, Balatro looks like magic.
If you're the type of person who, say, has an accounting degree and does cash forecasting at the day job, Balatro feels less like a game and more like data entry and the illusion's completely shattered. The system's fun for about an hour while you work out how to take it apart.
@@SimuLordYeah bro, you’re way too smart to enjoy playing Balatro. You and the brilliant accountants can make a Google Sheet together, the rest of us are enjoying a video game
@@SimuLord It feels like that if you roll right and can get your deck to look the way you want it to look. With experience it's easier to optimize, but between the blinds, cards drawn and shop rolls you're left at the games mercy sometimes. The fun is in finally getting that perfect run or doing something mid run, flipping your run and that being the thing that gets you over the hump.
Let's say it's a blind where you play 1 hand, you have burglar and have been using your hands to max out your flat mult, now you absolutely need a re-roll, mult x or just an insane pull from somewhere. That's where the gambling comes in, wheel of fortune hitting polychrome and just clearing The Wall is why I play Balatro.
0:07 egg mentioned
We do love our Egg don’t we people?
+2
He's bald???
Dipped in Mama Liz's chili oil
+2 +2
So its not a cursed design problem, it is a deliberate design choice.....
I think another aspect of the message that wasn't mentioned in the video is the seeds in Balatro. If you've played Minecraft, you most likely already know how seeds work there, and that knowledge can be applied to Balatro as well.
For those who haven't already seen, if you've played a game of Balatro (regardless of success) you'll be met with an end screen showing your seed for that game. Seeds give the game that "new journey" feeling since each one is a new experience with a different set of Jokers to be bought throughout. There are several reasons why seeds make the game better, and one of those things is allowing the community to find and share unique combinations or possible strategies they found in specific seeds, which can then be recreated by others using those same seeds. This has gone to such an extreme level, that there is a program out now that can search Balatro's entire seed set (if you let it search long enough) for very specific conditions set by the user. For example, the program can filter seeds based on whether they have good potential for a certain hand build, like flushes or high cards. it then starts listing every seed it can find using the fact that each seed has already been predetermined by the game and cannot change between identical playthroughs.
So, after all that, even the experience you have in the game can be as random or specific as you want it to be. I personally think that Balatro is fun no matter which way you go about it (obviously the latter will start to get more repetitive) and even speedrunning is an interesting option some people try just to have a new experience. This is what I love about Balatro - there is always something new to try, and you have to be careful about your choices.
Maybe I'm off the mark, but I think the ambiguous state of the score expands player expression. Making it so the score is technically calculatable makes it so people who prefer not to min-max get to do that without the score looming over them, while those that like to optimize can attempt to do so within a fundamentally chance based game, similar to how some poker players calculate the odds of winning a hand and some don't. I think this is one of the reasons the game has such broad appeal.
@@Buttons841That's certainly one of the takes of all time when the entire video is explaining the reason the game developer hid the score and what makes it enjoyable. It's one thing to say you prefer to be able to calculate your final score and another thing to say people playing the game the way the dev intended should find a new game.
@@Buttons841 I think the fact that you chose to identify score as the most important aspect of the game rather than chance/luck which the dev himself believes exemplifies my point that there is room for variety. I optimize myself but I also see the value of allowing many ways to play.
@@slinnkys5405 Hitting or surpassing a target score is literally the fundamental mechanic of the game. HOW you get that score is where player expression comes into play, because figuring out the the optimal choice of cards and hands given the state of a run is an unsolvable problem where you can apply intuition.
Figuring out the ambiguous state of the score (or not) is not player expression because the score for any given hand is trivially solvable with a calculator once you know how jokers and special cards interact. Players that calculate the score will just have more information and can make better plays than players that don't.
At casual levels of play it's not really important to calculate because you are missing so much information about how to play your thought is better spent learning. But if you play the game for years and try to play at a high or competitive level I guarantee you will feel pressure to use a calculator, which very well might ruin the intended fun of the game.
@@Buttons841There aren't a ton of situations where getting an *exact* calculation is useful and often the cases where it is useful are often pretty quick to calculate. eg. if my mult in ante 1 is 4 then I just need my chips to sum to 75 and I clear. I don't find that to be particularly tedious. I enjoy doing the mental math just like when playing real poker as it's just part of the game.
That's the problem though - the game _doesn't_ have that broad appeal, because the people who should be the most vested in a game like this, the long-time roguelike card gamers who live for the optimisation and playing at very high levels, immediate bounce off the two core mechanics. Forcing them to do the maths AND then having lengthy animated sequences which are meant to "build tension" when they already know the outcome (because they calculated it beforehand) just results in an unrewarding game loop.
The game currently has broad _casual_ appeal, because a lot of people are enjoying picking it up and watching the flashy lights, but will it have dedicated long term appeal if the hardcore players who you rely on to keep the game in the public consciousness are at odds with the core mechanics? Time will tell I guess, but it feels unlikely.
I think a big difference with Isaac's pickups is that pickups aren't always free. There are plenty of times in Isaac runs where I picked up a random boss drop and was excited to experiment and figure it out. However, there are just as many times when I encounter an item in a shop and have to decide whether to spend my hard-earned coins on it, which is hard to do if I can't figure out what it does. Same goes with the items you get by sacrificing your health to the devil statue. Because I tend to be conservative with my resources, my choices basically become "look it up on the wiki to see if it's worth it" or "save my money for something whose consequences I know how to predict."
It also doesn't help that isaac has many items that are outright negative
@@TheWrathAbovethe only trully negative item i can think is shard of glass. You are meant to lose a bunch of times but some people are afraid of it
@@pod_036 there's few items that are outright purely negative, but way more than a few that can make or break your build, literally ending your run in an instant
@@pod_036 "You are meant to lose a bunch of times but some people are afraid of it"
At least for me and how I play games, losing is fun when it's in some way my fault. Builder permadeaths like Dwarf Fortress will punish me for something I've failed to plan for (notably even when I've not had a way of knowing about it before), but once I've experienced it I can plan around it. Card builders like Balatro will sometimes stump me with a boss blinds that nukes my deck and, after the first time, I can choose between "plan for it" (reroll jokers, alternate wincon, etc...) or "hope I don't hit it" (and live with just a rerun since the game is so short).
In BoI's case, at least for me, I lose the strategic/gameplay decisions in picking up the run-ending item. Instead, it's simply a binary "do I happen to remember this item in the sea of 1000?". When I have the info available, I can actually make the fun, meaningful decision because it's not about remembering 1000 different items effects and interactions. I can then blame myself for making the dumb mistake.
@@ghandiwon there are not many run ruiner items for it to be a worry
It's a classic cost of convenience scenario. The harder technically available information is to gather, the fewer people will actually seek that information out except for those people that take joy in the process of optimization itself. Strictly speaking, gaining access to information is like getting through a lock, even the best attempts at foiling someone still only slows them down and doesn't prevent a truly determined person from eventually doing so. It just has to be hard enough to deter the average person.
Including a score preview in the game would make it a part of the game, but when installing a mod or using an external tool like a browser, you're making a choice to seek resources outside the game itself to breach that barrier. The option remains non-default, clearly defining the desired play experience and putting it on the user to decide whether they want the intended experience or to seek out ways to modify the game to their preferences.
I love both Balatro and Isaac, but the difference is that Balatro is based on a rule set most people know with way less options.
It's basically just figuring out multipliers and you have all the info you need, it's just if you want to get really specific and optimize then you'd need auxiliary resources.
Isaac imo extremely frustrating without a item guide or mod as there is no way of knowing what does what outside of experimentation. It can be novel at first but becomes incredibly frustrating quickly, esp with many items causing negative effects.
Zelda was that way exactly because they wanted people to reach for information outside of the game. But because the internet was too new, it implied asking friends.
The Internet was not even publicly available when the first Zelda game was released. It was not until the early 90s that online discussions became a big thing in video games.
@@Canadas_Very_Own lol yeah I was going to say, in the 80's it was just DARPA-net, The Internet wasn't an available thing for people.
2:48 quick note
The score burns when it is equal or bigger than the amount of score you need to win the round.
It's not luck based and doesn't get hotter.
now that is information I would actually like the game to have told me lol
@@RomanticoutlawI see where you're coming from but tbh that's not too hard to figure out yourself
It doesn't burn hotter, but it definitely lights up when you get particularly overflowing hands (like in orders of thousands+ times the target score)
The fire gets larger and more ravenous depending on how much you’re beating the target score by
If you keep scoring beyond the flames the flames get bigger and then turn purple so yes it does get hotter just not luck based.
Actually a cheat code does sound like a really good solution for this. Generally only the hardcore people are going to be looking up something like a score preview and the people who just hop on will just play the game as intended.
So while the Isaac comparison I think is the best option that comes to mind, there’s one big issue with it, and that’s that Isaac has INNUMERABLE variables that are both changed by items as well as introduced by them too. Maybe when Isaac first launched and there was just short of 200 items and pickups it was much more feasible that people could pick up a new item and decipher what the pickup did. But there is over 700 now, it is way too much information now. Besides just the process of learning what something is, you may not SEE that item again until you’ve picked up 300 others and you’ve tried to learn what they do so the original item has completely fallen out of the players head. I imagine when the game launched it was a much more feasible thing to expect people to figure out what an item did but as the number of items has gone up, interactions have gone up exponentially as a result, it’s a feature that’s gone too far and I don’t blame new players for using mods to find out what pickups do.
As for Balatro, I don’t think it’ll have the same issue. It’s just one feature and piece of information missing. Yes it’s a very big and important piece of information, but you can still ballpark it based on your current run and what other hands played have gotten you up until that point. It’s more that the specific number isn’t known, but you’ll only really be lost on the score of a potential hand if you haven’t been paying attention at all up until that point. But I do think that the option should be there in some capacity. I do fully agree the game should be open to modding, but I personally like the idea akin to using cheats where if you have the score display enabled then you can’t “unlock” anything (like how for a time when cheats were still a thing, usually enabling any cheat codes in a game suspended the ability to unlock achievements). Any new poker cards you buy with the display active will still remain undiscovered, you can’t unlock any new decks, winning a run doesn’t really count as winning a run that’s tracked, etc. It would make it so having the score display enabled would make the next run more of a test run to experiment and get a better understanding of how systems and score multipliers work. That I think will let people play the game how they want with training wheels so they can learn, but will force people who want to progress to play the game how the developer wants them to.
I usually calculate or estimate my score in the first two/three rounds where it's easy to do it by head, without a calculator, because I feel like the beginning of a run is really defining, and I don't want external tools. I can't say I'm surprised some people actually use external tools though, I indeed did that with Isaac as well (only when I felt the need to understand an item)
I believe most players of Balatro could guess whether their hand is good or not based on their previous rounds and current hand. I think the calculator is clearly the antithesis of that and not what most players would use. For Isaac, the more items are added then the more a person requires a wiki to remember what they do and there isn't enough information at a glance to understand if the item is good or not unlike Balatro where the context of your run gives you the power to know what is good or not.
I mean the clear distinction is that the information in Balatro isn't hidden. You might choose not to use that information and just make an educated guess, but the information is there, so for people who want to use it, the game is creating unnecessary additional grind. Like, imagine Isaac added item descriptions, but each one was encoded and you had to decode them through some manual process with a decoder wheel. You might do this the first few times, but for the hundreds of items in Isaac? You'd probably just give up and go back to the wikis.
This really is a fundamental design issue - the designer is saying they only want people who are casually interested in their game to have a good time, but anyone who gets very invested and wants to become very good at the game will suddenly hit this wall of having to do maths homework constantly. It's essentially a punishment for the type of players most games would love to attract - the ones who would usually play your game for thousands of hours, build youtube channels around it etc. It's a choice the dev is completely allowed to make, but I'm not convinced that it's a smart choice.
As someone with several thousand hours in Slay the Spire, what I love about that game is how a) it gives you the information you need (the addition of enemy intents was genius) and b) the UI gets out of your way allowing a very tactile and immediate level of engagement with the game. Seeing numbers go brr and pretty lights do their thing doesn't sound like it would be anywhere near as engaging and would get old very quickly. But... maybe that's the point. Maybe the game is essentially meant to be a fidget spinner with a card game attached, and if people enjoy that, more power to them.
@@TheDelinear whilst you can work out the exact numerical value of a hand in balatro, it's often not very useful information; during a run you will have got certain jokers that provide bonuses under certain conditions, and it's pretty obvious what you would have to do to get a maximal hand. The challenge lies in trying to achieve the best hand in the cards you have, deciding whether it's worth the risk to discard certain cards to get a better hand, and setting up good synergies with your jokers in the first place. Like, it's pretty easy to rank different possible hands in your head, and as long as you have a vague idea of an ordinal ranking the actual value matters a lot less because if your best hand isn't good enough there's not much you can do about it
The only case I can think of where you might actually want to calculate the value exactly is in a special type of round where you are only allowed to play one hand and have to hit a score threshold: if you have a decent looking hand but you think you might be able to do better, it's worth checking if it hits the threshold or if you have to throw it away and try and get a better one (and note even then you probably wont have to explicitly calculate the exact value to tell). But this only appears once in a while as a kind of boss battle, and I would argue it's meant to be a shake-up from the regular gameplay and to get you thinking really hard about the optimal strategy.
@@TheDelinearexcept you dont have to do it to begin with. Just put your strongest hand out.
Its pretty clear people have no idea what they're talking about, whats the point of calculating the score when it gets into e territory? Literally uncalculable.
I think the issues are quite different between Balatro's and Isaac. With Isaac you have to remember what 100s of icons mean for your build, some you've seen only a handful of times, some that look a lot alike others.
I think a better solution for Isaac would be to slowly unlock rough descriptions / synergies as you pick up the item. This would solve most issues I believe
I always love your videos, man. Genuinely grateful for all the insight and entertainment.
Something I've noticed when I play Balatro is that I usually don't try to calculate, but when calculating seems like it will be easy enough to fudge in my head, I'll do it.
The information being there makes it easier to spice things up by shifting between the working out the ideal move and the pick n hope for the best playstyles without leaving the game
I just got back home from a day at college and the first thing I did was open balatro and right then the notification came. I think the universe is telling me I have a problem with this game.
If I wasn’t on vacation I’d play it right now. Really needs a mobile version tbh.
@@kotzpenner the dev has just announced a mobile port is coming sometime in the future!
@@georgetriantafyllidis6525 im glad!
Something very very similar happened with Rimworld. The game creator, Tynan Silvester, created the game as a story simulator with drama, loss and struggle. But that's not how most people play it. In fact it's most often played as a base building strategy game in which loss is seen as something to be avoided. The game designer decided to push back hard against that kind of playstyle. People made kill boxes for raiders so he nerfed turrets, people responded with traps so he added tunneling enemies which ignored walls so people made the wall into a killbox, so he made enemies which drop down from the sky right into your base and.... you get the idea. The constant arms race has, in my opinion, made the game worse for both types of players so I think it's best to just give the players the freedom to choose how to play is by far the best, possibly with a message explaining the pros and cons like you suggested.
Oddly, this reminds me of an indie game I played a demo of: "Howl". It's a turn-based tactical game where you can chain multiple actions together during a single round, with one caveat -- for every action you take, every enemy gets to take an action too. In other words, each action constitutes a "turn" (your turn, then the enemy's turn). You do not have to perform the maximum number of actions per round -- it's perfectly possible to execute only one action per round so you can concretely observe the results before you plan your next move(s). However, this is NOT how the game is "meant" to be played, so the game designs a few systems to incentivize planning multiple actions per round:
1 - When you clear a mission, you are scored based on the number of _rounds_ elapsed, not the number of _actions_ taken.
2 - Certain events occur on a "once per round" basis --- notably, werewolves turning innocent villagers into more werewolves only occurs at the end of a round, so the more actions you can chain together, the better you can rescue survivors.
3 - Certain powerful spells/abilities can only be executed as part of a chain of actions taken during the same round; you cannot execute them individually.
I played through binding of Isaac for hours upon hours before finally caving to adding an item description mod. The reason was simply this: there was too many items for me to remember and it was a hassle to stop mid run to figure out what something did despite me using it already. That is the flaw imo in Isaac. It had become a hindrance.
Balatro is different because you will already have a decent idea of your hands capabilities beforehand. You have enough accessible information from your jokers to make the right decisions. It impacts so little people in comparison to something like Issac where the vast majority faces that issue.
Change Isaac’s systems to tell you descriptions after discovery still results in a vision Edmund desired, or at least 90% of the way there.
Honestly its just bad design in aroguelike to have item descriptions like Isac, game is just too popular for anyone to dare call it out how sht it is
The Binding of Issac situation actually reminds me a lot about how the Risk of Rain series (1, 2 and Returns) has a similar issue, albeit to a smaller extent, where the effects of each item are described but not the exact numbers (for example, Soldier's Syringe tells you it gives attack speed but doesn't directly specify via. popup that's it's +15% per stack). Then again, Risk of Rain does have tools to see those exact numbers via. mods, wikis, and the logbook outside of active play.
Risk of rain 2 has some hidden substats that make even the better item description mod incorrect
I think Risk of Rain handles this really well. The item description will tell you the basic info but if you’re curious about the details then you can check out the log book or the wiki for the exact values, and it also adds a sense of mystery when the item description doesn’t tell you what the item does. When you first pick up a ukulele and all it tells you is “…and his music was electric.” it lets you know that this item stands out from the rest.
@@elegy8187That's the best part with RoR is that most of the time, even if the item description is vague, it gives you a hint of what to look for. Ukulele mentions electricity, so when you see little zaps fly between enemies, you have the chance to connect the dots.
@@elegy8187 My main issue was that you are not told how much/how each item stacks, though many items in RoR Returns stack infinitely when they didn't before
@@jimijamflimiflam6323yeah, I love vanilla RoR but having to memorize stack limits again whenever i return to it isn't fun for me. thankfully, I can throw RoRML at it and it's all good.
In my opinion, the way Balatro's dev did it, i.e simply hiding the score was a perfectly valid way of doing it. Yeah the game isn't exclusive to "casual" enjoyers but I think it's less about the "right" way to play it and more about the way YOU want to play it. I think a late game unlock could work but I also like the idea of the developer keeping his game the way he wanted it to be to begin with. Mainly I think if the way you're trying to play the game is boring to you, then you're not playing it right. You're not "cheating" but it's like making up rules to guarantee you can win, which is never fun. At least not in my opinion.
excellent video, as always. keep up the good work!
In the case of Isaac, there are 2 “solutions” i can think of.
First, you can have items be not communicated the FIRST TIME that they’re found. My biggest problem isn’t that items don’t have descriptions (I’m totally with Edmund that finding a new power up and not knowing what it does is very exciting), but the problem is that the game has HUNDREDS of them! If you play RELIGIOUSLY you would remember them anyway and they wouldn’t be a mystery, but for people that only play so often, they’re kind of punished by that fact. Showing descriptions after the first time sort of fixes that problem. You could also have a “memory” mechanic, where the game only remember x number of item descriptions before forgetting them, meaning you’d have a rotation of rediscovering items and being excited by that. I’ll also note here that items/power ups in Isaac can be very hard to understand on their own too, and that pushes player towards descriptions. AND can be required for certain aspects of the game
The second “solution” is having item icons only HINT at what the item does. So for example, the cat paw could have 5 possible effects. Which one did you get? Well try it to find out!
That memory mechanic sounds really interesting and could be an excellent in-between, but I can see people hating it so much because they are losing something they felt they had earnt or were owed. Aka having an unlock relock, even if that unlock's only information you may still have, is a neat feature that noone will enjoy.
@@ACEYGAMES Could be something you improve too. LIke you could potentially unlock more "memory". Or you could just have it as an option. It would still be better than just pulling up the wiki though. In the specific case of Isaac, there are SO MANY items/power-ups that you could the game could "forget" some and you as a player would have forgotten them too, even if you played somewhat often
Reminds me of the card system in Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. You can combine different cards for powers/effects but until you do or see the results of a combination, the game doesn't tell you what's happening. So you have to experiment and try things (or look it up...)
More "traditional" Roguelikes often have some method of identifying items, like Identify scrolls or paying someone to name something, etc. Of course in those kinds of games items can do things like kill you instantly so *some* way around that has to be allowed.
God looking at gameplay at normal speed after getting used to play at max speed feels so slow now ! Not a problem per se, just an interesting thing I noticed.
A few friends and I discord stream our balatro. Everyone max speed but one friend plays at 1x speed. The contrast looking over at his game feels like Im watching .5x speed lmao
I'm a 2x man, slow speed allows you to peak flipped cards on certain boss blinds.
i think a score counter is always a bad idea. as someone who follows the “high level” community, balatro is an easy game, especially for optimization. adding a score counter doesn’t help high level players at all, it’s more a crutch for newer players than anything
Even then, it only helps in the first couple rounds anyway. And those are always the same so you can just remember that you need a King high Straight or better to win in 1/2 hands (depending on if Small or Big Blind). After that, you have an emergent build and the exact score is pretty much irrelevant.
Fascinating, ty. I loved hearing about this in Binding of Isaac.
What's most interesting to me about this, is how it shares the issue of losing being unfun, which stealth games have. That's what drives people to optimize the fun out of their games.
An easy fix and good compromise for The Binding of Isaac seems so obvious to me. It would keep the original design intention while also granting much more accessibility for players - without the need of referring to wikis and mods. Just keep the original design with item descriptions and effects hidden until the player gets and uses(!) them for the first time. And do the same for synergies, interactions and combinations between items. Therefore players feel the excitement of getting and new item and finding secret combinations and synergies, but also gain an in-game wiki of all their previous findings. "Backpack Battles" actually does a great job with an item database and secret combinations exactly like that. Binding of Isaac is just nearly unplayable without any wiki or mod with its 400+ items after all those updates. I'm pretty sure that most players wouldn't use a mod or wiki with that design compromise. And there'll always be a small playerbase of people who want to know everything in advance and get precise information down to the decimal point. Those people will always look up information in a wiki anyway.
Yeah this isn’t a design flaw. I’ve only tried computing a hand once or twice primarily because I was on the last round and wanted to know which hand was the better choice. It was really nice to have that info and I could make the choice how to play. The real flaw with Balatro is the overwhelming importance of early game economy. It makes for a very rote early game in the first couple antes.
There are other minor nitpicks with the game as well: the boss blind reroll button is in a really odd spot/easily missed and the joker descriptions can be so lingo heavy that you need to google to find out what the descriptions mean. These are not too terrible once you have enough experience with the game, but they were really frustrating for a newcomer.
@@1925683 Which jokers are lingo heavy? I needed to google what a face card was but otherwise, I think I understood everything after my first run. The only joker I can really see that might be an issue is the one that generates a Double Tag
@@faceless1434I need to review them, but I remember having to lookup the meaning of retrigger and there were others that I wasn’t immediately sure what the effect would be. The mime joker especially confused me because it never seemed to do what it said in the description. I think having a glossary of certain terms would be useful especially when you’re still getting used to the difference between hand, round, blind, etc. Additionally, the joker “bestiary” in the menu could have more extensive descriptions and explanations of effects. Overall I think the game does a good job describing the jokers, but there are inevitably going to be some that are hard to understand for newcomers.
@@1925683 Unless you can get the Mime without ever getting a Steel, Gold, etc. I don't feel like it's that confusing as its the identical phrasing so when getting it you just look at any jokers and special cards to see what it'll retrigger if its not already obvious. That being said, if its an issue for someone it'll be an issue for other people too and just because its perfectly intuitive for me, doesn't change that.
That’s how I thought it should work, but even with those cards I never saw it trigger 😢
I always find it weird when people refer to Legend of Zelda as a game you had to figure everything out for yourself because it comes with a manual that explains every item and enemies. Certainly there was an element of trying to see an item being used in a practical setting, but the manual basically explains the use of it. I think this mindset comes from people who just ignored the manual. To be fair, I think most people don't want to read them. Very often nowadays it's hard to ignore the manual since it's built right into the game with tutorials.
Anyway, I think a solution to this issue in Balatro could just be an unlockable option awarded from winning a certain way. That way new players get the experience of figuring out what things do, and experienced players get their calculator.
Probably many people ended up playing it on emulator or borrowed the game without the manual.
It's not so much the items in the original Zelda which are cryptic- but where exactly to use them/how to progress beyond the obvious stuff which is in the manual. Like- which bushes to burn, which walls to bomb, where to use the flute etc. These things can be really obtuse until you share information, or play and use trial and error for long enough to get a feel for the sorts of places where these largely unsignposted solutions are.
Proof of this is how later games treat these exact same mechanics- for example- bombable walls being cracked, or at least making a hollow sound when poked with your sword to signify that they can be blown up.
I love these analytical think-pieces you do!
I think there was a brief golden age of social play for single-player games, essentially before the internet, where a huge part of games was talking about them at school (or wherever, but let’s be honest-it was mostly kids then).
I was watching someone recently do a blind play of SMB3 and complaining about one level that “you couldn’t get through without buying Nintendo Power” and it just drove me crazy because there was always *someone* at school who’d figured it out.
There is this song by brentalfloss that says Dragon Warrior was just a scam to make you pay more money for the strategy guide, when the game is literally just reading what NPCs say and griding a bunch around every town to buy the best equipment before proceding.
That was even more prevalent in the arcade where designers expected players to figure stuff out together. Mortal Kombat was stuffed full of obscure secrets for that purpose. Tower of Druaga created a trend of filling your games with secrets that made no sense but were mandatory for beating the game so that players had to share information if they wanted anyone at their arcade to have a chance at beating the game. Quite a few games that are now considered stupidly obtuse and nigh unplayable were a result of that trend. Stuff like Super Pitfall, Deadly Towers, Simon's Quest and Milon's Secret Castle don't expect a solo player to decipher them. Even in the internet age devs released games like La Mulana and Fez with the same intent behind them though since the internet is global it was only the first wave of players after launch that had to work together, the rest just got to read the documentation that first wave produced.
@@massivepileup Yeah I wondered about arcades. (Their heyday was a little before my time and I grew up in a fairly rural area.)
If I had to guess, the SMB3 level you're thinking of is World 6-5, World 7 Fortress 1, or the World 8 Fortress.
@@reillywalker195It was world 7 fortress 1.
Calculating or estimating the score yourself is an expression of a skill. It's part of the tactical gameplay.
That feels very different than opaque hidden mechanincs.
If each Joker had no description, that would be more like Binding of Isaac.
This is why Bobby Fischer hated chess. solve-ability is a design defect in games. This is why Masahiro Sakurai implements many secret layers of chaotic mechanics under a seemingly deterministic system.
Great video, as always!
For binding of Isaac, I think a progressive item description could be nice. So when you first pick up an item, you don't have a description, but the more you use it, the more of its ability description is unlocked for you. It would make players more curious about using said item.
Popular StS creator Jorbs created an hour long presentation to explain his feelings on Balatro and the matter at hand, which he designated under Delayed Variable Rewards. (Bear in mind I am paraphrasing) In his experience, he isn't a fan of DVRs, and is largely convinced that they shouldn't form the backbone of entertainment - for exactly the same reason as people are against slot machines. It was an interesting video on the topic that I would encourage other people to seek out and form their own opinion on.
Yeah I watched that one very good
11:51 Heat Signature mention! Honestly adore this game and I wish more people talked about it
To this day, playing around with the different kinds of teleporters and slowing down time to take down entire rooms of bad guys Superhot-style are some of the most fun gaming experiences I've ever had. Great game tbh
@@jaimeaguirre3382 right? Or when the whole ship is hunting you down and you have to perfectly manage stealth shields and key cloners to get out undetected. The gameplay loop is so so addictive!
I feel this a lot with RuneScape. I love the game very much, but part of the fun is in absolutely massive the game is and how you can just stumble upon countless items, locations, and monsters. When the game was younger people would experiment constantly and it wasn't really about reaching the end game, it was about how you got there.
Now RuneScape is arguably the most well documented game of all time. People have optimized the fun out of the game. People can obtain major milestones in mere weeks or even days. They aren't concerned anymore with trying things out and seeing what they like, they're obsessed with optimizing to do things in the fastest way possible. Anything else is now considered a waste of your time. It's a shame because Jagex has constantly had to make updates that go against their game design philosophy to be able to appease players and continuously upkeep a snowball of power creep. Every update has a huge consequence in the way people play the game and it's entirely because the community wants to access as much information as humanly possible. Even the exact cost per experience to do an action is publicly available on their own official wiki that automatically updates with in game market prices. It's an incredible feat full of passion for a game they love, but the game has changed arguably for the worse as a result as people chase goals at mach speed instead of enjoying their journey.
The best middle ground I can think of is something like a bestiary in an RPG, where defeating an enemy lets you view its move list and weaknesses. It disincentivizes players from just googling each enemy by rewarding them for overcoming the challenge. I don't think it would take much away from the core experience of Binding of Isaac to allow players to unlock descriptions for the various items they find on each run.
The best feeling in Balatro is having a feeling about the performance of your hand and being proven right by the hard math.
This is super interesting to me. I'm a player that tries to avoid looking up anything on a game at least for the first full playthrough as it completely ruins the fun for me knowing where I "should" be going or what I "should" be using. Obviously I know there's a completely different sect of people that enjoy min/maxing everything in a game, so it's an interesting dilemma.
You can be both, I play most games blind but also tend to min/max to the point of restarting games if I realize I've made suboptimal choices.
The challenge mode in Balatro is really fun, adding little difficulty spikes without the grind of playing on really high stakes. But there's no unlocks for it, exept more challenges! Coming off of Isaac I would have expected to be able to unlock more jokers from completing these challenges. But having a score preview unlockable from beating a good chunk of these challenges would be really fun. Maybe as a toggle, so that people can only turn it on when they really need to see if their run's about to end or not.
I deeply revere the fact that Thunk did NOT show the score. A few times I’ve really done some mental math, and either been way off or just barely missed it. It feels like such a core part of the game experience. I think your suggestions for how to include this are really clever, especially as a late-game unlock. Great video!
11:25 A better example might be Hollow Knight, where the completion % isn't viewable until you've reached the last bench before the final boss.
We're going through this right now with Brailliance. People asked for a "wordle mode" that makes our puzzle game less like its unique self, and more like the popular option. So, we're A/B testing exactly that. As of this writing, the variant without "wordle rules" is winning decisively with day-one retention.
"You think you know what you want, but you don't"
I think you should consider what I believe would be the best solution here: Allow the "requested version" to be an unlockable mode after playing the game the intended way.
A little disappointed it doesn't work like Pixletters tbh. Seems like a natural solution.
I don't see a flaw here, I see a clever design decision providing two affordances for two different play situations. What's afforded: the fun that comes from winging it with your hand and being surprised, and the fun that comes from engaging in computation in tricky situations. See also @RBAlejandro's comment
You can also design your game in a wiki-hostile way to preserve the necessity of exploration and experimentation. For example, say you have a roguelike like Isaac with mysterious items. You could randomize what sprite is shown (each could have an overlapping pool of fitting sprites)
Whoops, accidently posted and you cant edit on this dogshit mobile site.
I was going to add, not giving items any names at all. The player could be given the opportunity to enter a custom name for it, and even write a custom description as notes on what it does. This kind of system is also suited for a more simulationist approach to items, where the effects and properties aren't necessarily hardcoded but can be randomized too.
This entire video is bizarre to me because I thought literally the entire point of Balatro was putting together this series of modifiers and multipliers and then the challenge was actually understanding how they worked together and knowing which cards to pick for them. Either everything worked the way you'd figured it would and you win and it's satisfying, or you're surprised by the effects or order that things happen in, good or bad, which is exciting and can lead to fun moments. Either a score preview OR fully precalculating seems like it robs the fun to me, and the idea that the intended experience is apparently that you just guess and act almost at random sounds really strange. It sounds like I got something from the game that neither Mark nor the developer did.
i don't think he meant full random, just using the non-completely reliable calculator that is your brain
no i think youre exactly right in your experience its exactly whats described at 2:23
@@w4shedup I don't take it that way at all. "Knowing whether or not the hand will win the round" sounds like "you can't know with 100% certainty", not "act somewhat randomly". To use some metaphor: Using a calculator in Balatro is like using a ruler to make a straight line. The developer's quote is like freehanding but trying your hardest to make a straight line. Acting somewhat randomly would mean waving your arm around and hoping it makes a line.
@@BunnLilah i don't think your analogy works in the slightest. nothing in balatro is as precise as a straight line. there is a number you have to hit but if your target is 600 you can hit 601 or 2837478383 and you still win
Uh, what? They’re not saying you pick things at random, just that you aren’t always sure if your hand will beat the ante if it’s close and you don’t do all the calculations ahead of time.
Obviously you still pick things that are helpful and synergize with eachother.
If he were to add the option to enable score previews I'm curious how he could handle cases where some of your cards are flipped over or where the odds are randomized. Most likely you would have to either leave a "?" or present a range to the user. Very interesting design problem indeed
It would sometimes be "wrong" which seems like it would make people mad when they were told they won, and then it changes.
The game is exactly how it should be to create excitement
I really felt the problem you are describing in a game called Poker Quest. It’s a very hard poker themed, rogue-like, and so knowing the odds was really important to do well. They weren’t officially in the game but their discord had a calculator and they also included a spreadsheet of the odds in the game in the game download. So I found myself constantly querying their calculator on discord to help give me a necessary edge which did bring down the overall experience of the game.
I’m very happy the points are hidden, and there isn’t an option to show them. I’m definitely someone who would turn that on automatically, and that’s been one of my favourite parts of the game so far!
I like the idea of making it a joker, or locking it behind an achievement that you get after playing for a bit, so you can experience playing without it.
At first, Binding of Issac is small. Card, item, power up is quite a few to remember. Then DLCs happen and too many things to remember. I have no choice but to search for help online. because who love losing?
I'd describe myself as one of the "incredibly invested" players, having 100% the game and pouring 100s of hours into it already. Personally, I don't think the score preview is necessary and I agree with localthunks design choice, I never once felt the need for it, and the game was more fun without it
Whenever this kind of thing comes up, I'm reminded of a very different sort of game - Darkest Dungeon. There's no question that the brutal difficulty, permadeath, and roguelike 'roll with the punches' design was the whole point. You're MEANT to sometimes lose heroes you've invested heavily in building up, meant to sometimes lose entire EXPEDITIONS and have to claw your way back up from a fresh batch of recruits. Meant to learn from it, and strategize around it by always making sure you keep some veterans in reserve who can lead some fresh-faced new heroes into the dungeon if necessary, as well as realizing that investing in the village is the only thing you CAN'T lose, making it all the more important...
But some players, like myself, just bounce off that philosophy hard. Preferring to see the heroes as unique characters rather than disposable minions, unwilling to face the immense amount of lost progress that a failed expedition can land you with, or just too impatient to proceed with the amount of paranoia-riddled patience the game demands... and we, rather quickly, figured out how to copy the game's save-directory to another location. Things went sideways? Exit the game, overwrite the save-directory with the copy you made earlier, open it again, and you're back where you were. It's more laborious than a traditional save-load system, sure, but it works - and how much you wanna use it is up to you. Any time you lose a hero? Only if you lose the entire team? Are you still going to play cautiously to avoid the hassle, or taking advantage of this safety-net to proceed more brashly?
And, of course, on top of that there's a bunch of 'rebalancing' mods, many of which were very popular. Increasing your party inventory lets you carry more supplies into a dungeon, and more treasure back out. Enabling characters to equip an extra Trinket allows for more powerful combos, and makes them all significantly more potent overall. You could even grab a mod that just let you revive fallen heroes every time you returned from an expedition, though that one had drawbacks. For those with the vampire-focused DLC, you could mod the 'Crimson Thirst' to make it less virulent, and thus less likely to infect your crew or spread among them. All clearly counter to the developer's intentions. But they allowed people like me, who would otherwise simply have abandoned the game after the first major setback, to play and enjoy it for dozens and dozens of hours...
...shame about the sequel. =_=
Reading through the comments, I think I might be the only one in the target audience for the way the Binding of Isaac does item discovery. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been “super serious” about getting optimal runs (despite having over 300 hours in the game), but rather enjoy going through and discovering different items. At this point I know what a lot of them do, and so when I do manage to combine a good synergy it feels a lot more like I managed to do it by my own knowledge of the game and repeated trying, rather than by having someone guide me through it. I understand why some people may not like it, but I definitely get the air of mystery of old-fashioned rogue-likes and I really enjoy it.
One thing I think that you should know is that the flames that comes off the score isnt just for show. If a hand one shots the blind that is what makes the flames appear. And i think that is the perfect amount of information for balatro to give you.
True but the flames only come up after you've played the hand in most cases (exception is in the rare cases when your base hand chips/mult before card and joker effects kick in) so in essence it truly is only an aesthetic thing (one I love I should mention)
Was waiting for a video on Balatro! Thank you GMT!
I resent the implication that mathing everything out to maximally optimise your plays makes the game less fun, or that such a desire only applies to people who are really invested in Balatro. This is just how I play all games, and I love it~ I think spreadsheets are fun! It may not be “normal”, but my experiences are still valid. Justice for the autists! :D
I know its unrelated to the actual video, but you talking about cursed reminded me that i really want to see a video of you talking about risk vs. reward in games and how to do it correctly, and different ways to approach the 'risk' part.
The thing with The Binding of Isaac is that everything revolves around the random items and how they synergize with each other. If an item is unknown, you can't know what it does, and how it'll enhance (or screw up) something else. Balatro, on the other hand, gives you the information, but leaves you to figure out how to best synergize the jokers and your deck. Yes, this isn't a score preview, but at least Balatro leaves you the information to figure things out, rather than TBOI, which left you with hardly any useful clues. Given also a TBOI run is more involved and a player may not see said item again in a long while, the relation of the information is also a bit different.
Isaac is still pretty different, because the game itself changed. Not having description for a 100 items was still manageable, and each one was clear enough. With rebirth and extensions, they added so many items, some of them arbitrary symbols, that it was just impossible to remember most of them unless you played it regularly
Balatro won't get to that point unless it asks specifically for optimal plays
Hey Mark, I'm a fan of your channel and really appreciate how you think and discuss videogame design...but I very much disagree with your take on Balatro. I'm one of those players that calculates scores. Not in all hands mind you, but I do it sistematically enough that I do have a spreadsheet for it. And the thing is: I'd HATE to have a score preview on the game. Because calculating in Balatro is PART of the fun! It's an aspect of exploration, like tracing you own map of an interesting region or piecing together lore from found books. It's not about seeing the resultant score, is about using math, statistics and probability to deepen my understanding of the game, discovering how mechanics work, becoming better at playing, learning and applying those learnings into the next run.
I understand not everyone will play like I do, but that's the genius of games as an interactive media: there are multiple ways of having fun, and they don't necessarily need to compete. What you (and LocalThunk) are calling a flaw to me is a wonderful strength: by not having a score preview but showing all needed information to derive it, there's wide open space for player expression and for more people to find their own fun in the game. It's weird for me that you of all people would imply that there's a "wrong way" to have fun while playing games, instead of recognizing that the dev's vision is only one aspect of what a game can be when it meets the real world and it's players. Being open to emergent behaviour and learning from how people interact with your creation, and find their own fun in it, is essential to making games (or really, making anything meant to be used/seen/heard/experienced by other people).
Honestly I agree, even on the other end of the spectrum as someone who'd never use it even if it was available. Balatro is an extremely mathematically solveable game; you can go a *lot* further than just calculating an expected hand value. You can start calculating odds of hands at certain deck sizes and card counts for things like flushes and of-a-kinds, you can start calculating exactly how much planets or other shop purchases would upgrade your gameplan...
In a game that's extremely mathematical, having the game do the math means there's less game - whether you'd rather intuit it, or solve it yourself!
Counterpoint to Isaac.
As someon who played since the Beta was on Kongregate and yes supported every Isaac kickstarter including the boradgame and Bumbo (yes I am basically a dinosaur).
The first Isaac had only a 114 or so items, and none of them that I remember were exceptionally obscure, you would see the effects immediately.
About half of these were unlocks for things that, for the most part were fair, achievable challenges.
Then came The binding of Isaac rebirth.
And I was exceptionally hyped, it had a LOT of cool fun ideas, updated graphics and fixed one of the biggest problems of the first game:
Inconsistent synergies:
The first game the problem where if you picked up some items in certain order they would multiply differently, the most egregious example was I believe: Sacred heart + Mutant spider, normally both of these items were ABSURDLY good but if you picked them up in the wrong order they would actually lower your damage, I am talking a 8 times difference in dmg with the wrong order. There were a couple of items like this, and this was the main reason people used an external webpage in vanilla, finding all other items, which you eventually sorta learn, is one thing and discovering effects is fun and I ahd a blast figuring out myself what they did, I even accidentally found out both bible interactions. Having your run ruined because you forgot that you needed to pick up the items A - C - B - D instead of A - B - C - D, can kinda suck.
Luckily this was fixed in The binding of Isaac rebirth.
But it introduced another need for such webapges, three reasons.
1) This time around the item total went up to over 400 and later even close to 450 (if I remember correctly), far more to remember and arguably too much.
2) Some challenges, like anything to do with the lost, a one-hit character were asanine (I think 75% of my 400 hours were spend on this) meaning that getting that HAHA funny item was suddenly ruining that one good run that you REALLY wanted to complete because it gave a super neat item if you did, so better check the wiki to make sure I don't pick up an item that literally accidentally kills me.
3) And lastly, items stopped being simple. Its one thing to have a player figure out that a certain upgrade bends tears to enemies, or pierces obstacles or provides knock back or poison, or makes you move faster. Its another entirely to expect a player to stumble upon the fact that the black candle removes all curses and grants increased changes at the Angel and devil room, and thats an easy on in the spectrum of obscure items. How about the flat penny trinket, that eveyr time you pick up a coin you have a chance to spam a key? Or how picking up the match stick trinket is the only way to remove the tick trinket (I think).
It was a very nice design decision for the first game, but with the second game literally giving you multiple items that hurt you (looking at you spark plug) and combining this with a one-hit char (which imo should not be in the game) it drove even me, one of the least wiki oriented person to use the wiki.
I will never forget using spark plug on a Lost run where I had both odd mushroom, Brimstone, Ludovico Technique Tiny planet and Mutant spider. I had the mother of all rolls and item combination, the best run I had ever had, and then imagine my surpise when my use item just killed me.
I stopped playing Lost and other challenge character without wiki ever since.
I personally always found the lack of item descriptions in _Binding of Isaac_ (and the mechanically similar, though mildly less opaque _Enter the Gungeon_ ) to be a hindrance to the gameplay experience. In my view, it slows a player's sense of Progression in a way that feels unfair. If you sink time into the game, your skill level with the base mechanics - which is central to the Roguelike gameplay loop - will increase faster than you can deduce what every random-drop item does, which sandbags your ability to strategize.
You could end up with a combination of items that would help you finally get that sweet sweet Winning Run, but not know that you have items that synergize in that way, making you feel in hindsight (i.e. the next time that RNGesus smiles upon you with that combination of items) like you were cheated out of a Victory.
Isaac items were more managable before the updates, as there weren't many. Now there are thousands of them with many synergies, without counting the trinkets with small effects
True Solitaire for our time. Never going back. I didn't even think about this thing before, I'm just trying to run these calculations in my head and it's a good mathematical test, even if I'm average, keeps your mind calculating all the way. Then you realize that some common and uncommon cards can be broken if you get them from the start, and even later gotten rare cards won't necessarily run over those if you built them well. I have 4k hours in Isaac, goin my second full run now, balatro is a nice change for that grind, even if I'm only on the easier levels.
I feel like a potential solution would be adding an "expert" or "pro" mode that is mostly the same, with the primary difference being a time limit to select your hands. A time limit would make referencing a spreadsheet or using a calculator to figure out the optimal hand pretty much impossible, forcing the player to rely on their own ability to intuit their hands. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like a lot of the people using calculators and spreadsheets would be drawn to this mode, since they are likely going for a "high score", and the expert mode would have a higher value in that sense. Kind of like how nobody really tries for a high score on easy mode, since it feels cheaper than going for one in normal or hard mode.
For me, the cryptic messages in Binding of Isaac didn't work out because there's no "safe place" to experiment. Picking up an item can ruin your build (and hence the whole run), which really works against the playful mystery McMillen was trying to invoke.
There's also so many items, where a good chunk of them are niche (so you've already used it but don't remember what it does). In that case, there's no mystery feeling either. Though, McMillen acknowledges that in the 2023 post you showed (where the original game only had 100 items, but it has since expanded to 700+).
This reminds me of my experience with Darkest Dungeon, where, at first, I played the game normally without outside information and then, after going through a few particularly frustrating events, looked up what is recommended for each boss/location which drastically altered the feel of the game
The problem with Darkest Dungeon was the massive "iteration time". Building up your heroes took a lot of tedious grinding, and getting blindsided by something could kill all of them permanently, set back your meta progress, and cost you hours of work. It is definitely tense, but also extremely frustrating and potentially unplayable if you only have so much time to spend.
It's telling that Darkest Dungeon 2 completely overhauled the metagame, to where each run is self-contained with a completely fresh set of heroes and gear.
The deck peek is a vital part of the game for me. I don't bother to calculate my hands, but sometimes I need to know what to discard if I want to keep going on that run. It's a clutch mechanic, to know whether I should use my last discards going for a Full House with cards I'm trying to draw but that I may or may not have unwittingly discarded or used them previously.
Thanks for sharing with us this video.
To me, it seems like the cursed problem here could be summarized as "Mystery and discovery in the age of the internet," which came from Alex Jaffe's GDC talk.
My brother, my best friend, and I have been playing Balatro in our different ways: my brother's a successful poker player, so he has a decent capacity and desire to run these numbers in his head. My best friend is the 100% optimizer, so I don't doubt that he's already playing with extensions. Me, I'm another spectrum: I intuitively approximate the numbers and most of the time, it works out. What we all have in common is we all enjoy the game to keep playing.
So, it makes me wonder if being a cursed problem is just one way of looking at it. Another is that localthunk is happy with the game, and all three of us are happy experiencing the game. That way, it doesn't seem like a curse nor a problem at all.