I don't like Kaycee's mod

[spectre0404044040]

I know the dev's have a right to do whatever they want with the game, but I think they missed the mark with what made their game good. Act 1 was good because of the variety of secrets, and ability to break the game. Kaycee's mod seems to do the opposite of that. I'm not here to complain about the fecundity nerf, I never really used that. I am annoyed by not accomplishing anything after ten runs, aside from a frequent urge to put my fist through the screen, to the point where I actually has to stop playing because I couldn't trust myself to not to it. Very few games have made me feel that way, and base Inscyption certainly didn't. The removal of the escape room style mechanics aside from the painting was the first turnoff, doing the puzzles gave a nice change of pace and gave you new things to experiment with while being able to progress even if you don't get any further in your run, but for whatever reason KM decide to streamline out this stuff, even though this really set the game apart and act 3 having less of it was a disappointment, I would have added more, and integrated them further into the gameplay, like being able to find the safe code via a secret event. As for the actual gameplay experience I find it downright miserable, I have only gotten to Leshy once and got taken out on his first phase by bad rng, and the sent the next couple runs banging my head against the wall, dealing with completely roided out enemy encounters, and a increasily stale set up, with the same starting deck again and again. I haven't even seen the new content because I con't even get past this difficulty wall. By contrast, in act 1 I was able to get to Leshy twice, back to back, beating him the second time. Even when a try to have the most gamebreaking combos, I just can't seem to surmount this difficultly. I want to play with new content, not a watered down version of what I've already played. Seriously I can understand no boons, or capping campfire uses at 2, but no deathcards, really? Just going to remove one of the game's most interesting features? Also why is the squirrel head not here but the hook and clover are. The lack of the sacrificial knife, not even in item drops, is also irritating as that could really help, not to mention removing the eye was such an interesting effect, and personally I would have added more special eyes that could help you out in gameplay, and then made the knife rare to find, but it's not even here. Now maybe some of this stuff will be added in the official release, but right now this was not what I wanted out of an act one expansion. I get that it's supposed to be harder, but I wish there were ways to actually make it tolerable, like boons that reduce your challenge points, or hell just the squirel head would do wonders, this made me realise how much I rely on it, and it would be nice to have it back as an option. Overall I feel the KM tried to streamline and improve act 1, but in doing so removed it's soul.

[Scrub]

I like to think of it as a reaction to people begging for endless content in a linear story focused game.

Like if you tried to add an endless or challenge mode to Half Life 2. Doable but not really "needed".

Inscryption was never meant to be some balanced card game, it's here to seal away the OLD_DATA and we shouldn't ask more if it

[Dlanor]

There are different types of reasons to enjoy videogames. Novelty, Challenge, Mastery, Exploration, Socialization, Competition, Story, the list goes on. Inscryption Act 1 is a Novelty/Exploration/Story based game, where you enjoy finding things out for the first time and get a great WOW moment from big scenes like the first time you see the Moon or gouge an eye out. Kaycee's Mod is a mode based on Challenge/Mastery, you are meant to enjoy overcoming difficult fights and earning victories yourself, and like watching yourself improve as you get wins more frequently. The core issue is that you seem to have expected Kaycee's Mod to make Inscryption Act 1 last forever, which was never a viable option. You cannot discover the Moon boss for a 10th time and be as surprised as you were the 1st time, you will not be shocked and impressed by the eye gouging cutscene the 100th time you click the button to perform it, you cannot have unlimited fresh story content or find out how crazy Ouroboros is forever. The entertainment types of Act 1 are incompatible with games that last forever.

Kaycee's Mod is not for you if what you seek is Novelty/Exploration/Story and not Challenge/Mastery, and that is ok. No game that lasts forever will be for you if that is what you seek. You will not enjoy the 20th run you steamroll using Squirrels with old-Fecundity, there will be no tension and nothing new and it will be dreadfully boring because you will just be going through the motions of playing the cards in your hand while already knowing the result of the entire run, with 0 mental stimulation. Kaycee's Mod fixes that by actually making runs mentally stimulating by removing most auto-win features, it is possible to enjoy runs without new content to discover off of the challenge of overcoming the difficulty and winning anyway. I highly suggest you play Act 1 again, but just refuse to pick up the film roll, you will very quickly see how boring it becomes to win every run without trying forever without even having to think. It might not happen in 5 runs, or 10, but soon you will hit the point where you know every possibility and you will be dreadfully bored by the inability to lose.

Think about the things you're saying the mode should have kept: variety of secrets? How do you keep secrets lasting forever? Ability to break the game? You can still break the game just as hard, it just doesn't happen every run anymore. Room puzzles? How do you do unlimited room puzzles without them being copy/pasted and growing tedious? Death Cards and Squirrel totem were never negotiable, it is simply not possible to lose with them if the player is half decent. I'll mention that at base difficulty, getting a 99.99% winrate in Kaycee's Mod is actually completely possible, you just need to know what good choices are, the only time you ever actually lose a run to bad RNG is if your pelt choices suck and then the first few fights are the hardest ones, and that is talking about .01% of runs at most.

Kaycee's Mod and Inscryption Act 1 are both extremely high quality modes that can satisfy their target audience, the confusion you have seems to stem from the fact that they don't share a target audience, as they were never meant to. The bright red skull icon for Kaycee's Mod was your warning sign that it will be hard, it's not Act 1 again and it actually achieves high replayability because of this. Kaycee's Mod was made for the group of players that didn't research the game and bought it thinking it would be a spooky animal-themed Slay The Spire, not for people that wanted Act 1 again.

[StayPuftMM]

Few things. First off, there are no "devs" there's just one guy and the sound/art people who were contracted.
There is no "removal" of puzzles. Wanting completely new puzzles and content makes sense, but aren't really in the scope of a free post-game content update. Making new painting puzzles was pretty low hanging fruit. The only other thing that could have been done that wouldn't require a bunch of new assets was for new "set up the tiles so you do X or more damage in one attack" puzzles in the cabinet. You basically want a second room of act 1 of Leshy's cabin, which would be cool, but that's not what this is and you can't expect that from a free update.
The big danger with the rogue genre is that it is very easy for the player to have multiple runs where they make zero progress. If you don't want to deal with that or just want to blame RNG then the genre isn't for you.
Finally, please don't do huge run-on sentences and please use formatting like paragraphs or something like that.

[spectre0404044040]

As I said at the start this is not my game, it does not need to cater to my wishes, and I figured out pretty quickly that I wasn't the target audience. Some of disappointment comes from expecting things from KM, and that is on me. However there were a few things I feel that are in the vision of KM.
For one an entire new room of the cabin is too much for me to ask, and that the focus is on the gameboard. However removal of everything in the room aside from the painting felt a bit much when the original cabin had so many little things to interact with. But, this isn't the core of my argument.
My big problem comes with the fact that the game takes the too easy gameplay of act 1 to the polar opposite end of the spectrum, and locks all of the new content behind actually beating leshy. That second part is more of an issue, as to experiment with any of the new stuff, you have to surmount a completely jacked version of the old stuff, with one arm tied behind your back. Additionally this adds to feeling like my time is wasted, as act 1 and other roguelikes have side objectives that allow for unlocks, without clearing a run. This allows runs to feel like they mean something. KM only has the extremely rng dependent painting. I would frankly prefer if you could get some exp from simply getting far or there were thing you could do in tun to get exp. The experience would be far more tolerable if I could actually use the new content.
For the squirrel head, I know how overpowered it is, and what I had I had in mind wasn't like with the hook or clover, a challenge selection that gives you negative challenge points, so you would have to activate more challenges to reach the point quota. The squirrel head would be selected like this, and several other options of this type like a encounter difficultly -1, or old fecundity, since people like to complain about that. Might need to be a -10 points though. This would give you more difficultly options, and would allow the people just looking for more gameplay content the ability to tone down the difficult to levels they can tolerate, while people looking for the hardest challenge would just ignore them.
For death cards there are ways to integrate them without making the game to easy. For example adding in more ways they can be used by leshy than just his second phase, such as special encounters where they can appear, and a challenge option that can make them randomly appear in any encounter and/or couldn't be found by you. This would cause making super ridiculous death cards a double edge sword, and would add new difficultly options to KM. Options to adjust your deathcard pool, or disable them outright would also come with this.
Now all of this does come with a grain of salt, in that KM is still unfinished. Despite the performance issue being rather irritating i'm not going to complain about them because of this. Deathcards in particular are something I think will be added in the official release. I will be giving it another shot when it gets a full release. But as of right now, judging it as a free gameplay expansion, I think it's difficult is too rigid and intense. Of course I don't have to play it, so I won't.

One last thing, while this is clearly aimed at challenge seekers, there is still the lore logs, meaning this is still trying to appeal to lore guys.

[Dlanor]

Originally posted by spectre0404044040:

For one an entire new room of the cabin is too much for me to ask, and that the focus is on the gameboard. However removal of everything in the room aside from the painting felt a bit much when the original cabin had so many little things to interact with. But, this isn't the core of my argument.

There's still stuff to interact with though. The painting is still there when you have puzzles to solve, and we traded the rest of the one time puzzles for the Gramaphone and ability to trade out your character figure. Those 2 things actually add a good bit to the game, especially all the alternate OST options.

Originally posted by spectre0404044040:

My big problem comes with the fact that the game takes the too easy gameplay of act 1 to the polar opposite end of the spectrum, and locks all of the new content behind actually beating leshy. That second part is more of an issue, as to experiment with any of the new stuff, you have to surmount a completely jacked version of the old stuff, with one arm tied behind your back. Additionally this adds to feeling like my time is wasted, as act 1 and other roguelikes have side objectives that allow for unlocks, without clearing a run. This allows runs to feel like they mean something. KM only has the extremely rng dependent painting. I would frankly prefer if you could get some exp from simply getting far or there were thing you could do in tun to get exp. The experience would be far more tolerable if I could actually use the new content.

Beating Leshy to unlock the content is important though, it adds a slight learning curve instead of throwing you in the deep end. and eases you into the difficulty. You're seriously overestimating how hard the game is, it doesn't hand free victories out as often but on low difficulties winning has very little to do with RNG and everything to do with player skill and planning. It's possible to win with every single difficulty multiplier on at once with over a 50% winrate, if you're struggling with just a few easy challenges enabled it's not because the game is too hard to win.
An XP system is a waste of time to implement and has negative impact. If you can't win when you only need a couple challenges enabled, how would you do better with harder challenges and more complex cards? You have to be able to win using the basics to even start with the complex stuff on purpose.

I've also suggested the anti-challenge toggles before, but in the end if the dev doesn't want his challenge mode to have an easy mode, that's up to him. It's the same as Dark Souls, if the dev views the difficulty as the point then asking for an easy mode isn't gonna help. You're underestimating how broken those mechanics are too, the Squirrel Totem or old Fecundity wouldn't just be -10 points, if it was truly balanced it'd be like -100 points each because they literally wins runs for you even if you close your eyes and click around randomly. Sure, it won't win every run for you, but progress only needs 1 win, so something that can guarantee you victory without earning it deserves a price that fits a guaranteed victory. Otherwise you didn't actually earn the unlocks.

Originally posted by spectre0404044040:

Now all of this does come with a grain of salt, in that KM is still unfinished. Despite the performance issue being rather irritating i'm not going to complain about them because of this. Deathcards in particular are something I think will be added in the official release. I will be giving it another shot when it gets a full release. But as of right now, judging it as a free gameplay expansion, I think it's difficult is too rigid and intense. Of course I don't have to play it, so I won't.

One last thing, while this is clearly aimed at challenge seekers, there is still the lore logs, meaning this is still trying to appeal to lore guys.

We're like 1 patch away from leaving Beta, you're getting your hopes up far too much if you're actually expecting Death Cards to come back. They are the antithesis of an unlimited replayability roguelike, it just doesn't fit the mode. We're gonna get the Skeleton boss (as a reward for beating Challenge level 12), we're maybe gonna get a bit more content like a few non-rare cards, we're gonna get a few balance and qol tweaks, and that's probably it. Personally, I find the mode too easy, I win far too often even with most/all challenges enabled, it really just requires you learn the best options.

While the game has a few scraps of lore in it, people that are only into the game for the lore are far better off reading the wiki or watching other people play if they aren't here for the challenge. It's absolutely not a game mode for people that want lore but hate difficult games, you get very little lore and a lot of harder adjustments.

[StayPuftMM]

I suggest checking old threads for tips on how to get yourself unstuck, getting a completed savefile so you can play with the unlocks, or giving up on it.

[Cruxin]

You went into a focused challenge mode for die-hard fans, expecting more content akin to the original game. That's not what KM is trying to be.

It's hard, but nowhere near as bad or RNG as you imply. Some people can fairly consistently win with all challenges (not me, lol). It's just harder, less easy to break, and requires more thought.

[spectre0404044040]

So I am a firm believer in that games are art, and that difficultly is a part of that. Therefore the developer can make the game as difficult as they want to. A specific piece of art is also not necessarily for everybody, and some people just won't like it, and I may not be one of the people who is specifically appealed by KM. But I am interested in a more difficult act 1, as I did enjoy the gameplay and I think its too easy now. So, in the spirit of constructive criticism, I think the mod has some issues.
The difficultly: Now the urge to put my fist through the screen (which I was not joking about) does come from me, but it is triggered by something. Specifically elks. Now, I understand that the squirrel head is, but to be honesty the really difficultly adjustment I want is difficultly -1, because I know there is a difficultly +1. I can deal with the bosses fine. I cannot deal with Five. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Elks. Per. Encounter. and in the second area, every run. Some things are rng, like a skunk being prescision guided to my Mantis god, and you have to know how to adjust. However the elks are completely consistently BS, seeming specifically designed to be hard to deal with with a base wolf. And this seemed to be the only enemy the game like to use, other than moose and ravens, which aren't much better. Actual enemy variety would be nice. I can break the game without the squirrel head, and I never used fecundity in the first place. I can always seems to get a good thing going, I have gotten evolving 4/3 Mantis Gods, undying 5/6 frogs, among others. However these always seem to fall to the elks, unless I get something really busted. The specific issue is the 'by the second area part', that's too early, and it limits your ability to experiment when you need something busted ASAP. Now some of this could be learning curve, but I have played other roguelikes, and they don't crank it up this hard. As for needing to learn, I completely understand that, but this seems to be a brick wall, not a curve.
Now of course potential difficultly crutches should be worked off, and it would just be as simple as going 'you cannot use crutches to increase your challenge level past this point'. Also when I was talking about exp, as I said I haven't beat leshy, I don't know how the unlocks work, what I was referring to was the ability to unlock things by simply getting far, or playing enough runs, something like that. While the two rabbit pelts thing was very smart, only having one starting deck gets stale quick, being able to swap between two-four decks, would help.
Deathcards....how are they the antithesis to an infintitely playable rogue like. the seem like quite the opposite. The only new things I would add to the system would be: Getting a deathcard if you win, leshy still fries you if you win in act 1. The ability to edit the pool of deathcards you have, or disable them outright. Additional options would include preventing them from being found by you, and making them occasionally show up in encounters. All this stuff would only really require some new UI on the menu and some basic code, no new assets would really be necessary. A trifurcated 7/7 absolute force of nature just occasionally showing up on the enemies side seems like it would be a fun challenge, just as much as it could help a new player. Add on to this stopping your challenge level from advancing if you can draw deathcards, so you can't rely on this. All in all this just seems like it would add more depth.
Now once again the dev doesn't need to appeal to my wishes. Additionally I'm most interested in a more formal paid expansion focusing on one of the two remaining scribes. However, I do have an interest towards a harder version of act 1. However my problem comes with that even approaching it with the intended mindset, and prepared to endure some difficultly, I feel its ideas are not executed the best, and the initial difficultly curve is too steep.

[Hardwyn "Boogaloo" Doe]

ahem, get gud lol

[spectre0404044040]

Haven't heard that one before

[Dlanor]

OP, I honestly can't even remember the last time I lost to an encounter including an Elk. They only do 2 damage. I really can't say anything other than you gotta learn what wins, because if you're losing to Elks you aren't picking winning stuff.

They added a new challenge today, and not only did I beat it on my first try, I did a run with every single challenge on at once including the new challenge, and won that on my first try too. It's not the game that is too hard, it's the player not knowing what wins.

They even included a bunch of big buffs in this patch. The game is easier than ever right now, you just gotta learn the combos and how to build a deck that doesn't lose to 2 damage Elks.

[Cruxin]

Originally posted by spectre0404044040:

even approaching it with the intended mindset, and prepared to endure some difficultly,

but... you're clearly not. if you're losing to vanilla elk encounters on map 2, youre genuinely doing something wrong in your approach

[KriKitBoNeZ]

Originally posted by spectre0404044040:

So I am a firm believer in that games are art, and that difficultly is a part of that.

Is making your posts unreadable walls of text also part of this amazing philosophy?

[spectre0404044040]

I'm not trying to sound condescending. I say that because the game does not need to cater to me. My amazing philosophy includes that no person can ever be 100% right. With the benefit of hindsight my initial post was over critical and just plain wrong in places, with that last line being the worst of it. Fundamentally I am trying to provide constructive criticism, and want to be through.

[spectre0404044040]

I also must note that my arguments can very much be addressed by 'git gud' I simply had some frustrations I wanted to vent.