Why the difficulty changing is different now

[Zero Grim]

The reason Issac is causing such a storm even compared to other releases now is because of one huge change in design ethos, before an increase in difficulty always came with a new choice you as a player made.

You can beat mums heart but can you beat heaven itself?
You can beat heaven but can you do it without red hearts?
Can you do it without hearts at all?
Can you beat a boss who is ALL THE BOSSES at once?

Every time something more difficult was added to the game it was set as a challenge (sometimes literally) but now the difficulty increase has come not from a challenge imposed by the game asking you to defeat it but onto the base game itself, so if you don't like the new direction of difficulty unlike before where you could simply not [play to blue baby, play as blue baby, play as the lost or fight delirium] you are stuck with it.

Now there is no release valve if you want to relax, the default level of engagement is now "*** ***" if you liked the old balance and how the game used to play well guess you just wasted money buying something that made your game less enjoyable, enjoy the refund.

As a player who's pretty hardcore but not extreme I'd say the reason this difficulty just feels so bad to play is you don't die to a climax of anything anymore, you just slowly die by a thousand cuts, your health draining to every little mistake and there being vastly less opportunities to regain it, the increase in red hearts does not even come close to closing the gap with the on average half a soul heart you are expected to be able to get on each floor now.

I would be very happy to see a "real Issac" difficulty which had no unlocks, few achievements and no progression on top of what you would get on hard mode, and then just see how sadistically painful Issac is meant to be.
Would I play it, yea I would, for the same reason I'm still playing now, Issac's one of the best and deepest games ever made, but this time I feel like if I stop playing I may never pick it back up again.

[Death Grips]

This is actually a pretty fair argument.

For the most part, the difficulty expansions of years prior have built upon that core infrastructure of TBoI, which in turn allowed it to be experienced at the player's choice when ready. Sure, some new enemies and bosses would overlap in pre-exisiting floors, but it didn't come anywhere near the sort of overhaul delivered by Repentance. Changing well-established elements like enemy HP values, shot-speeds, etc. really shouldn't have happened to the game as a whole. These are the sort of things you would expect from a higher difficulty. If anything, the developers should have just implemented one more difficulty setting above "Hard" that would include these changes rather than altering the entirety of the game itself.

In any case, this DLC launch is in pretty obvious need of tweaking, much like Afterbirth + was when it launched. I'm sure you'll see adjustments in the days/weeks following, so you can place faith in that.

[Omertoso]

I admit I've only been playing Repentance on hard mode, and some of what I'm saying might not be relevant for normal mode. If you spot such a discrepancy, please tell me; I don't want to preach falsities.

It seems weird to me that one would buy an expansion only to afterwards choose whether or not they want to play the new, tougher content. The decision was already made when the expansion was bought; of course I would go to heaven or Void, and I'd do it as ???, too; that way I can play what I bought!

(With that said, it would be reasonable for one to refuse to play as The Lost or The Keeper due to how difficult they are even if clearing the game as them unlocks new items.)

Still, it's true that in previous expansions - save for Rebirth - content was simply added. It's certainly an interesting move for Edmund & Nicalis to go the way they did, and I'm sure they were expecting a lot of backlash. Surely some of the criticism is valid, too; the contents of patch 4.0.1 is very welcome.

But, to be honest, I can see why they wanted to make hard mode harder. I mean, the previous hard mode was just, what, less heart drops? Bigger floors? More champion enemies? When you knew the ways of survival - that is, where to find soul/black hearts and what items give them, and possibly even how to spawn those items - less red hearts and bigger floors could only become annoyances sometimes, not something that makes the game hard. Not to mention the fact that the game had so many ways to make overpowered builds. Now, I understand that some people love(d?) this aspect of the game, but in my opinion, hard mode is supposed to be hard, not something to bulldoze over when you know the gimmicks.

Champion enemies rarely make things much harder than their normal variants, unless a lot of them spawn in a single room. Admittedly, some variants make some rooms pretty rough, i.e. the invisible ones, spawn-two-normals-upon-death ones, and those that explode to bullets upon death, which is a good thing.

What I'm getting at here is that when you knew enough of the game, there wasn't much of a challenge in the game left. If you wanted an overpowered build, you could just keep resetting until a treasure room gave you Dr. Fetus or D6 or whatever. Besides that you still could just know where to look for marked rocks and to bomb for skulls and mushrooms in hopes of health and items, and know when is it relevant to go to shops, secret rooms, maybe even sacrifice rooms. At some point skill stops being that big of a factor, and it's the knowledge that carries you through each run.

Now that some enemies' bullets fly faster and tinted rocks don't spawn as much, I've had to re-think some of my usual strategies not only for survival, but for each room I encounter... To be honest, it's hard for me to say whether it's unfair or not; I'm just having fun when the game makes me think differently for once.

However, as Death Grips said, there will be some tweaks coming as has happened in every expansion, and I'd like to believe some of them will make the game more fair. Still, I like the direction they're going because, for me, red hearts no longer are a burden that are in the way of activating passive effects from certain items and wall me from boss challenge rooms and potentially even Devil/Angel rooms.

In short: Hard mode wasn't that hard, there used to be certain strategies that heightened your chance of survival dramatically which worked almost every time and didn't need much skill to pull off, current hard mode is good because it's supposed to be hard.

[Zero Grim]

So yea once you knew what you were doing hard mode became easier, but don't you see the paradox there?

You had to learn hard mode, you had to get good with all the items, learn the secrets, figure out how to use the more common backfiring items and make every run worth it.

Now an update comes out and just makes all that time and effort Irrelevant, most items that took skill to use have been changed enough you have to learn them from scratch.
Most complex high risk strategies you could use to get an edge now so rarely pay out that the math just tells you its not worth the hassle of doing it anymore. (full clearing a floor for instance was just a losing move before 4.01, you would never recoup the resources you'd spend to do it)

So you have a pair of choices, turn the difficulty off the one you've spent the large part of a decade mastering OR just not play the game you're used to ever again.

I personally I am "enjoying" relearning hard mode, having a challenge is on paper a good thing but the execution of the challenge is terrible. If I lose a run now its not because something was too tough to defeat, its because occasional hits of damage just didn't get healed enough, when you look at the losts ability to take 1 hit per room as a health improvement you gotta wonder what the balance of the game has become.

The largest issue is all these changes got dumped the second you install the game, and then them feeding into each other like the worlds most disgusting snake.

Item Pools being larger would be fine if there were high powered items to occasionally break the monotony> (but a lot of OP items were nerfed)
Items being nerfed would be fine if you had more control of them> (reroll machines are now much more expensive to use and rarer to find)
Less ability to reroll items would be fine if there were guaranteed ways to get good ones at a price> (without soul hearts a single stray piece of damage becomes run losing for lack of god rooms)
Less soul hearts would be fine is you could depend on the core items> (the larger pools make finding dependable staples harder) LOOP complete return to start

A Harder hard mode is something I can get behind and enjoy, but the ONE thing Issac has going for it is being able to break the game and cause chaos, that is the only string it has in its bow, the only feather in its cap that no other game I've ever heard can even approach and now it is significantly more luck based (not harder mind you) to break the game, so if you want to have that enjoyable experience of having two copies of every item in the game and shooting a tear that crashes to desktop you have to not only ruin your runs time and waste your own you now ALSO have to be super lucky to get the piece of game breaking nonsense that remain.

Make it harder, but leave the fun alone.

[Fio]

It's very not fun to have your face bashed in when you're far enough into the game. You can always restart a new save file, but this game has a ludicrous amount of grinding baked into it. It takes forever to beat the heart repeatedly, complete the polaroid/negative, get unlocks going on each character, doing greed/greedier mode, doing all the challenges including some of the more egregious ones (Looking at you Speed/Ultra Hard).

[jayhena]

people say the op items got nerfed really hard, but personally, if i get tech X, brimstone or mom's knife, i still think they are way too strong, even in their current state.

the biggest nerf to me is orbitals, sac dagger, cube of meat/ball of bandage, etc. but they are still usable for smaller enemies, fixing mom's foot and satan's foot to deal contact damage was a pretty needed change too, a cube of meat alone could clear mom, it lives and satan pretty easily before.

i also don't think the game is that much harder if you don't go to alternate floors, if anything, going for a planetarium makes my polaroid / negative run easier (also the negative buff helps). tinted rock were so common that bombs were the limiting factor in a lot of runs

[Omertoso]

Originally posted by Zero Grim:

So yea once you knew what you were doing hard mode became easier, but don't you see the paradox there?

You had to learn hard mode, you had to get good with all the items, learn the secrets, figure out how to use the more common backfiring items and make every run worth it.

The jump from normal to hard really was not that much before Repentance. All enemies still acted the same way as before, and all rooms stayed the same. Sure, more rooms and the absence of red health means you will have to learn to take less damage, but it's still not that different from normal that you'd have to learn as extensively as you're saying.

I played a little bit of normal mode in Repentance and I confirmed my suspicion that some enemies behave a little differently between difficulties. This is the kind of change I like to see; now you can't just steamroll through the mildly-inconveniencing-mode with simply your knowledge, you also need more skill. Before Repentance after unlocking whatever was behind the hard difficulty I just played the normal mode because bigger floors were just a waste of time instead of a challenge, and having the rare case of ill-placed champion enemy just wasn't worth it.

Does anyone know if there's a new list for changes between normal and hard mode now? Browsing through the Afterbirth+ -> Repentance change notes is a drag.

Originally posted by Zero Grim:

Now an update comes out and just makes all that time and effort Irrelevant, most items that took skill to use have been changed enough you have to learn them from scratch.
Most complex high risk strategies you could use to get an edge now so rarely pay out that the math just tells you its not worth the hassle of doing it anymore.

The time played is not completely irrelevant. Most items were left intact, and most of the modified ones still retain the characteristics that you learned before. It's not like you're starting the game anew without prior knowledge, you just need to adjust what you've learned in the past to the new setting, something that you'll attain by playing the game. Eventually the wiki will be updated with concrete information, and if you're anything like me, you'll learn most of the juicy details there.

An example: I just defeated The Beast in a run where I got Tech X. While it seemed to deal less damage and was slightly more erratic in its movements, it still pierced through obstacles and enemies, which is already a huge boon for a single item.

Originally posted by Zero Grim:

(full clearing a floor for instance was just a losing move before 4.01, you would never recoup the resources you'd spend to do it)

Are you talking about Repentance? If not, there were many benefits to be gained from exploring whole floors, i.e. libraries for Bookworm transformation, finding health to be able to utilize sacrifice rooms. Heck, I even recall situations where I had low health at The Womb and I decided to explore the floors in hopes of finding health; sometimes I would fail, sometimes I would succeed.

If you were talking about before patch 4.01 but still in Repentance, I see little sense in talking about it if it has already been patched.

Originally posted by Zero Grim:

So you have a pair of choices, turn the difficulty off the one you've spent the large part of a decade mastering OR just not play the game you're used to ever again.

I personally I am "enjoying" relearning hard mode, having a challenge is on paper a good thing but the execution of the challenge is terrible. If I lose a run now its not because something was too tough to defeat, its because occasional hits of damage just didn't get healed enough, when you look at the losts ability to take 1 hit per room as a health improvement you gotta wonder what the balance of the game has become.

The largest issue is all these changes got dumped the second you install the game, and then them feeding into each other like the worlds most disgusting snake.

What you're describing here sounds to me that you're just not used to how the game plays now, something that everyone is experiencing right now. I don't know when you started playing, but this has definitely happened every time you went to a new area or a new boss. You don't know anything about it, so you take damage and eventually die. You might even be using items whose effects you are not entirely aware of, which means you probably under-utilize them, take damage and eventually die. It's probably more evident to you and many others now because you already have hundreds of hours in the game.

I do realize that it's not just a new area or a boss this time, it's the fact that past content was modified. Still, it's the same idea, with the addition that something that you're used to act a certain way no longer acts exactly that way.

Originally posted by Zero Grim:

Item Pools being larger would be fine if there were high powered items to occasionally break the monotony> (but a lot of OP items were nerfed)
Items being nerfed would be fine if you had more control of them> (reroll machines are now much more expensive to use and rarer to find)
Less ability to reroll items would be fine if there were guaranteed ways to get good ones at a price> (without soul hearts a single stray piece of damage becomes run losing for lack of god rooms)
Less soul hearts would be fine is you could depend on the core items> (the larger pools make finding dependable staples harder) LOOP complete return to start

A Harder hard mode is something I can get behind and enjoy, but the ONE thing Issac has going for it is being able to break the game and cause chaos, that is the only string it has in its bow, the only feather in its cap that no other game I've ever heard can even approach and now it is significantly more luck based (not harder mind you) to break the game, so if you want to have that enjoyable experience of having two copies of every item in the game and shooting a tear that crashes to desktop you have to not only ruin your runs time and waste your own you now ALSO have to be super lucky to get the piece of game breaking nonsense that remain.

Make it harder, but leave the fun alone.

It's not like I've been in any Isaac communities, but it's so nice to hear that someone enjoyed the game-breaking stuff so much. I never cared much for it; many times I skipped some items because they would just make the game into a monotonous "press fire and win" mess that I had seen so many times and that so many people talk about over and over. However, something that I don't enjoy can still be a legitimate way for someone else to enjoy the same experience.

For me, the more important factor is the item combinations. (I also really enjoy the theme and the story, but those are not relevant to this discussion). Sometimes I would get an overpowered combination that I would enjoy because I was not aware of something like that, thinking more on the way of "with my current build, what will happen if I pick up this item?"

And it doesn't have to be overpowered to be enjoyable. Soy Milk, The Ludovico Technique and Tiny Planet were items that I would often avoid because of how radically different they make the gameplay, but when I did play around with them, it was very fun and interesting. These are just some examples that I expect to get reactions from whoever reads this post; most of the runs I, and I believe anyone else, play have some kind of gimmick that makes the run even a little bit of special.

This, I believe, is the core of Isaac's gameplay. At the risk of sounding condescending here, I find it against the game's idea if someone always goes for the typical overpowered combinations, perhaps even going so far as to reset until they get what they want. "Discovery" in Isaac, to me, isn't just finding out about the secrets of accessing Cathedral/Sheol, Blue Womb or Void; or unlocking characters like The Lost, The Keeper etc.; it's finding out all these weird combinations that may or may not work.

Finding out again all kinds of new combinations in Repentance is what makes me want to play it. The harder content and the nerfs/buffs force me to utilize gimmicks that I would previously see no reason in utilizing because the game was not that hard after the time I've put into it. I think Edmund and co. talked about this in some blog posts, and I'd like to at least say that they're going into the right direction.

Patches will come to fix the growing pains. Maybe they'll keep the past normal and hard as-is and make a new harder difficulty, which would make me look pretty silly, but in the end I'd be fine with it.

EDIT: holy wall of text! sorry about that.

[Zero Grim]

I might give a more in depth response to this later, not really got the brain juice left for it right now but in summary the issue I have right now is that if you played any of the previous DLC's the way you played the old game two things would happen:
1: you would have roughly a similar experience
2: you would not get to encounter all the cool new content.
so you were not punished for playing in an old familiar way but you were given incentives to play differently, the changes to repentance are someone taking their toy out of your hands because you aren't playing with it "correctly" instead of showing you why you would have fun if you played a different way.

I agree hard mode should be harder, but it shouldn't deny old forms of play that used to exist, patches seem to be aiming in that direction but I have been burned by developer apathy before.

[Omertoso]

Who buys DLC to have a "roughly similar experience" to the base game while ignoring "all the cool new content"?

The only difference between Repentance and other DLCs is that they revised a lot of past content, forcing people to adjust their strategies for bosses, areas, enemies, rooms, items etc. accordingly and to not rely on the same old find-certain-item(s)-win-game strategies.

I suppose you've been trying to say that you liked how you could break the game and bulldoze everything. And now you can no longer do that. It's hard for me to relate because I didn't enjoy it as much as you; I always preferred to see what kinds of item combinations are possible and how do they work against each boss.

If what I said about you is true, then all I can hope is that you find some way to still enjoy the game. I mean, you'd be missing out on a lot, and I'd like to believe that once you learn the game's new gimmicks, you'd enjoy the game just as much as before, maybe even more.

[Josedx9]

Originally posted by Zero Grim:

(full clearing a floor for instance was just a losing move before 4.01, you would never recoup the resources you'd spend to do it)

I think you just had a lot of bad luck, since repetance came out I have noticed a significant increase in pick ups.
The normal chests are usually full of keys and bombs and the gold ones almost always drop a random item, even on my first run it came out in a totally normal room "Rocket in a jar" I think it's called.
I mean, to enter the antibirth floors you need first a key, then 2 bombs and finally pay 2 hearts and in all my runs I have been able to access them.

Originally posted by Zero Grim:

I agree hard mode should be harder, but it shouldn't deny old forms of play that used to exist, patches seem to be aiming in that direction but I have been burned by developer apathy before.

I will tell you a secret, Ludovico and technology maintain their powerful synergy together, you only need those two and you literally sweep the rooms without difficulty in repentance.
After experiencing a classic synergy again I could see why Edmund wanted to nerf so many items

[jayhena]

Originally posted by Josedx9:

Originally posted by Zero Grim:

(full clearing a floor for instance was just a losing move before 4.01, you would never recoup the resources you'd spend to do it)

I think you just had a lot of bad luck, since repetance came out I have noticed a significant increase in pick ups.
The normal chests are usually full of keys and bombs and the gold ones almost always drop a random item, even on my first run it came out in a totally normal room "Rocket in a jar" I think it's called.
I mean, to enter the antibirth floors you need first a key, then 2 bombs and finally pay 2 hearts and in all my runs I have been able to access them.

same, a lot of pickups in most of my runs, also some really weird rooms, like the one with almost if not 100 coins laying on the ground, in early floors, or the "heart" room with a ton of red hearts and lone heart enemies (from the small masks of infamy enemies)

[>[Blackthunder]<]

Well as a medio casual, who could have some fun in the Game without the Hardcore stuff like Lost, i have a really Hard time with the Changes.
Had 2 Successfull runs, 1 Normal Azazel Mega Satan, and Challenge 31 after around ~200 resets, both ended up in Gnawed Leaf. (ok on the Azazel run i was Strong anyway, but the Leaf secured Satan)
Im on idk (just gave up without looking) -30 Streak trying to Unlock Bethany.
Im never Resetet first floor till i get a OP item, thats kinda Boring.
But wow, how many Sh*t items it get that gets frustating to even stay alive till Moms Feet.
Killing her is another Story, and womb was the few runs just the ending. Feels Hearts just got patched out there.

I still have fun, im hard trying getting better. But i feels its just to much.
Theres always the Hardcore Characters like Lost, for the Hardcore Players. Which i pretty much ignored yet to even try.
If thats to "eZ" for some of you, they should added a "harder mode", or give urself challenges, like setting urself a Limit on Items u Pickup. Whatever.

Adjusting Hardmode and some items, no Problem.
But i feel its just to much, and i feel closed out of a big part of the Game

[Zero Grim]

Now that I've had a proper chance to play the new levels what baffles me is they didn't just focus all these changes on healing being destroyed into dust to be a property of the new floors instead of all floors at once, never being able to get soul hearts and barely ever finding a HP UP item means at the end of most runs I am lucky to have five hearts at all, and not 5 remaining, five total.

It is a sad sad state of affairs when you realise the lost has more survival than any other character now because 1 hit per room dwarfs the amount of health anyone else receives.

[Josedx9]

first floor, a blue heart after cleaning a room https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2446843216

[Knud den Store 🧙‍♂]

Agreed.
Let me start by saying Repentance is HUGE, and I love the work everyone put on this. The reworked sprites, music, artwork, ambiance, secrets and new mechanics, it is all great.

That said...the game need serious re-balance. As tedious as it was, it was possible to beat Satan in the original with base stats, and Satan was the big bad then. 10 years later and it seems like the game is balance towards isaac being broken from Basement I onward.

The anti-birth chapters are much too hard and offer little reward, you are only going to play them to beat Mother and then there is no reason to even visit them, too much risk for so little reward. My suggestion would be to reduce the health pool of all new enemies and have new floors offer better items in contrast to normal floors.

Downpour should offer crazy fire rate items as its name implies.
Dross should offer poison or enemy de-buff items.
Mines should offer DMG up items
Ash Mines should offer defensive options.
Mausoleum should offer angel room items
Whatever the new mausoleum is called should offer devil items.

Corpse should have special rooms.
That way there is a balance on what you want to do with the game and reduces the risk of bad runs created by items that do not have synergy among them.

Then there are the Alt characters, those are crazy but asking everyone to beat the game on hard as it is, let alone the final baddy, it is too much too ask.

[Omertoso]

Originally posted by Knud den Store:

That said...the game need serious re-balance. As tedious as it was, it was possible to beat Satan in the original with base stats, and Satan was the big bad then. 10 years later and it seems like the game is balance towards isaac being broken from Basement I onward.

I just came back from an Eden run where I started with damage and tear speed at 1 tick in the pause menu. The only damage up I got was Lump of Coal, and the only tear up I got was Epiphora and a single tears up pill. I also had Friendly Ball from a treasure room and 2 Spooky from a Devil room (enemies gain fear status for a short moment when you walk towards them). With a few lucky Balls of Steel pills, I managed to go halfway through the path from Mausoleum/Gehenna to Home, when I realized I didn't have a Cracked Key and quit the run prematurely.

I'm not saying that I'm some kinda god-like player or you just need to git gud, I'm saying that your statement that Isaac nowadays requires you to be broken from the beginning is utterly false. I have had multiple runs while playing Repentance where I just don't get that good items yet I still get quite far.

Originally posted by Knud den Store:

The anti-birth chapters are much too hard and offer little reward, you are only going to play them to beat Mother and then there is no reason to even visit them, too much risk for so little reward.

wait, that's how it's always been: beat new bosses until you unlock what you want and then move on to another boss or whatever you're aiming for. Mother is an end boss, what rewards are you expecting other than item unlocks?

Originally posted by Knud den Store:

Then there are the Alt characters, those are crazy but asking everyone to beat the game on hard as it is, let alone the final baddy, it is too much too ask.

I've found that unlocking the alt characters is a good goal to have while getting adjusted to the new mechanics and trying out new items. Basement-Caves-Depths don't have that huge changes and are still relatively simple, and both Mausoleum/Gehenna and the road to Home offer a good chunk of the new content with new mechanics and enemies. You don't need to defeat Dogma and The Beast to unlock the alt characters, but you can still try them out.

The downside is that you need to beat Mother once to be able to do this grind... But once I got to this point, it's been a comfy ride.