Artificial Difficulty: The Game

>difficulty
It's a Skinner box for retards

>>378432734
>artificial

I mean, what the FUCK does that mean? What? Megaman is also artificial because they can ghost through solid walls and you cannot? Explain this artificial concept to me, because it sounds like you just find it difficult.

>>378432734
How is this artificial difficulty?

Are you retarded, once you know enemies attack patterns you can easily avoid them.

Get out of here with your "I'm a shitter so it must be the games fault" thread.

This game is ez

>>378433923
Artificial difficulty exists in things like racing games that use rubberbanding ai to outright cheat but I wouldn't say it exists in Isaac.

>>378433923
Not OP

IMO "artificial difficulty" is a game that denies established conventions of the genre purely to make itself harder. For example, a platformer where you can only distinguish a correct jump down from an insta-death pit by trial and error, a FPS where you can only pick ammo for the gun you're currently using, a 20 hour RPG with no checkpoints or saves, etc.
No idea what Binding of Isaac does or how difficult it is, never played it.

>I'm bad, the OP

There's a little bit of RNG bullshit, but that's a consequence of the unmatched amount of variability you get. People still get streaks of hundreds of wins in a row, if you play well then you'll win.

>>378432734
I never understood this game or felt a need to play it. Can someone give me a quick enchilada?

From what I've read, the newest DLC does things that could be seen as "artificial difficulty". But I haven't played it yet.

>>378433923
In OPs defense there are a couple bosses that have "damage scaling" which adjusts how much damage they take based off of your damage output. On weaker runs it's supposed to give you a chance against these bosses but on strong runs it artificially makes you tickle the boss to death when literally everything else gets instagibbed

>difficulty
kek, I got golden god in Isaac and I'm a retard who couldn't get through Spelunky once

>>378435259
Roguelite with tons of items that change the way you play and lots of systems that keep you constantly making decisions trying to play optimally. Not much else to it, people just find it very replayable.

You can literally win 95% of runs with any character besides The Lost or The Keeper if you are not dogshit at the game. This is a valid complaint for the original, but Rebirth and everything after it just introduced so much more good items that you are basically guaranteed to win if you are even half-decent at the game.
You probably just suck.

>>378432734
>being retarded and bad at video games
Kek, I bet you think Gurdy is the hardest boss.

>>378435490
Not in rebirth. Afterbirth is the one that adds Hush and Mega Greed. But they basically ruined the game. It's a boss that takes forever to kill no matter what and completely invalidates the point of the game. Issac isn't hard at all because each enemy only has 1 or 2 moves and you can easily take down any of the bosses as default Issac, but it's outrageously boring to sit there and plink away at it for 5+ minutes. That's why I can't stand to do the awful "challenge" mode stuff where you have to beat the game with 2 items and pretend that you aren't going to immediately buy brimstone on the 2nd floor to make up for no items or damage for the rest of the game.

>>378435018
it's not, it just has a risk vs reward system for picks. each time you play there are pills you can find that you don't know what they do until you use them. some good many bad.

items are also randomized so some runs are easy and others brutally difficult.

you start entirely over if you die.

some hidden rooms give extra stuff but you need to know where to bomb to find them, sometimes you get items that will tell you where.

>>378432734
>game based on luck
seems right

>>378436653
>you start entirely over if you die.

I would consider this "artificial difficulty" if you can die due to a single wrong button push and the game takes hours to beat.

>>378432734
difficulty is like everything else in this game:
random.

>>378437702
refl i would love to see you play an actual roguelike

>>378437702
it's part of the genre.

you can get some rediculously good items early and often but run the risk of losing everything if you are stupid.

You can literally have 200 games winstreak on hard with any characters. Even The Lost.

>>378437702
It's not artificial difficulty if you're the one making a mistake, dumbshit. Also, Isaac doesn't take hours to beat, you can run through the whole thing in 40 minutes. Never try to play actual roguelikes that can take 20+ hours and punish you even harder for smaller mistakes.

>>378438135
yeah that is possible but as someone who does nothing but eden streaks sometimes you get a shitty run with 1 blue heart, no damage and a room full of fast champions when you have crap speed.

the game has a fair bit of unavoidable damage these days

>>378438472
>18 tear delay
>two damage

>>378437976
Most roguelikes either have a progression system with some stats/items persisting between runs, or allow you to take a couple hits without dying. (There is a sub-genre of "masochist" games in the vein of IWBTG on Impossible difficulty, but they treat artificial difficulty as one of the selling points)

Strafe got a lot of bad press because they failed to understand that if you do permadeath, players need some incentive to keep replaying the first levels every time.

>>378438201
>Isaac doesn't take hours to beat, you can run through the whole thing in 40 minutes.

Well then it's fine, that's my point.

>Game is short enough that you don't lose 5 hours of progress if you die = OK
>Game allows you to make a mistake or two but still beat it = OK
>Game requires 5 hours every time to get to the final level that can only be beaten with 100% muscle memory = "artificial difficulty"

>>378438201
>It's not artificial difficulty if you're the one making a mistake
It can be, if the "punishment" is grossly disproportional.
It is a genre convention that if a game that requires perfect precision and/or trial-and-error, it should have checkpoints every now and then, so you can grind your skills without wasting time repeating things you already learned.

>>378439734
the roguelike genre doesn't work with checkpoints.

if it was changed in that way it would no longer be a roguelike and instead just be a dungeon crawler

Is it bad that if I hit the reset button very very often because I calculated that the build I got in the run won't get me to the boss rush?

>>378440193
If you actually want to get good at the game for some inexplicable reason, yes. There are no unbeatable runs. People with win-streaks in the thousands are proof enough of that.