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Assists are meant to be for handicapped people so regardless of whatever disability they have, they can still enjoy and beat the whole game.
Opinion: Who cares about what the developers intended - it's a feature of the game. If you want to use assists to shortcut building up muscle memory, use them. If you don't want to use them, don't use them. If you are unsure, try them and make up your own mind.
It's a game, the most important thing is that you have fun. If you like overcoming challenges and/or if you plan to play Dead Cells for a few hundred hours you should probably stay away from assists. If you're stuck and you hate beating your head against a wall and/or if you just want to finish the game without investing hundreds of hours, assists can probably make the trip a lot more enjoyable. I haven't tried most of them, but I think there's nothing wrong with using them, even if you don't have disabilities.
It's a shame too, because there's a really easy fix for it that plenty of other games have implemented for their cheat/assist modes: Disable achievements. That way the people who wanna see as much content and unlocks as they can can still play it without worry, but people who value the design of overcoming challenges after several dozen failed attempts are still rewarded with something ultimately pretty cosmetic, but something that still makes you feel acknowledged for your accomplishment.
Idk, I know my stance is kinda controversial, and i'm willing to accept that, but I just personally feel like my potential enjoyment of this game has gone down after hearing about that update.
If you want my take on it, I don’t think that you’re in any need of an assist mode, frankly. Thus far you’ve appeared to have excelled at the game and are possibly progressing a bit faster than the average player.
As far as my opinion of Assist mode, I personally am not a fan of it. I will say that I’m not opposed to the idea of there being tools and features in place to give struggling players a helping hand. There is Custom mode, the training room, and the Aspects system (secret passage next to the doorway at the starting room of the Prisoners’ Quarters, if you haven’t seen it). I have frequently played the game with some of those options myself, though moreso for the purpose of spicing up gameplay than for the sake of making it easier on myself.
But I think the difference between those systems, versus the Assist mode, is in what the intention appears to be. I feel that all of those features I listed are able to provide aid in a way that encourages the player to continue improving their skills and developing a better understanding of the game’s mechanics. They provide a helping hand, but they leave most of the game’s challenge intact to where the player will eventually become good enough that they no longer need to rely on using them in order to play the game. This is emphasized in the way that use of these features come with certain restrictions to offset their benefits, such as Custom disabling achievements when certain options are enabled or too many items have been removed from the gear pool, or Aspects preventing you from being able to acquire the next boss stem cell to advance to the higher difficulties. Essentially they act as a “training program” for what is the default experience: Normal mode.
This is not the case with Assist mode, which goes a step too far by allowing the player to modify parts of the fundamental gameplay design choices and balance. By having the ability to lower enemy health / damage and turn off permadeath, you’re able to negate the game’s challenge, which takes away a core part of the intended experience of Dead Cells, being a game that has been heavily marketed on its “hardcore” nature. And I know what the response to this would be: “Let people enjoy the game how they want.” I understand the sentiment, but I don’t necessarily agree with it. I feel that people ought to play a game with the desire to experience it for what it is, rather than what they wish for it to be. I say this from a place of personal experience: some of the greatest game experiences I’ve ever had came from games that I normally wouldn’t even consider playing. Stepping out of your comfort zone and allowing yourself to play something you don’t think you’ll enjoy can sometimes lead to you finding an experience that you didn’t know you wanted until you had it. I believe that most people now-a-days are content with just playing video games in the way they’re accustom to, and while that’s advantageous and I can see the appeal in being able to tone down the difficulty of a game if you’re not into that sort of thing normally, it can come at the cost of potentially passing up the next greatest moment you’ve had with gaming.
I’m sure that I’ll get some flak for this saying this, but I feel that the Assist mode is not a beneficial addition to the game, and I recommend against using it. If you’re in need of help with overcoming the game’s difficulty, I urge you to opt for playing on Custom mode and using the training room and Aspects in place of Assist mode. Those options are properly integrated into the game to enhance the experience of playing Dead Cells, rather than to take away from it.
Bosses are traditionally the biggest hurdles, especially the late-game ones. Training Room completely side-steps most of the historical challenge of getting HotK's pattern down. You had to go for a good 1-2 hours until you had 1 *attempt* at learning more, which was a very tense experience because so much time was on the line. Training Room is a massive massive change to the game (essentially turning off permadeath just like the assist) that has no drawback at all.
Custom Mode has an option to enable health fountains on 5 BSC, trivializing health and money management. How is not getting achievements a proper trade-off/drawback? They have zero impact on the game. You can totally see and play all the content of the game with achievements disabled, they are meaningless.
Turning off permadeath has always been possible by juggling save slots. You don't even need to manually copy save files - the in-game menu allows you to copy save slots. The assist is just an easier way of doing that without having to quit to menu. That also highlights that the only thing keeping you from completely side-stepping the challenge has always been your mental fortitude. If you wanted to do it, you could - assists changed nothing about that.
Your opinion is totally valid as a subjective preference. I have weird preferences too! But objectively it's pretty hard to explain why Custom Mode and Training Room are "good", while Assists are "bad". I think they all make the game more enjoyable by taking out frustrating aspects while remaining completely optional, giving you the choice of customizing your experience.
Additionally, the training room requires that you learn the boss at a fixed level of difficulty, where your gear is always at an equal level of strength that's balanced for a proper engagement. There are no stat scrolls given to you ahead of time, and the bosses' health and damage are adjusted for this, so it's the same fight no matter what build you choose.
In contrast to that, the normal game has certain unpredictable factors that're able to strongly influence the strength of your build, such as bonus scrolls from challenge rifts, or the (new) legendary gear with powerful affixes, which can and do lead to instances where you simply get a strong build that's able to blast down the boss in a shorter time, where you don't have to worry about dodging as many of their attack patterns. At its extreme, you can melt a boss in mere seconds, only giving them a chance of attacking maybe one time.
If anything, the training room boss fights give a more legitimate, "true" taste of the challenge.
As I said early on in my original post: the point about these features, and why I dislike certain ones over others, has to do with intention. It's about what the message being conveyed to the player is, by the developer, when they choose to use them.
In the case of certain options for Custom mode, disabling achievements tells the player that, "This method of modifying the game is not a part of the intended experience of Dead Cells." The choice is given to you to use is, if you want to use it, but in doing so you're restricting yourself from doing it the "right way", as a way of putting it. The difficulty of 5BC is balanced around the inability for the player to refill at health fountains, and enabling that option changes a core aspect of Hell difficulty's design, which is why you cannot earn achievements while using it.
As far as copying save files: that's just a natural side effect of the fact that quitting out of the game in Dead Cells does not mean quitting out of the run, as is the case with many other roguelites, in my experience. You have the option of doing that, yes, but I think that the genre definition - which includes permadeath as fundamental element of what defines a roguelite - combined with the action of duplicating a save file itself, is enough of an indication that it's not an intended way of playing the game. Closing out the game mid-run and creating backups of your save files are both features that exist for the player's convenience; they're not a part of the gameplay experience themselves.
I'll try to better (and further) explain my issues with the Assist mode here. There are two parts to my opinion on the feature:
1. The Intention
I have spoken my thoughts on Custom mode, the training room, and Aspects, all of which provide a form of assistance or a helping hand to the player, and I've said why I'm fine with those options. So why is my opinion different for Assist mode, then?
It's because the developers have not given a clear message on how this mode affects the experience of the game like those other features do. When you first open the Assist mode screen in the Options menu, there is a message from MT / EE that explains how this feature exists to make the game more accessible to a wider audience, and that, "What really matters is that you have fun playing Dead Cells!" That sounds great by me, I'm happy with the game bringing in more people.
But when you start to compare the options available in Assist mode to the ones from those past additions, and look at the lack of restrictions (or "trade-offs/drawbacks, as you described them), it brings up a lot of questions. For example, why is it that re-enabling health fountains on higher boss cell modes is an option that disables achievements, but turning down enemy health and damage to just 20% - one fifth of the original values - does not disable achievements? Why can you not acquire new boss cells why using an Aspect, but you can do it while playing with unlimited lives through Continue mode? Why are dual-binding and equipping two of the same item (without a legendary) even exempted from the pool of "legitimate" options for Custom mode, when all of the features from Assist mode that I just mentioned have a far greater impact on the gameplay experience?
I'd like to know exactly why Assist mode is seemingly treated differently than past features introduced to offer players help. Why not allow those other features to be used in the game without having them disable achievements? Turning on more healing options doesn't affect the game anymore than turning down enemy stats, and it seems a bit arbitrary as to what is or is not considered "intended". The developers themselves even spoke about how they changed the shop categories from item types to class types, in an effort to encourage players to change their build throughout the run, because they view swapping items as part of the experience of Dead Cells. But the option to re-instate the old shop categories is there in Custom mode, and it doesn't disable achievements either.
It's all vague, and that's what I don't like about it.
2. My Personal Opinion
This point is entirely subjective and is no more "right" or "wrong" than anyone else's opinion, I will acknowledge that upfront. But the original topic of this thread was about asking for peoples' opinions of Assist mode, so that's why I include it.
I am someone who likes to experience games in their intended way: I like to have the experience that the developers are looking to convey. This is why I prefer to play games with as few modifications as possible - I don't install mods on a first playthrough, even for non-gameplay related things like visual improvements - and unless a feature is implemented with the explicit message that is part of the intended experience, I'd rather not use it. This is my own choice, and yes, people are free to not play games that way and make whatever modifications to the experience to make it better for them. I can not do anything to stop them from doing that, and I understand that I shouldn't care if they do, because it doesn't affect my experience. That is all a completely fair assesment, and I understand it.
However, I also feel that people ought to be open to the possibility of trying new things, and stepping out of their comfort zone. The reason for why I say this is because it is something that I, myself, did a few years ago, and I have found that it has led to me having incredible, new experiences with games that I would've otherwise missed out on entirely. Back around 2017 or so, I started to take more chances when it came to buying new games. In the past, I was someone who was very bad at video games, and found myself struggling and getting frustrated by them. I was also someone who was accustom to playing much simpler games, and found that trying to learn a game with a long, in-depth tutorial and loads and loads of mechanics was a slog that wasn't fun. And I am (or perhaps was) someone that doesn't really care about story in games, and just wants to play for gameplay. All of these factors could, or possibly may have, led to me giving up on certain games because they didn't align with what I already preferred to have in games.
And then, when these past few years came into sight, I broke out of those pre-conditioned mindsets and discovered games that fell within those realms of discomfort that I enjoyed immensly. I found games like Dead Cells, and Hollow Knight, and the Souls series, all of which are designed to offer a significant challenge that makes the majority of players struggle and can result in a frustrating experience, and they turned out to be some of the greatest games I've ever played. I discovered the game Age of Wonder 3, which is a 4X title - something known for being complex and hard to get into - and because I was willing to put up with the long grind of learning all of its systems, I found one of the most satisfying gameplay loops I've ever seen, even rivaling Dead Cells (my most played singleplayer title of all time). And then came CrossCode, a game that hasn't just made me want to play story-driven games now, but proved moreso than any other game just how special an experience can be when you take a chance on something. If I had passed it up the moment I heard that it was story-focused, I would've legitimately missed out on my second favorite video game of all time.
And this is where the conversation comes back to the discussion about Assist mode. By giving people the option to strip away the challenge, by lowering damage or disabling permadeath, you're taking away an aspect of the intended experience of Dead Cells. I have watched some videos covering this topic, and I've heard multiple people agree with the sentiment: sometimes the lack of options for changing a game's difficulty can benefit their experience. They said that if they were presented with the option of being able to lower the difficulty, when facing a challenge that felt impossible to overcome for them, they probably would've taken the offer. And they see that it would've robbed themselves of the feeling of satisfaction that came from conquering that challenge as it was designed.
If you want to use Assist mode because you don't like the difficulty, or you find it frustrating, that's your choice to make. All I am saying is that I would recommend against it, because I know that in doing so you might be giving up on a great experience that you won't have otherwise.
This stuff exists to distract us from the real world and that's it. It's a distraction and nothing more. Don't worry about what some incel gaming bros think about how you enjoy your distractions. They are objectively wrong.