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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
I don't know why, but the sound of the Blind Chip disintegrating reminds me of the sound of opening a chocolate bar (Mars, Snickers, etc.) and I get instantly hungry.
Fun fact: all the art was done by localthunk except for one single joker, made by lumpytouch, simply because he loved the game and wanted to contribute
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel an assist mode equivalent is a good compromise on that. Celeste's assist mode is very clear that it's not the intended way to play the game, but the option is there for those who need or want it. It's not a perfect analogue since in Celeste it's mostly intended for disabled players who are unable to play the game normally, but I've also used it for things like seeing the golden story end to farewell, because there's no way I'm getting that through normal gameplay. It gives people who really want it the option, while leaving everyone else untempted
Having the score preview hidden in plain sight but calculable is what hooks you in, you stay mentally present when playing, then you strategize and optimize your joker build for what kind of playing cards and planet cards you're getting. You guesstimating the scores manually or even with a calculator means you're fully engaged with the game, which is what I suspect, what the dev exactly wants.
Wait, people calculate their score??? I just cross my fingers and get disappointed if I fucked up and didnt play a good enough hand against the needle.
I only calculate my score if I’m switching jokers between 10 multi or 50 chips. I found out that planets have a diminishing increase of multi over chips so multi wins out later. And for the final boss I calculate just to make sure I didn’t miss an hour of playing
You really don’t need to. If you’re properly keeping an eye on your scores you can get a grasp on what your next hand will be, because balatro is all about building your run around maximizing the score for one hand
I can't believe people aren't calculating it out. I pretty much approximate the score in my head before every hand. Any time I'm not certain I'm blowing past the blind I'm pulling out a calculator. The game would just be a slot machine without that ability.
@gabemerittt3139 calculating every hand might be overkill. Usually if you get around the same hand type, (straight, flush, full house) with the same jokers, you’ll usually get the exact same chip amount. If you’re playing with a luck based deck like a heart flush deck, calculating is pointless. But if you generally get 15k, you’ll be getting that everytime, and then when you buy a new joker, you can estimate the increase. If it’s a 3x joker, you can expect around a 3x or 1.5 increase
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
@@gameplayfirst-ger 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.
@@gameplayfirst-ger 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
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.
There's a fair amount of random chance cards in balatro which is why I think full score calculators aren't that helpful for all builds. For now I'm glad it doesn't have them, I like to play casually and enjoy the slot machine effect.
Yeah, I think this is an important point, there could be ways to still present the information. Like switching between high to low limits of the score. But, I do think this video does ignores the fact that your score isn't necessarily static before you play your hand.
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".
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.
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).
I wouldn't call this a design problem at all, it gives casual players the thrill of not knowing what they'll get, and people who enjoy tryharding get to predict and calculate the optimal paths. It's a form of skill expression that is in tune with the gambling nature of Poker.
@@Mirtual This is the pinnacle of useless video essays. He spends 50% not even talking about the game and other games, then concludes with a basic opinion and makes it sounds like a twist
What I like about this game design is the fact that contrary to The binding of Isaac the game doesn't force you to calculate your scores all the time in order to play well. You just need to calculate your score in Critical / Key moments of the run to be a good player. The game even rewards you as you become a better player because you start to overkill the score meter a lot of times, reducing the amount of time you need to spend calculating.
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.
@@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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Balatro is a gambling game. just like how card counting exists in the real world but isn’t intended for black jack players, score counting exists for people that want to ruin the fun of randomness
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.
The ability to choose is 100% the point here. A dev shouldn’t be clamping down directly on certain ways of playing, unless those play styles make the game directly worse for other players, such as in multiplayer-focused games. If anything, that’s why I think a feature like this should be contained as a mod. For those who don’t want to do the calculation, it’s right there, but it doesn’t force its way into the gameplay of others.
I think it's the exact opposite, actually. This is a good thing for Rimworld. The developer is making things more fun for the people who want to play his way by making gruesome sadness death movie simulator and giving more fun for people who are optimizers who want to play ultimate nerdy numbers game. By changing the meta constantly, optimizers can have the fun of finding a new meta. They *want* to problem-solve, and the dev is giving them a problem to solve. And the story-focused guys didn't really care about the meta at all, so nerfing turrets a bit isn't going to reduce their fun by much. They're there to find a story, not to build the ultimate defense.
@@queenofthesalt5199 It's weird that people get mad when game designers design their games. I think they should make the game the way they want it, and people can choose to play it or not.
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.
@@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.
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
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.
Came to the replies sections looking for this! Yes, so many people forget that games had the information written on manuals!!! Nostalgia glasses really ruined a lot of game designers decisions nowadays.
For anybody who doesn't know there's a puzzle/soulslike game called Tunic which builds heavily on the feeling of reading a game manual, except the manual is written in an unknown to you language. Strongly recommend.
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.
Heavily agree. Playing the early antes well in Balatro requires a good intuitive sense of what hands to play/sculpt for and I strongly believe that trial and error (and even the occasional manual calculation) do far more to help players develop that sense than a simple score preview would.
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?”
@@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.
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."
@@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.
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.
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).
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.
I dont think the score preview is only for hardcore players. There's a sense of debilitation that can arise when you're not allowed to make an informed decision. There have been plenty of instances in games where I think "why did that happen?" and it's not that I'm a super strategic player, it's that I want a sense of agency in the game that I'm spending my free time playing. When I don't understand what is happening, I don't have agency.
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)
Possible cool thing could be this: when you look at your cards you see that you have a full house. You click the five card for full house, dont see any score or know if this is enough point, BUT. You then see you can also lay down a four of the same, you then lay that out instead, and then an arrow points up with a blue color to indicate this will score higher than the hand you just looked at before, the full house. It would show a red arrow pointing down if its worse. I think this could be really cool and not spoil the suspens, not knowing if its enough
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.
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
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!
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.
Isaac already got around this by having additional options for the HUD. I always play with both the Found HUD (which displays your current stats and gives you indicators for any stat changes you get from any items/consumables you use) and the Extra HUD (which shows you what items you've picked up). I also play with the transparent full map overlay instead of the minimap, which is another option the game gives you to use. You absolutely can tell what the vast majority of items do from just picking them up, and you can know exactly what your stats are at any point in time, all by just enabling the Found HUD.
@@loumona76 if you stop spending all your time agonizing about winning every round, you’ll find it to be a lot more satisfying and fun. That’s basic human psychology.
@@harrylane4 Maybe some people want to progress in the game instead of constantly losing progress and starting over because the game refuses to give the most important information for no valid reason.
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.
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.
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 love the quote "When given the chance, the players will try to optimize the fun out of the game". I have experienced this so many times, but it is so hard to avoid it as a player, when everyone else is doing it. That is why I think it is better for the developer to explicity prevent it. I am not a good player in Age of empires 2. But I have played atleast 500 hours of it during my childhood. But playing online for 10 hours after i finally got a legal version of AoE, completely destroyed my interest in that game. The fact that there is an optimal strategy in that game for even the first few minutes and you literally cant survive if you dont follow it, is just plainly heartbreaking for me.
Similar thing playing Pacific Drive right now. When you scan a new anomaly it adds it to your logbook. But the description isn't "this does that if you touch it", it's an in-universe journal entry or report describing an encounter with the anomaly. It hints at its nature without being explicit because after all, it is a mysterious anomaly. And it is a lot more enjoyable to not know for sure, to hesitantly approach them, or to avoid them in case and then one day when frantically driving bump into one and be like "oh no". But it's a somewhat universal issue with games. RPGs don't tell you "this option will give you a good ending and this one will be bad", but we can look it up, follow walkthroughs, and miss the enjoyment of immersing ourselves. I've started being very conscious of my bad gaming habits, and it's helping me to rediscover joy in a lot of different types of games
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@PikaPenny17Then you're not gambling. Gambling may have strategic elements and require skill to succeed, but the big draw of gambling is the uncertainty of luck and chance and the thrill having to make a bet on something you aren't 100% certain you'll win. Now with poker games, that's not something you can guarantee as you know what your hand is worth and, if you're playing a score game like Balatro, then the only luck involved is whatever arbitrary modifiers are applied to a given run and luck of the draw, which is mitigated by either counting cards or using the deck tracker. That's not to say that you're way of doing things is wrong. After all, a big draw of Balatro is figuring out how to rig your deck to win every time and keep that win streak going. But a core part of the game's design philosophy as told by its creator is that unless you take the time to slow down and meticulously analyze everything, you can't be certain that you'll get a hand that will score high enough to win, and trying to play hyper-optimally goes against the spirit of the game as they designed it and intended for it to be played as a casual recreational poker sim with lots of whacky rules and shenanigans to mess around with.
@@Brutalyte616 If they didn't want me to play hyper optimized, they really shouldn't have made some decks only unlockable by beating higher difficulties that require hyper optimization to win. Also, I would say the gambling in Balatro is more, will you draw the right cards, rather than whether the hand you play will be good enough.
@@PikaPenny17 There's a difference between playing optimally, i.e. making the best plays you can with all available information, and the proposed hyper-optimization of having the game itself tell you what the best play is at any given time and effectively playing the game for you in such a way that you cannot lose. Yes, that's fine for unlocking more deck options to fool around with if you're just going for that, but if that is the way you're choosing to play the game overal, with theoretically no chance of losing so long as you don't deliberately make a mistake, then you aren't really playing the game so much as you are just running a program and going through the motions.
This problem is what guides and walkthroughs are for. Disambiguating game secrets steals from the experiences of discovery and learning, like when an NPC blurts out the solution to a puzzle before you’ve even had a chance to understand what the puzzle is. If players want information the game does not explicitly provide, it is the player’s choice to go outside of the game to ask the Internet for help, clues, or a full disclosure.
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.
And ultimately, the actual strategic backbone of Balatro, the real high minded stuff, isn’t really the score itself. Are you at maximum interest? Is this Joker going to win me this Ante? Is this Joker going to win me the run? What small, incremental advantages can I make when I’m not in combat? All those numbers are almost always less than 100, and usually less than 50.
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.
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.
Ever heard of Slice And Dice, that's essentially turn based rpg but you roll dice? You can UNDO the targets and order in which you assign damage / shields / spend mana (you can't undo rolling tho, only the 'combat') And the game is still fun and challenging to play. That's one of the best game design choices I've ever come across
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.
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.
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.
I feel like the hidden score total also adds to the feeling of this being a "poker" game. Obviously, the psychological elements, like bluffing, can't be replicated in a PvE poker game, but it does give the feeling that the player's instincts or knowledge of when to play a hand or what hand to play matters. Leaving the score calculating to the player means that a player's personal knowhow (even if it's just accurately calculating with an app) is the metric by which you succeed. But it's possible to play well just by knowing which hands will be affected by the most Jokers or have the best base chips/mult, so player instinct still has a place. The only time I feel like calculation is really necessary is during endless mode or when facing The Needle boss blind.
I disagree with this being a flaw. The game allows for you to go super in depth and mega nerd out to optimize the game if you so choose which to some is boring (and to those people they can simply not do it) but to many it feels fun and rewarding. Also the only times you realistically have to do this is when your starting out (before you have a good feeling of how powerful curtain hands and cards are) and in very tight games where every chip matters. Now in the first scenario it can be bad as a new player doesn’t want to deal with that when learning the game but they don’t have to as they can simply learn from playing and failing. And in the second scenario it can feel extremely rewarding finding the perfect hand that barely edges out the win especially if your initial hand would’ve lost. So yeah it can be bad some times but 99.99% of the time it’s a non issue and sometimes it’s even a good thing that makes the game fun. Thank you for listening to my Ted talk
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
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.
Aboit Isaac, it has much different goal than Legend of Zelda, or at least it makes people think that it has. Progressing in the game unlocks more and more difficult challenges, that can get very frustrating. It's not about finishing the game like in Zelda, but torturing yourself to get even more unlocks. Add to that the idea of not having a wiki for all of that and the design gets really messy. But there's a possibility that the hardest challenges in Isaac were designed to only be unlocked by the sweatiest gamers, and the avaliability of the information destroyed that idea by also challenging the casuals.
I think is is more of a an example of genius game design. This game caters for those who are casual and randomly play cards, while the tryhards who want to win the blind with one hand, they just can! Nothing is stopping them other than some simple calculations
I think Balatro gets away with not having score previews, because in most situations (outside of ante 1), you aren't beating the blinds by a small margin: you're more often beating them by 5-20% or more, depending on how strong your build is relative to the ante. So, you don't *need* to precalculate your hands. You can just rely on learned gut instinct, because even if you estimate a hand is worth 60k chips, but it's actually 50k, it doesn't matter against a 40k blind. In short, because you win or lose by bigger margins, you can get away with making educated guesses rather than precalculating each turn. For this reason, and the ones localthunk brought up, I hope he never changes it. I want the feeling of a gamble to always be there (at least, for those of us who'd rather play cards than play calculator 😂).
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!
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.
I always found that aspect kind of fun, having to have some idea of whether something will get you enough chips or not. For example, if you play a flush with all face cards and it gets you ≈10,000 chips, and you need about 8,000 chips to win the blind, you can safely play the same hand you’ve previously played and know you’ll probably win, or you know you can’t play lower hands because they won’t get you enough.
Having NL (the Streamer Northernlion earlier in the video) in the same video in which the Binding of Isaac is discussed for the first time is such a NL to happen :D. Tho for real. Waited years to see an episode on the Binding of Isaac so I’m happy to see that you finally touched on it. Also Balatro hype 🎉
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.
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 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.
I think a simple solution would be to make one of the higher stakes enable score preview, while playing at that difficulty or higher. Basically, the idea is to only give the player the option when the game is hard enough that they really need it.
I've heard this concept of "difficult to acquire (yet still obtainable) information" referred to in tabletop games as "fuzzy information", which I feel is a solid term for it. This design approach has many benefits. It's well-known that a game's level of determinism can affect the fun factor, with too much determinism often leading to analysis paralysis. However, when information is only knowable "in theory," humans can often intuitively estimate outcomes without losing the unpredictability that keeps the experience exciting. In this way, fuzzy information strikes an ideal balance, offering both strategic depth and room for the unexpected.
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+).
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 love the lack of a displayed preview score! it's so fun to do a quick mental estimate just to get a ballpark figure, then letting it rip and hoping that it's on the winning end of the ballpark
5:15 I am not done the video yet, and I am curious to see the final conclusion of the video, but I actually really enjoy this about Balatro! It is not a design flaw to me. Sometimes it is difficult to get the exact number my score will reach, but strategizing in Balatro gives me a similar type of joy as playing Poker or Blackjack strategically. Except the gameplay in Balatro is much more dynamic than either of those games, and the visuals and SFX when you're scoring are still very satisfying. I am also the type of person who enjoys 4X strategy games though, and I see doing the arithmetic in my head (even if I get it wrong) as part of the challenge. I wouldn't bring a spreadsheet to Balatro for the same reason I wouldn't bring a spreadsheet to a board game with friends. It would ruin the fun of the game. Okay, now time to finish watching the rest of your analysis. EDIT: 10:48 This is wild to me--not once stopping to mentally calculate your score ahead of time 😅
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.
And all the very specific and not hinted at in-game or in-manual bombable walls and burnable bushes etc.? That notoriously cryptic stuff is what he's talking about.
Another element from Binding of Isaac that this video reminded me of are tinted rocks, which drop rewards when blown up. Past the starting floors they become barely distinguishable from other props. While not technically hidden information, they are easy to miss when not paying a lot of attention to finding them, and and for me they become a sort of surprise treat I sometimes notice in the corner of my eye. And yet there's a whole collection of various mods that exist solely to make it impossible to miss the hidden rocks by making them stand out in various ways. It kinda felt like another way of sanding down the intended experience in order to optimise the gameplay in some aspects.
Classic Berlin definition roguelikes like NetHack and ADOM had a very similar problem. You could get permanent traits (mostly resistances) in various obscure ways, and the only way you were informed of the fact was a cryptic message in the game log. Something like "You feel unexpectedly warm" for when you get cold resistance and "You suddenly shiver" when you lose it. And there was no screen that let you just check all the traits you have. So the end result is that I used to have a lot of scrap paper covered with nothing but lists of resistances from each run.
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
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
I sometimes watch my friend play Isaac and up untill now I've never realised that the UI with all stats and item list and descriptions hovering on the top left weren't integral part of the game but a mod.
I agree with Balatro's current mode, not showing the final total to create suspense and theatrics, but when Binding of Isaac is trying to capture the feeling of playing NES Zelda, note-keeping is part of that experience. Like you said, talking with your friends and brainstorming and putting clues together were part of the play pattern for those games. The only difference is now, instead of being 5 or so kids on a school playground, your "friends" end up being everyone with an internet connection, all joining in on a message board to collaborate. Having your phone open to an item list is basically the same as borrowing your buddy's notepad with maps and secrets spelled out.
Risk of Rain 2 tries a similar thing with the lack of item information accessible while in a run, which is frustrating for making builds to get to Mithrix etc. the first mod my whole group downloaded for RoR2 was a UI rework mod that gives item descriptions. not only does it make item decisions easier, it makes the game more beginner friendly. (the next mods we grabbed were item beacons, all-ready check, and bigger group lobbies lol)
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?
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
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.
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.
I don't know why, but the sound of the Blind Chip disintegrating reminds me of the sound of opening a chocolate bar (Mars, Snickers, etc.) and I get instantly hungry.
Fun fact: all the art was done by localthunk except for one single joker, made by lumpytouch, simply because he loved the game and wanted to contribute
@@berrylly I did not know that! That's sick, I love Lumpytouch
lightning bolt flashbacks to playing solitaire on our computer in the mid 90s
This comment gives face cards a 1 in 2 chance to make $2 when played.
Casually dropping the sickest Zelda clip in the middle of a Balatro video 7:50
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.
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.
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.
Good for you, now can we also let disabled players be happy ?
@@loumona76what is wrong with you ? Nothing about this comment came across as trying to gatekeep disabled players.
@@loumona76 literally nothing about this is an accessibility or disability access thing. Balatro is extremely accessible to disabled players
@@loumona76 big “AI art is disability advocacy” energy
I feel an assist mode equivalent is a good compromise on that. Celeste's assist mode is very clear that it's not the intended way to play the game, but the option is there for those who need or want it. It's not a perfect analogue since in Celeste it's mostly intended for disabled players who are unable to play the game normally, but I've also used it for things like seeing the golden story end to farewell, because there's no way I'm getting that through normal gameplay. It gives people who really want it the option, while leaving everyone else untempted
Having the score preview hidden in plain sight but calculable is what hooks you in, you stay mentally present when playing, then you strategize and optimize your joker build for what kind of playing cards and planet cards you're getting. You guesstimating the scores manually or even with a calculator means you're fully engaged with the game, which is what I suspect, what the dev exactly wants.
Wait, people calculate their score??? I just cross my fingers and get disappointed if I fucked up and didnt play a good enough hand against the needle.
More score more better.
I only calculate my score if I’m switching jokers between 10 multi or 50 chips. I found out that planets have a diminishing increase of multi over chips so multi wins out later. And for the final boss I calculate just to make sure I didn’t miss an hour of playing
You really don’t need to. If you’re properly keeping an eye on your scores you can get a grasp on what your next hand will be, because balatro is all about building your run around maximizing the score for one hand
I can't believe people aren't calculating it out. I pretty much approximate the score in my head before every hand. Any time I'm not certain I'm blowing past the blind I'm pulling out a calculator.
The game would just be a slot machine without that ability.
@gabemerittt3139 calculating every hand might be overkill. Usually if you get around the same hand type, (straight, flush, full house) with the same jokers, you’ll usually get the exact same chip amount. If you’re playing with a luck based deck like a heart flush deck, calculating is pointless. But if you generally get 15k, you’ll be getting that everytime, and then when you buy a new joker, you can estimate the increase. If it’s a 3x joker, you can expect around a 3x or 1.5 increase
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
@@gameplayfirst-ger 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.
@@gameplayfirst-ger 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
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.
There's a fair amount of random chance cards in balatro which is why I think full score calculators aren't that helpful for all builds. For now I'm glad it doesn't have them, I like to play casually and enjoy the slot machine effect.
Yeah, I think this is an important point, there could be ways to still present the information. Like switching between high to low limits of the score.
But, I do think this video does ignores the fact that your score isn't necessarily static before you play your hand.
The design flaw is like when the interviewer asks you “what’s your biggest flaw” and you answer it with something that sounds negative but is positive
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
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”
I wouldn't call this a design problem at all, it gives casual players the thrill of not knowing what they'll get, and people who enjoy tryharding get to predict and calculate the optimal paths.
It's a form of skill expression that is in tune with the gambling nature of Poker.
Straight facts. Sounds like he called it a flaw for the sake of clickbaiting the most popular game right now, not a flaw whatsoever
@@Mirtual This is the pinnacle of useless video essays. He spends 50% not even talking about the game and other games, then concludes with a basic opinion and makes it sounds like a twist
What I like about this game design is the fact that contrary to The binding of Isaac the game doesn't force you to calculate your scores all the time in order to play well. You just need to calculate your score in Critical / Key moments of the run to be a good player. The game even rewards you as you become a better player because you start to overkill the score meter a lot of times, reducing the amount of time you need to spend calculating.
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
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
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
Balatro is a gambling game. just like how card counting exists in the real world but isn’t intended for black jack players, score counting exists for people that want to ruin the fun of randomness
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.
The ability to choose is 100% the point here. A dev shouldn’t be clamping down directly on certain ways of playing, unless those play styles make the game directly worse for other players, such as in multiplayer-focused games.
If anything, that’s why I think a feature like this should be contained as a mod. For those who don’t want to do the calculation, it’s right there, but it doesn’t force its way into the gameplay of others.
I think it's the exact opposite, actually. This is a good thing for Rimworld. The developer is making things more fun for the people who want to play his way by making gruesome sadness death movie simulator and giving more fun for people who are optimizers who want to play ultimate nerdy numbers game. By changing the meta constantly, optimizers can have the fun of finding a new meta. They *want* to problem-solve, and the dev is giving them a problem to solve.
And the story-focused guys didn't really care about the meta at all, so nerfing turrets a bit isn't going to reduce their fun by much. They're there to find a story, not to build the ultimate defense.
except there are in game options for this
How does making the game more dynamic make it worse?
@@queenofthesalt5199 It's weird that people get mad when game designers design their games. I think they should make the game the way they want it, and people can choose to play it or not.
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.
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.
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
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.
Came to the replies sections looking for this! Yes, so many people forget that games had the information written on manuals!!!
Nostalgia glasses really ruined a lot of game designers decisions nowadays.
For anybody who doesn't know there's a puzzle/soulslike game called Tunic which builds heavily on the feeling of reading a game manual, except the manual is written in an unknown to you language. Strongly recommend.
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.
Heavily agree. Playing the early antes well in Balatro requires a good intuitive sense of what hands to play/sculpt for and I strongly believe that trial and error (and even the occasional manual calculation) do far more to help players develop that sense than a simple score preview would.
How is it bad then ? Also. You're forgetting disabled players.
the creator doesn’t really want people doing the math, so there’s no point in adding an accessibility mode for it
@@loumona76not everything has to be for everyone.
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
@@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.
3:38 "Stern spreadsheet style strategy" is my new favorite vocal warmup
XD
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
Dude not having the preview is my favorite thing about the whole game, its so fun even if I lose to just... take a gamble. Lmfao
Thats like saying "oh, i wanna see the dealers hand before i decide if i stand or hit" in blackjack. Part of the fun is the unknown
"We need to take the gambling out of the casino!"
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.
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.
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.
this is the closest we've got to an inscryption video
I dont think the score preview is only for hardcore players. There's a sense of debilitation that can arise when you're not allowed to make an informed decision. There have been plenty of instances in games where I think "why did that happen?" and it's not that I'm a super strategic player, it's that I want a sense of agency in the game that I'm spending my free time playing. When I don't understand what is happening, I don't have agency.
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)
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
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.
Possible cool thing could be this: when you look at your cards you see that you have a full house. You click the five card for full house, dont see any score or know if this is enough point, BUT. You then see you can also lay down a four of the same, you then lay that out instead, and then an arrow points up with a blue color to indicate this will score higher than the hand you just looked at before, the full house. It would show a red arrow pointing down if its worse.
I think this could be really cool and not spoil the suspens, not knowing if its enough
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.
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
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!
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!
@@webmolgamb im glad!
Isaac already got around this by having additional options for the HUD. I always play with both the Found HUD (which displays your current stats and gives you indicators for any stat changes you get from any items/consumables you use) and the Extra HUD (which shows you what items you've picked up). I also play with the transparent full map overlay instead of the minimap, which is another option the game gives you to use.
You absolutely can tell what the vast majority of items do from just picking them up, and you can know exactly what your stats are at any point in time, all by just enabling the Found HUD.
Honestly I did not think people would go out of their way to calculate their hands because that’s gonna take all the fun out
For YOU ???
It's also rewarding to WIN ?
Like seriously
@@loumona76 if you stop spending all your time agonizing about winning every round, you’ll find it to be a lot more satisfying and fun. That’s basic human psychology.
@@harrylane4 Maybe some people want to progress in the game instead of constantly losing progress and starting over because the game refuses to give the most important information for no valid reason.
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.
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.
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 love the quote "When given the chance, the players will try to optimize the fun out of the game". I have experienced this so many times, but it is so hard to avoid it as a player, when everyone else is doing it. That is why I think it is better for the developer to explicity prevent it.
I am not a good player in Age of empires 2. But I have played atleast 500 hours of it during my childhood. But playing online for 10 hours after i finally got a legal version of AoE, completely destroyed my interest in that game. The fact that there is an optimal strategy in that game for even the first few minutes and you literally cant survive if you dont follow it, is just plainly heartbreaking for me.
I had a very similar experience with AoE 2. I hate the whole concept of "meta" in online games for this reason
Similar thing playing Pacific Drive right now. When you scan a new anomaly it adds it to your logbook. But the description isn't "this does that if you touch it", it's an in-universe journal entry or report describing an encounter with the anomaly. It hints at its nature without being explicit because after all, it is a mysterious anomaly. And it is a lot more enjoyable to not know for sure, to hesitantly approach them, or to avoid them in case and then one day when frantically driving bump into one and be like "oh no".
But it's a somewhat universal issue with games. RPGs don't tell you "this option will give you a good ending and this one will be bad", but we can look it up, follow walkthroughs, and miss the enjoyment of immersing ourselves. I've started being very conscious of my bad gaming habits, and it's helping me to rediscover joy in a lot of different types of games
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.
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.
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
@@PikaPenny17Then you're not gambling.
Gambling may have strategic elements and require skill to succeed, but the big draw of gambling is the uncertainty of luck and chance and the thrill having to make a bet on something you aren't 100% certain you'll win.
Now with poker games, that's not something you can guarantee as you know what your hand is worth and, if you're playing a score game like Balatro, then the only luck involved is whatever arbitrary modifiers are applied to a given run and luck of the draw, which is mitigated by either counting cards or using the deck tracker.
That's not to say that you're way of doing things is wrong. After all, a big draw of Balatro is figuring out how to rig your deck to win every time and keep that win streak going. But a core part of the game's design philosophy as told by its creator is that unless you take the time to slow down and meticulously analyze everything, you can't be certain that you'll get a hand that will score high enough to win, and trying to play hyper-optimally goes against the spirit of the game as they designed it and intended for it to be played as a casual recreational poker sim with lots of whacky rules and shenanigans to mess around with.
@@Brutalyte616 If they didn't want me to play hyper optimized, they really shouldn't have made some decks only unlockable by beating higher difficulties that require hyper optimization to win. Also, I would say the gambling in Balatro is more, will you draw the right cards, rather than whether the hand you play will be good enough.
@@PikaPenny17 There's a difference between playing optimally, i.e. making the best plays you can with all available information, and the proposed hyper-optimization of having the game itself tell you what the best play is at any given time and effectively playing the game for you in such a way that you cannot lose. Yes, that's fine for unlocking more deck options to fool around with if you're just going for that, but if that is the way you're choosing to play the game overal, with theoretically no chance of losing so long as you don't deliberately make a mistake, then you aren't really playing the game so much as you are just running a program and going through the motions.
This problem is what guides and walkthroughs are for. Disambiguating game secrets steals from the experiences of discovery and learning, like when an NPC blurts out the solution to a puzzle before you’ve even had a chance to understand what the puzzle is. If players want information the game does not explicitly provide, it is the player’s choice to go outside of the game to ask the Internet for help, clues, or a full disclosure.
Very nice video essay. Keep it up man!
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!”
And ultimately, the actual strategic backbone of Balatro, the real high minded stuff, isn’t really the score itself. Are you at maximum interest? Is this Joker going to win me this Ante? Is this Joker going to win me the run? What small, incremental advantages can I make when I’m not in combat? All those numbers are almost always less than 100, and usually less than 50.
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
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.
I always love your videos, man. Genuinely grateful for all the insight and entertainment.
Ever heard of Slice And Dice, that's essentially turn based rpg but you roll dice? You can UNDO the targets and order in which you assign damage / shields / spend mana (you can't undo rolling tho, only the 'combat')
And the game is still fun and challenging to play.
That's one of the best game design choices I've ever come across
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.
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.
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 never thought about limiting info as a game mechanic. This is fascinating!
I feel like the hidden score total also adds to the feeling of this being a "poker" game. Obviously, the psychological elements, like bluffing, can't be replicated in a PvE poker game, but it does give the feeling that the player's instincts or knowledge of when to play a hand or what hand to play matters. Leaving the score calculating to the player means that a player's personal knowhow (even if it's just accurately calculating with an app) is the metric by which you succeed. But it's possible to play well just by knowing which hands will be affected by the most Jokers or have the best base chips/mult, so player instinct still has a place. The only time I feel like calculation is really necessary is during endless mode or when facing The Needle boss blind.
I disagree with this being a flaw. The game allows for you to go super in depth and mega nerd out to optimize the game if you so choose which to some is boring (and to those people they can simply not do it) but to many it feels fun and rewarding. Also the only times you realistically have to do this is when your starting out (before you have a good feeling of how powerful curtain hands and cards are) and in very tight games where every chip matters. Now in the first scenario it can be bad as a new player doesn’t want to deal with that when learning the game but they don’t have to as they can simply learn from playing and failing. And in the second scenario it can feel extremely rewarding finding the perfect hand that barely edges out the win especially if your initial hand would’ve lost. So yeah it can be bad some times but 99.99% of the time it’s a non issue and sometimes it’s even a good thing that makes the game fun.
Thank you for listening to my Ted talk
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.
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 😢
Aboit Isaac, it has much different goal than Legend of Zelda, or at least it makes people think that it has. Progressing in the game unlocks more and more difficult challenges, that can get very frustrating. It's not about finishing the game like in Zelda, but torturing yourself to get even more unlocks. Add to that the idea of not having a wiki for all of that and the design gets really messy.
But there's a possibility that the hardest challenges in Isaac were designed to only be unlocked by the sweatiest gamers, and the avaliability of the information destroyed that idea by also challenging the casuals.
I think is is more of a an example of genius game design. This game caters for those who are casual and randomly play cards, while the tryhards who want to win the blind with one hand, they just can! Nothing is stopping them other than some simple calculations
I think Balatro gets away with not having score previews, because in most situations (outside of ante 1), you aren't beating the blinds by a small margin: you're more often beating them by 5-20% or more, depending on how strong your build is relative to the ante.
So, you don't *need* to precalculate your hands. You can just rely on learned gut instinct, because even if you estimate a hand is worth 60k chips, but it's actually 50k, it doesn't matter against a 40k blind.
In short, because you win or lose by bigger margins, you can get away with making educated guesses rather than precalculating each turn.
For this reason, and the ones localthunk brought up, I hope he never changes it. I want the feeling of a gamble to always be there (at least, for those of us who'd rather play cards than play calculator 😂).
With scaling jokers, you don't want to beat the blind in 1 go, but you want to get close and that's where is issues start happening
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!
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
I always found that aspect kind of fun, having to have some idea of whether something will get you enough chips or not. For example, if you play a flush with all face cards and it gets you ≈10,000 chips, and you need about 8,000 chips to win the blind, you can safely play the same hand you’ve previously played and know you’ll probably win, or you know you can’t play lower hands because they won’t get you enough.
Having NL (the Streamer Northernlion earlier in the video) in the same video in which the Binding of Isaac is discussed for the first time is such a NL to happen :D.
Tho for real. Waited years to see an episode on the Binding of Isaac so I’m happy to see that you finally touched on it. Also Balatro hype 🎉
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.
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 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.
I think a simple solution would be to make one of the higher stakes enable score preview, while playing at that difficulty or higher. Basically, the idea is to only give the player the option when the game is hard enough that they really need it.
I've heard this concept of "difficult to acquire (yet still obtainable) information" referred to in tabletop games as "fuzzy information", which I feel is a solid term for it. This design approach has many benefits. It's well-known that a game's level of determinism can affect the fun factor, with too much determinism often leading to analysis paralysis. However, when information is only knowable "in theory," humans can often intuitively estimate outcomes without losing the unpredictability that keeps the experience exciting. In this way, fuzzy information strikes an ideal balance, offering both strategic depth and room for the unexpected.
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+).
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?
There is a slight indicator with the fire. The fire means that you scored the round minimum, or higher, in a single hand
That only shows up if the score before Jokers and cards was more than the blind
I love the lack of a displayed preview score!
it's so fun to do a quick mental estimate just to get a ballpark figure, then letting it rip and hoping that it's on the winning end of the ballpark
5:15 I am not done the video yet, and I am curious to see the final conclusion of the video, but I actually really enjoy this about Balatro! It is not a design flaw to me.
Sometimes it is difficult to get the exact number my score will reach, but strategizing in Balatro gives me a similar type of joy as playing Poker or Blackjack strategically. Except the gameplay in Balatro is much more dynamic than either of those games, and the visuals and SFX when you're scoring are still very satisfying. I am also the type of person who enjoys 4X strategy games though, and I see doing the arithmetic in my head (even if I get it wrong) as part of the challenge. I wouldn't bring a spreadsheet to Balatro for the same reason I wouldn't bring a spreadsheet to a board game with friends. It would ruin the fun of the game.
Okay, now time to finish watching the rest of your analysis.
EDIT: 10:48 This is wild to me--not once stopping to mentally calculate your score ahead of time 😅
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.
8:48 Well that developer clearly never read the manual for the Legend of Zelda as that gives descriptions for various items.
And all the very specific and not hinted at in-game or in-manual bombable walls and burnable bushes etc.? That notoriously cryptic stuff is what he's talking about.
Was waiting for a video on Balatro! Thank you GMT!
Another element from Binding of Isaac that this video reminded me of are tinted rocks, which drop rewards when blown up.
Past the starting floors they become barely distinguishable from other props. While not technically hidden information, they are easy to miss when not paying a lot of attention to finding them, and and for me they become a sort of surprise treat I sometimes notice in the corner of my eye.
And yet there's a whole collection of various mods that exist solely to make it impossible to miss the hidden rocks by making them stand out in various ways. It kinda felt like another way of sanding down the intended experience in order to optimise the gameplay in some aspects.
Classic Berlin definition roguelikes like NetHack and ADOM had a very similar problem. You could get permanent traits (mostly resistances) in various obscure ways, and the only way you were informed of the fact was a cryptic message in the game log. Something like "You feel unexpectedly warm" for when you get cold resistance and "You suddenly shiver" when you lose it. And there was no screen that let you just check all the traits you have. So the end result is that I used to have a lot of scrap paper covered with nothing but lists of resistances from each run.
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
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
I sometimes watch my friend play Isaac and up untill now I've never realised that the UI with all stats and item list and descriptions hovering on the top left weren't integral part of the game but a mod.
It is part of the game now, but for years it was just a mod
I agree with Balatro's current mode, not showing the final total to create suspense and theatrics, but when Binding of Isaac is trying to capture the feeling of playing NES Zelda, note-keeping is part of that experience. Like you said, talking with your friends and brainstorming and putting clues together were part of the play pattern for those games. The only difference is now, instead of being 5 or so kids on a school playground, your "friends" end up being everyone with an internet connection, all joining in on a message board to collaborate. Having your phone open to an item list is basically the same as borrowing your buddy's notepad with maps and secrets spelled out.
Risk of Rain 2 tries a similar thing with the lack of item information accessible while in a run, which is frustrating for making builds to get to Mithrix etc. the first mod my whole group downloaded for RoR2 was a UI rework mod that gives item descriptions. not only does it make item decisions easier, it makes the game more beginner friendly.
(the next mods we grabbed were item beacons, all-ready check, and bigger group lobbies lol)