[Item Management] Gameing the item drops

[Entropie]

After finally beating the watcher I will share some concerns about how gameing the item management system can make the game a lot easier at the cost of variety.

What I did was pretty much only unlocking items that were leading to powerful combos.
(Phasing + assasins dagger, elec whip + att up) the remaining points were used to leveling up the few weapons I was using.

This made runs a LOT more consistent, I would be almost guaranteed to get a good combo early on and would have no troubly improving it with higher level items later.
It would also ensure that I had a high likelyhood of finding weapons/items that I had already invested cells in.

Sure the game forces you a little bit to unlock more items by putting higher level potions, saved gold and the random starter weapons behind a counter but you actually only have to unlock very few droppable items to get to the 3rd potion level (and everything else), only the level 4 potion was kinda out of reach without compromising this strategy but that is a small price to pay.

Now, for a game like this it is clearly not intended that the player is artificially limiting the item drops, there are some games, where any item unlocked becomes automatically available (binding of isaac) and there are games that allow you to remove items from the pool (crypt of the necrodancer).

Currently there are also some things that exacerbate the problem:
- Power level of later unlocks is not too different from starting items
- The difficulty of later stages can make runs with underwhelming items very frustrating

There also are numerous possible solutions, to name a few:
- Unlock items immediately when a schematic drops, though this means you don't have to carry the schematic to the end of the level anymore.
- Allow players to remove unlocked items from the pool, maybe at the cost of cells.
- Require more items to be unlocked for further upgrades.
- Have later unlockables be significantly more powerful. (This doesn't feel like it fits this game though)


Looking at some other rogue-lite titles it seems that every game has a slightly different way of addressing this issue but it has to be solved one way or the other.

[ChaosSabre]

Well taking Isaac example from this. The optimal way of playing that is to never finish the game with certain characters and never unlocking the alt basement floors. You'd have more consistant runs in that as well. And yea you can do the same here by just getting stuff you want. Players who don't care bout optimization will just unlock everything or just stuff they care about. Only thing I mind with unlocking all stuff is that when you unlock random starting melee it takes away your rusty sword and if you are lucky enough to get a cursed sword as your first weapon welp XD

[Entropie]

Imagine you had to pay in binding of isaac to unlock items to actually appear in your runs, there would probably be a lot of items you would not want to pay for.

[Blade]

All great ideas I just wanted to throw an additional one in there. Adding a bonus to your character as they unlock more items. That way if you want to unlock a few you can, so as to keep your drops low, and if you want to unlock everything you'll get some benefit to offset the RNG item dispensory.