The Binding of Isaac Update adds Internal Item descriptions
Also includes big balance changes.
great
now i can finally play the game
Submitted 1 day ago by simple@piefed.social to games@lemmy.world
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/250900/view/521976260528701584
Comments
yucandu@lemmy.world 1 day ago
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Waking up to World War 3 AND the greatest qol update to a game ever? Today is gonna be real fucky, huh?
ech@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I strugglebused on BoI for a while, trying to force myself to experience it the “right” way and just hating it the whole time. Legitimately thought I didn’t like the game for a long time. Then I finally gave in and just looked up the items as I found them and that made it so much better. I played enough to get every ending, and I stopped worrying about “ruining” games by looking things up after that. Baring legit spoilers, I look up everything now. Turns out that knowing how the game functions is pretty important for enjoying it. Glad they finally got around to addressing that.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Interesting take. I thought the lack of knowledge on item behaviour added to the ludonarrative harmony, since you’re a lost child wandering around. I did look up the item descriptions after though, in case some things didn’t make complete sense.
Once I started mastering the game and they added zillions of new items that diluted the item pool, it lost its lusture.
But I can see how it could be frustrating to not know wtf the stuff does
ech@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
That certainly was the intent. I just hated it. It felt like every run was doomed from the start until I managed to get through the seemingly endless number of runs that would be needed to suss out not just what every item did, but how they interacted. There were parts I really liked, but I kept putting it down because it just wasn’t fun. Once that daunting requirement was removed, I had a blast and played it a ton. I haven’t gone back to it in a long time and it still remains one of my most played games on Steam.
LaserTurboShark69@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I’ll probably stick with the external item descriptions mod but this is a great update. The trinket buffs are so very welcome.
At this point there’s way too much quality of life added to Rep+ to go back now.
Skyline969@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
This is huge! Guess I’m gonna throw another hundred hours at the game.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Oh yay, I can take that mod off now
simple@piefed.social 1 day ago
This is a big change. For people who don't play Isaac, the items were often vague and vast majority of people used mods to show what these items do before you pick them up. Now it's a built-in feature with the newest update after years of requests.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I believe initially this was supposed to be part of the appeal. Any item may or may not screw you over if you don’t know what it does which is in keeping with Isaac’s theme of being beat down by your circumstances. Part of gutting gud was intended to be memorizing what the often idiosyncratic items actually did. Except now with years of updates and content expansions there are so many items it’s unrealistic to keep track of it all anymore. In the early days I might have disagreed with this but now it makes sense.
At least according to the patch notes you still have to collect an item the first time to get its full description, and the new descriptions don’t show at all until you beat Mom for the first time (i.e. you clear at least one basic run), so new players still get to experience the Fun and excitement of potentially getting hosed by an unfamiliar pickup.
simple@piefed.social 1 day ago
This. It made sense in Flash isaac when there were maybe 100 items, but now in Repentance+ there are just too many to count with many items looking very similar to others. Not including vague trinkets and run ending decisions like devil deals.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
To elaborate:
One of the foundational elements of Rogue and Roguelikes (that is so polarizing it isn’t part of The Berlin Interpretation) is the idea of randomized and unknown item effects. It goes back to tabletop gaming where you would find a potion and have no idea what it does, so you would give a sample to a rat you keep in a cage or splash it on a goblin prisoner. For obvious reasons, that shit went away in favor of skill checks.
The BoI items were very much in that vein. Theoretically you would memorize them over the course of runs and learn the synergies that helped you. In practice… ain’t nobody had time for that shit.
But it is a design philosophy that wasn’t uncommon for roguelites/likes of the era.
cRazi_man@europe.pub 1 day ago
Yeah I got the impression that’s how they intended for the game to be played. I’ve had a BoI app on my phone for years to get around this.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Yeah i think it should be an option to turn off. And like at my most addicted I would say git gud. But I come back for a few runs every few years and while I can remember some bs like soy milk + libra breaks the game in your favor but soy milk + brimstone is fucking unplayable. There’s so many items
you_are_dust@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is actually the reason I never finished the game. I pretty quickly got sick of looking every item up and/or constantly stopping to take notes about what items did. And I really like roguelikes a lot. But it felt like there was so much to have to memorize and for me in broke the otherwise fast pace of the game. Another victory for patient gaming!
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
All of the updates and content expansions and so on and so forth have really made Isaac unmanageable in that regard. Throw in the fact that there are quite a few item drops that are objectively detrimental in basically every situation so that a not insignificant fraction of the item pool is just trash drops that nobody in their right mind would ever pick up, and it gets ridiculous quickly. Once you have enough unlocked that you’re regularly getting runs down into the lower sub-basements of hell, unless you’re an absolute guru the meta is literally just to meta. Know a couple of the game-breaking combinations off the top of your head and cross your fingers that you’ll run across all of the components.
This is in stark contrast to e.g. Dead Cells, which is why I’ve got such an immense respect for the latter. If you’re willing to adjust your play style slightly, every single drop in Dead Cells is a viable weapon that can be deadly in the right hands. You could be wielding a legendary golden abyssal trident, sure, but you can also just as well beat the shit out of all the boss monsters with a pair of frying pans tied together with some rope. It must have taken an immense amount of work to get all of that even vaguely balanced and ensure that there were no duds, wheras Isaac’s strategy seems to be more just throwing shit at the wall (probably literally…) to see what sticks, with a salting of deliberately adding things to troll the player for the lulz.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Same, I enjoyed the gameplay but every item drop was far less exciting because I’d need to pause and consult a wiki before making a choice.
MudMan@fedia.io 1 day ago
The vast majority of people to be read as "a tiny fraction of players". It's just probably the players more likely to be part of the online community around the game or to play it consistently this long after release. I wouldn't be surprised if only a very, very small percentage of the twenty thousand people playing the game right now ever had installed any mods at all.
While I don't have hard data on this, I can tell you I've played the game since the Flash days and certainly never modded it for this reason or even considered it. Wiki page open onthe side just in case? Sure. Mods? Nope.
Intuitive perception on this stuff gets weird.