Balatro's 'Cursed' Design Problem 

To me, not being able to preview the score is one of the game's greatest strengths, but the ability to calculate it yourself as a last resort is exactly what makes Balatro an all timer. Sure, you can mostly rely on rough estimation without thinking too hard about everything, but there's also an undeniable magic in the adrenaline of having only 1 hand to cover a ton of points and having to desperately pull out your calculator to figure out what combination of jokers, card order or hand type can get you through. Plus, even when I do so, there's been so many times when, in the heat of the moment, I fail to take card interactions, debuffs, effects, or boss abilities into consideration in my calculations and end up failing miserably when I was so confident, or crushing the blind when I thought all hope was lost, and it is extremely fun no matter the outcome. To me, the only thing that would suck the fun out of it is using the dedicated hand calculator, but even then, if someone chooses to play like that and still gets a fun and rewarding experience out of it, then it's still a net positive.

I think Isaac's "figure it out" approach worked at the start because there were less 200 of them and most of them had a a pretty immediate effect. Nowadays there's over 700 of them, and some of them have really weird effects and/or only activate under specific circumstances. Especially with trinkets, I have over 1000 hours in the game and I really just do not remember what half of them do. Without Item Descriptions, a lot of trinkets just become "thing I pick up and then replace with something that I actually know about without ever seeing their effect activate". I like the method used in The Void Rains Upon Her Heart. Item pick ups are initially kept hidden to the player, but after picking one up, you can unlock their description. Something like that in Isaac would be a nice compromise.

For Isaac, I always thought the easiest thing to do was to add full item description after you tried said item at least once. That way, I feel like players would be more willing to experiment.

Cool mechanics and fun gameplay aside, can we talk about the art for the joker cards for a minute? Look at the subtle smirk on their faces, the tasteful sheen of their foil. Oh my god, they even follow your cursor when you mouse over them.

Something very very similar happened with Rimworld. The game creator, Tynan Silvester, created the game as a story simulator with drama, loss and struggle. But that's not how most people play it. In fact it's most often played as a base building strategy game in which loss is seen as something to be avoided. The game designer decided to push back hard against that kind of playstyle. People made kill boxes for raiders so he nerfed turrets, people responded with traps so he added tunneling enemies which ignored walls so people made the wall into a killbox, so he made enemies which drop down from the sky right into your base and.... you get the idea. The constant arms race has, in my opinion, made the game worse for both types of players so I think it's best to just give the players the freedom to choose how to play is by far the best, possibly with a message explaining the pros and cons like you suggested.

Fun fact: Balatro is actually an old word for jester or joker, which was used frequently in Ancient Rome

Amusingly, mods have already done what you've described: there's a mod out there that adds a bunch of new jokers, and one of them is Scouter - and all it does is show you how many points you're going to score. Making it a Joker is also really interesting because it means you're not using that Joker slot for something that actually provides a mechanical benefit, so there's an inherent trade-off to having that information available.

I wonder if McMillen only rented Zelda as a kid? The game came with an instruction booklet that explained all the items. This does bring up something I think a lot of young people playing retro games don't always understand, which is that the instruction booklet was part of the experience back then. Thanks to memory and technical limitations, there were rarely in-game tutorials, so you were expected to reference the book. Of course, many games were also intentionally obtuse beyond that. Every time I got a new game, I was always super excited to read the story section of the booklet. I kinda miss that feeling.

The game does not give you your score, but it gives you enough info that you can reliably estimate pretty quick. The scores in Balatro are so bonkers anyway that you rarely need to calculate them precisely, but with a little experience you can ballpark them in a bracket narrow enough that you don't need to worry. And anyways this is not the kind of game where you have a lot of different ways to play the cards in your hand, so even if a hand is not enough there's probably nothing you can do better with what you have. To me the most fun about Balatro is to set this little formula in your head and tweak it to maximise your score, it's a really fun game for people that like mental mathematics and a score display would take that away.

I love that Balatro doesn't have the score preview for all the reasons you/localthunk have stated, I think an additional advantage is that it allows you to get a different feeling/intuition about each run, instead of having to do a calculation most of the time you can draw on your past experience in the run and just make an approximation of if the hand you're about to play is good enough based on your recent history.

I think Binding of Isaac is kind of a different case. The game has like 1000 items and not knowing what they do is frustrating. Half of them have effects that you would NEVER figure out unless you looked it up, and others will instantly destroy your nice build that you spent an entire run making. The item description mod has in my opinion been the best thing to ever happen to the game.

This is very reminiscent of the "should there be an easy mode in Dark Souls" argument.

I wouldn't call this a design problem at all, it gives casual players the thrill of not knowing what they'll get, and people who enjoy tryharding get to predict and calculate the optimal paths. It's a form of skill expression that is in tune with the gambling nature of Poker.

When Tunic nerfed an overpowered item combination (increasing its mana cost from 1 to 4), they also added a code that reverts the nerf for 80 seconds, specifically because the speedrun depended on the cheaper mana cost. I can't remember if this code is alluded to in-game.

In magic the gathering, the information in between "hidden" and "public" is "derived information". "Public information" is everything a player is required to share to his opponent about his card on demand, things like amount of cards in hand, life total and others. "Hidden" is every information unkown to one or both player, like what cards are in your hands, what is the order of cards in your library. "Derived" Is everything you can deduce from public information, if a player returns a card from play to their hand, they are in no obligation to reveal that this card is now in their hand because it's a "hidden" zone, but a skilled opponent will remember this "derived" information. I think it's a pretty good naming convention for this "in between" for information technically public but not easily available.

I kinda disagree with your conclusion here. I think the solution Balatro arrived at is awesome, because it's easy to "guesstimate" your score, which is a major strategy factor...but it's hard to precisely calculate it. Often not quite "impossible" but still...Thus, for me at least, the score preview provides guidelines, and I usually find it more interesting and efficient to experiment with different hands at various points in order to test or confirm what actually works best for my current deck and joker loadout.

this is the closest we've got to an inscryption video

3:38 "Stern spreadsheet style strategy" is my new favorite vocal warmup

Ngl, i only calculate my score on the boss bind where you are allowed one hand.

I'm (mostly) on team "leave it the way it is". I've had a handful of Balatro moments where I've cleared the blind by the skin of my teeth, came just shy of the point total, or completely miscalculated and either blew the blind out of the water or fumbled the bag. Trackable information isn't necessarily a design flaw, as it gives players an analog choice: Some will ignore the idea entirely, some will brute force it with calculators or mods, and some like myself will do something in the middle. Face down cards (and I think stone cards as well?) can have their information sussed out by sorting by rank or suit and comparing their position to neighboring cards. Usually I don't go to great lengths to identify anything beyond suit (flush gang where you at), but sometimes you gotta do some heavy tracking and logic puzzling to nail that one straight so you don't die to a stray boss blind. I'll even slow the game down back to 1x just to track face down jokers and reshuffle them back into their proper order. The key thing here is letting players discover and manipulate the game the way they see fit. Adding the score calculator or a hand scoring preview could be an assist feature for players who aren't fans of math, but I don't think it has any place in affecting the core game.

2:48 quick note The score burns when it is equal or bigger than the amount of score you need to win the round. It's not luck based and doesn't get hotter.

If your game has a "ruin fun" button (using external tools to calculate everything and remove suspense) but you manage to design the game so that only a tiny percentage of players actually bother pressing it, then that's good design right? I get that from a purely objective lens the game has something you could describe as a game design flaw, but it's also something that most people won't encounter. Effort and time are resources too even if they aren't in the code, and this time the game has been balanced in a way where the time/effort to calculate your hand just isn't worth it to most players so in my eyes the problem has been solved.

I resent the implication that mathing everything out to maximally optimise your plays makes the game less fun, or that such a desire only applies to people who are really invested in Balatro. This is just how I play all games, and I love it~ I think spreadsheets are fun! It may not be “normal”, but my experiences are still valid. Justice for the autists! :D

I think Balatro gets away with not having score previews, because in most situations (outside of ante 1), you aren't beating the blinds by a small margin: you're more often beating them by 5-20% or more, depending on how strong your build is relative to the ante. So, you don't *need* to precalculate your hands. You can just rely on learned gut instinct, because even if you estimate a hand is worth 60k chips, but it's actually 50k, it doesn't matter against a 40k blind. In short, because you win or lose by bigger margins, you can get away with making educated guesses rather than precalculating each turn. For this reason, and the ones localthunk brought up, I hope he never changes it. I want the feeling of a gamble to always be there (at least, for those of us who'd rather play cards than play calculator 😂).

Zelda was that way exactly because they wanted people to reach for information outside of the game. But because the internet was too new, it implied asking friends.

3:14 the misclick three of a kind instead of the full house hurt me

There's a fair amount of random chance cards in balatro which is why I think full score calculators aren't that helpful for all builds. For now I'm glad it doesn't have them, I like to play casually and enjoy the slot machine effect.

I usually calculate or estimate my score in the first two/three rounds where it's easy to do it by head, without a calculator, because I feel like the beginning of a run is really defining, and I don't want external tools. I can't say I'm surprised some people actually use external tools though, I indeed did that with Isaac as well (only when I felt the need to understand an item)

Happy to see "streamed by pretty much everyone" = Northenlion

The Binding of Issac situation actually reminds me a lot about how the Risk of Rain series (1, 2 and Returns) has a similar issue, albeit to a smaller extent, where the effects of each item are described but not the exact numbers (for example, Soldier's Syringe tells you it gives attack speed but doesn't directly specify via. popup that's it's +15% per stack). Then again, Risk of Rain does have tools to see those exact numbers via. mods, wikis, and the logbook outside of active play.

Ever heard of Slice And Dice, that's essentially turn based rpg but you roll dice? You can UNDO the targets and order in which you assign damage / shields / spend mana (you can't undo rolling tho, only the 'combat') And the game is still fun and challenging to play. That's one of the best game design choices I've ever come across

I personally hate not knowing how many point my hand will score ...

Something I've noticed when I play Balatro is that I usually don't try to calculate, but when calculating seems like it will be easy enough to fudge in my head, I'll do it. The information being there makes it easier to spice things up by shifting between the working out the ideal move and the pick n hope for the best playstyles without leaving the game

It's not quite the same vibe, but as a designer myself who likes thinking about combinatorics and the action economy of a game? I absolutely calculated my Balatro turns in advance starting from my very first session. The DIFFERENCE is that I don't pull out a calculator, I just kinda roughly eyeball it and make sure I'm landing where I want it to. It keeps a lot of the thrill of not knowing just HOW big it will be, while still giving me the assurance I'm not making a tactically stupid decision.

I dont think the score preview is only for hardcore players. There's a sense of debilitation that can arise when you're not allowed to make an informed decision. There have been plenty of instances in games where I think "why did that happen?" and it's not that I'm a super strategic player, it's that I want a sense of agency in the game that I'm spending my free time playing. When I don't understand what is happening, I don't have agency.

I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but your video of THPS3 (the section on cheat codes at 12:17) is actually of the PC port, not the console original... and it is very clearly modded with LevelMod, as seen in the options menu as well as at the bottom of the main menu. Weird choice to align with the script!

An easy fix and good compromise for The Binding of Isaac seems so obvious to me. It would keep the original design intention while also granting much more accessibility for players - without the need of referring to wikis and mods. Just keep the original design with item descriptions and effects hidden until the player gets and uses(!) them for the first time. And do the same for synergies, interactions and combinations between items. Therefore players feel the excitement of getting and new item and finding secret combinations and synergies, but also gain an in-game wiki of all their previous findings. "Backpack Battles" actually does a great job with an item database and secret combinations exactly like that. Binding of Isaac is just nearly unplayable without any wiki or mod with its 400+ items after all those updates. I'm pretty sure that most players wouldn't use a mod or wiki with that design compromise. And there'll always be a small playerbase of people who want to know everything in advance and get precise information down to the decimal point. Those people will always look up information in a wiki anyway.

11:51 Heat Signature mention! Honestly adore this game and I wish more people talked about it

I played through binding of Isaac for hours upon hours before finally caving to adding an item description mod. The reason was simply this: there was too many items for me to remember and it was a hassle to stop mid run to figure out what something did despite me using it already. That is the flaw imo in Isaac. It had become a hindrance. Balatro is different because you will already have a decent idea of your hands capabilities beforehand. You have enough accessible information from your jokers to make the right decisions. It impacts so little people in comparison to something like Issac where the vast majority faces that issue. Change Isaac’s systems to tell you descriptions after discovery still results in a vision Edmund desired, or at least 90% of the way there.

Casually dropping the sickest Zelda clip in the middle of a Balatro video 7:50

I love the lack of a displayed preview score! it's so fun to do a quick mental estimate just to get a ballpark figure, then letting it rip and hoping that it's on the winning end of the ballpark

For me, the cryptic messages in Binding of Isaac didn't work out because there's no "safe place" to experiment. Picking up an item can ruin your build (and hence the whole run), which really works against the playful mystery McMillen was trying to invoke. There's also so many items, where a good chunk of them are niche (so you've already used it but don't remember what it does). In that case, there's no mystery feeling either. Though, McMillen acknowledges that in the 2023 post you showed (where the original game only had 100 items, but it has since expanded to 700+).

In the case of Isaac, there are 2 “solutions” i can think of. First, you can have items be not communicated the FIRST TIME that they’re found. My biggest problem isn’t that items don’t have descriptions (I’m totally with Edmund that finding a new power up and not knowing what it does is very exciting), but the problem is that the game has HUNDREDS of them! If you play RELIGIOUSLY you would remember them anyway and they wouldn’t be a mystery, but for people that only play so often, they’re kind of punished by that fact. Showing descriptions after the first time sort of fixes that problem. You could also have a “memory” mechanic, where the game only remember x number of item descriptions before forgetting them, meaning you’d have a rotation of rediscovering items and being excited by that. I’ll also note here that items/power ups in Isaac can be very hard to understand on their own too, and that pushes player towards descriptions. AND can be required for certain aspects of the game The second “solution” is having item icons only HINT at what the item does. So for example, the cat paw could have 5 possible effects. Which one did you get? Well try it to find out!

God looking at gameplay at normal speed after getting used to play at max speed feels so slow now ! Not a problem per se, just an interesting thing I noticed.

i think the problem in tBoI that isnt there in balatro is that there's like, literal hundreds items and some of them have really weird effects. balatro only hides your final score, not like.... what your cards do. no one wants to be deep into a BoI run and pick up an item that makes their entire build stop working just because they havent memorized 700+ item effects.

we need the concept of "spoilers" to apply to more types of experience than just story plot

Popular StS creator Jorbs created an hour long presentation to explain his feelings on Balatro and the matter at hand, which he designated under Delayed Variable Rewards. (Bear in mind I am paraphrasing) In his experience, he isn't a fan of DVRs, and is largely convinced that they shouldn't form the backbone of entertainment - for exactly the same reason as people are against slot machines. It was an interesting video on the topic that I would encourage other people to seek out and form their own opinion on.

This is super interesting to me. I'm a player that tries to avoid looking up anything on a game at least for the first full playthrough as it completely ruins the fun for me knowing where I "should" be going or what I "should" be using. Obviously I know there's a completely different sect of people that enjoy min/maxing everything in a game, so it's an interesting dilemma.

I think a key point of balatro that a lot of comments are missing when they say that you can figure out roughly if your hand is winning or not is that, yes it's true but playing your highest scoring hand is not the best move in a bunch of situations, lots of jokers involve doing specific things that make prolonging the round longer And in that case you are trying to figure out how to get close to score enough points while triggering those jokers, which frequently involve non-optimal plays in the view of pure scoring, and in those situations having a score preview would certainly make a difference, knowing how many card you can play to renew your hand when you can't discard to try to trigger a joker without finishing the round get hard without calculating, especially as you get more jokers. At higher stakes, those types of hand that are optimal but not on the immediate score side are definitely important, if you can get more tarot, planets and money it can definitely define if a game is won or lost

11:33 I hardly disagree on that aproach, specially on an RPG (never played CC, but if I like some part of the game but not the story and they force me to sit thru it, it will deter me from playing more). The solution is pretty simple: just put a switch for the explicit score on the settings menu, with the default state as Off. People who are more likely to enjoy the surprise score are also more likely to start playing right away without minding the settings. Those who think more strategically are more likely to thinker with the settings a bit before playing.

Isaac items were more managable before the updates, as there weren't many. Now there are thousands of them with many synergies, without counting the trinkets with small effects

For the Binding of Isaac, I think the best would be to unlock descriptions as you use each item. That way the first time you find it you still have to experiment, but you don't need to remember all items descriptions from memory. This could also trick the players obsessed with optimal play into experimentation and variety in their build, as they'd try new things just to have a better understanding of it in the next run. Of course people would still use a wiki sometimes, so this isn't a bulletproof solution, just an idea

The biggest issue I have with balatros design is how easy it is to get a dead run by not getting a joker with mult in the first 3 blinds.

We're going through this right now with Brailliance. People asked for a "wordle mode" that makes our puzzle game less like its unique self, and more like the popular option. So, we're A/B testing exactly that. As of this writing, the variant without "wordle rules" is winning decisively with day-one retention.

Love the video, but disagree with a point. Saying that "Only the most hardcore of players would want a calculator" feels too polarizing. There are plenty of scenarios where, for example, "should you use or not use a glass card" entirely depends on whether you need it to win or lose on the last hand. It's not hardcore to want to use resources well without risking a run.

I think Isaac and Balatro would only be comparable if all the Jokers had their effects hidden. Not showing a score preview isn't even in the same ballpark.

honestly, i don't think score previews should be implemented in any form. the amount of times you actually need to manually calculate score is so miniscule, i think the game is fine just the way it is. any form of preview would get rid of the rush of not knowing whether or not you're going to win, which is honestly one of my favorite parts of the whole game

I'd describe myself as one of the "incredibly invested" players, having 100% the game and pouring 100s of hours into it already. Personally, I don't think the score preview is necessary and I agree with localthunks design choice, I never once felt the need for it, and the game was more fun without it

I think part of the issue here, especially for a genre like roguelikes, is not letting the player safely experiment. If going into a new situation blind means potentially risking all of your progress, players will desperately try to pull the blindfold off, not wanting to lose their whole run just to figure out what something does.

Whenever this kind of thing comes up, I'm reminded of a very different sort of game - Darkest Dungeon. There's no question that the brutal difficulty, permadeath, and roguelike 'roll with the punches' design was the whole point. You're MEANT to sometimes lose heroes you've invested heavily in building up, meant to sometimes lose entire EXPEDITIONS and have to claw your way back up from a fresh batch of recruits. Meant to learn from it, and strategize around it by always making sure you keep some veterans in reserve who can lead some fresh-faced new heroes into the dungeon if necessary, as well as realizing that investing in the village is the only thing you CAN'T lose, making it all the more important... But some players, like myself, just bounce off that philosophy hard. Preferring to see the heroes as unique characters rather than disposable minions, unwilling to face the immense amount of lost progress that a failed expedition can land you with, or just too impatient to proceed with the amount of paranoia-riddled patience the game demands... and we, rather quickly, figured out how to copy the game's save-directory to another location. Things went sideways? Exit the game, overwrite the save-directory with the copy you made earlier, open it again, and you're back where you were. It's more laborious than a traditional save-load system, sure, but it works - and how much you wanna use it is up to you. Any time you lose a hero? Only if you lose the entire team? Are you still going to play cautiously to avoid the hassle, or taking advantage of this safety-net to proceed more brashly? And, of course, on top of that there's a bunch of 'rebalancing' mods, many of which were very popular. Increasing your party inventory lets you carry more supplies into a dungeon, and more treasure back out. Enabling characters to equip an extra Trinket allows for more powerful combos, and makes them all significantly more potent overall. You could even grab a mod that just let you revive fallen heroes every time you returned from an expedition, though that one had drawbacks. For those with the vampire-focused DLC, you could mod the 'Crimson Thirst' to make it less virulent, and thus less likely to infect your crew or spread among them. All clearly counter to the developer's intentions. But they allowed people like me, who would otherwise simply have abandoned the game after the first major setback, to play and enjoy it for dozens and dozens of hours... ...shame about the sequel. =_=

I don't see it as a design issue, usually you don't need to beat a score within a single hand, so the exact score isn't that important -rough estimates usually get you there. But I like that I always have the option to figure out the exact score when it really matters. Perfect design imo.

As a hardcore strategy player, you don't need a score preview. Its just skill issue. There are ways to estimate your score and you can always do quick mental math as well. If you want to, make it a joker to estimate the selected hand's score. E.g. the joker changes (e.g. catches fire like the chipa and multiplier when score counting) based on what you selected.

2:48 "If you're lucky" is a fun way to say "If your hand's score exceeds the total score for the Blind".

I play (GZ)Doom a lot. I mostly play it unmodded but one mod that I use shows me current enemy health. While this seems innocent enough I've noticed that it leads to me spending much less ammo during encounters, subconsciously "optimizing" my ammo usage, spending less valuable ammo if I know that enemy is low on health. Which is probably not what map designer intended.

I really like how Rogue Legacy 2 does it's item descriptions where all information about the item is "???????????????" until you pick it up for the first time, that way you still get the sense of discovery without having to remember on your own what everything does.

There is a slight indicator with the fire. The fire means that you scored the round minimum, or higher, in a single hand

I found enter the gungeon had a good solution to the Issac problem. It has item descriptions that are meant to be more fun and world building centric without giving super explicit explanations. There’s a small blurb that tells you kinda what it does but while playing I personally found I still needed to figure it out for myself

I find it funny that McMillen cites Zelda has why he didn't put item descriptions when they are available in the manual. The only reason they're not in the game itself is because of data size limitations. But starting in LttP whenever you pick up a new item there is a text box describing what the item does. What they don't tell you are some of the secondary effects of items, like the hookshot being able to stun or kill certain enemy types along with hooking onto certain objects to travel pits and broken bridges.

I just don’t see how these are flaws. I get the devs even say so but I think they are being to hard on themselves. Like balatro there’s no way to guarantee everyone will play the way you want them too and the fact that people who don’t want to have fun with the game don’t have fun with it is not a fault with a design. Someone could do the same thing with a Mario game by building a machine that holds down buttons the precise way to make jumps correctly, it doesn’t mean there’s a flaw with the concept of changing players to make the jump on their own. And in the binding of Issac case, having a wiki with all the item descriptions is just the endgame of the quote he himself said about Zelda being a game where people shared knowledge with each other to win. Like that’s what a wiki is. It’s literally just about perspective with these things neither of these things are inherent flaws it feels like a rare case of lack of ego lol.

I think that adding in a "ask Jimbo About This Hand" button would be great. Jimbo, if you've forgotten, is the Joker that shows up for the tutorial, and the end of every run. He will congratulate you or mock you, depending on your performance. So having him tell you "Oh, this will absolutely win" or "haha, this is terrible!" with a little jibe for *needing to ask* might be a fun middle ground.

In board games, I've noticed I love games that prompt what I call "informed gut" decisions. Cabo is a game that provides you the information that you need, but often too much of it for a normal human player to track. So you internalize what you've seen, hope your subconscious calculates it in a way your conscious can't, and make a gut decision, still unsure of the outcome. Of course, some people are just smart enough to track every piece of info a game gives them, which risks it becoming "solved", or can't abide taking an informed guess so they sit there with analysis paralysis and take half hour turns. I could see Balatro thriving in the informed gut sense, having a notion that this hand is really gonna do it without doing all the math, and then waiting to see if you were right.

Honestly the biggest request I have for Balatro is to allow the player to view the current ante from the store without progressing. The current method allows a player to see the upcoming rounds only after leaving the store. That also decreases the opportunity to plan around boss ante abilities to only two rounds, and you may not even be given the ability to fix issues if you can't see them upcoming. Flush decks where that suit is negated is a great example

Was waiting for a video on Balatro! Thank you GMT!

This is one big advantage of mods; if players want something badly enough, someone will make it. And installing a mod is harder than checking an option, so it's a pretty concious commitment.

This is partly a matter of convenience as well. If binding of isac wasn't so punishing with each run having a long runtime, then I think the amount of people going out of their way to look stuff up wouldn't be as prevalent. Honestly, it's more fun to look it up over losing 30 min of playtime cause you picked up a dud power you cant put down.

Two things: 1) How many times does Soren Johnson's "timeless" quote have to be proven wrong by swathes of challenge-runners finding their own fun in spite of the optimal play before people stop claiming that all gamers need to be protected from themselves? 2) How disrespectful can you get to just assume every player would turn a score preview on even when they know they would have a less fun experience by doing so? Some people would turn it on when they realise they're calculating scores and it's taking too long and eating in to their fun, so they let the preview off-load that work. Meanwhile, others would leave it off because they know they prefer having the surprise I mean, seriously! The designer proves that people who would prefer not using a preview exist BECAUSE THEY ARE ONE OF THEM! LocalThunk even proves that people CAN choose to not use the option by choosing to not implement a very easy feature that would diminish their own fun if they were to use it. The argument that EVERYONE would turn it on without thinking simply doesn't work under the most basic examination

This might sound corny, but to me having to map out the item descriptions is like a small community. Like its these few people on the internet working together to catalog all the information, they're players who are deeply invested. I played binding of issac with my laptop open and it was fun to max things out. Idk i think its fun to talk about your favorite jokers online with other people who are just as interested

"If you somehow haven't played Balatro..." Until this moment I hadn't even heard of Balatro.

I think there is a fundamental different between the two example. In Issac, what's hidden is the item's ability, which in Balatro would be like hiding what each Joker do. And I think it is very different between hiding ingame mechanic that makes players have no idea how strategize around and hiding the exact result of strategizing with enough knowledge

I'd argue that doing the potential score calculations in my head, just staying in game without a calculator, is one of the most enjoyable parts of Balatro for me personally.

Maybe a half measure then: Instead of a score preview a "fire preview" where it's shown how viable a play is by hotter or colder icons but not the exact amounts - so that players feel they dont always have to optimize the game, and the game doesnt just outright give it away

Oh god the early clip of the vampire joker wiping the gold face cards only for the other ioker to immediately reapply it, thats genius

Trying to figure out how to get 'players' to optimize for the right goals is, in my view, one of the biggest, most fundamental problems in all of life.

The problem with binding of isaac for me there's so many items i just cant remember what they do, and its more frustrating to forget so quick than excitment of discover.

The thing about comparing to The Binding of Isaac, is that in Isaac there are thousands of items, most of them with some sort of negative downside, and you wouldn't know it until you picked it up and tested, but some of them are obscure and you might not even figure it out by yourself if you wanted to. It's like if the Joker cards didn't have a description. Another game, which has a somewhat similar type of problem is Risk of Rain 2, where items give you somewhat of a description of what they do, but they don't tell you how they stack or how they interact with each other. But it's less of a problem because you don't need to have a wiki open on the side unless it's a lunar item or something. In other words, if players want to calculate, let them, but don't add it as an option or at the very least make it a Joker, like the Scouter mod.

I would argue is not actually not a flaw at all. It runs on the same principle as Minecraft Creative mode. I always prefer to speed through my calculations, preferring a balance between speed and accuracy. The UI is so simple that I would actually be extremely annoyed at being forced to open a calculator or overlay. Balatro is designed for players like me, who play RTS at five times speed, who rely on their number sense for calculations. And there’s actually a lot of us.

I think the biggest problem with Isaac wanting players to experiment with each item before learning what they do is that Isaac is a roguelike where experimenting with certain items can end your run early and there's no way to guarantee you ever see a specific item again on later runs, especially with how many items were added in rebirth/afterbirth/etc

One solution, after the player has unlocked the mode or used the cheat code, would be to throw up a pop-up after 2 or 3 rounds. “Hey, we’ve noticed you’ve been playing in a mode going against the intended play style. Balatro has been designed with the thrill of wether or not your hand is enough. With this in mind how do you think being able to see the score has affected your experience? >Positively >Negatively >No Change” Adding a timer to prevent messing around could also work.

In my opinion, the way Balatro's dev did it, i.e simply hiding the score was a perfectly valid way of doing it. Yeah the game isn't exclusive to "casual" enjoyers but I think it's less about the "right" way to play it and more about the way YOU want to play it. I think a late game unlock could work but I also like the idea of the developer keeping his game the way he wanted it to be to begin with. Mainly I think if the way you're trying to play the game is boring to you, then you're not playing it right. You're not "cheating" but it's like making up rules to guarantee you can win, which is never fun. At least not in my opinion.

A Fun little side note - The developer actually managed to get the difference between poker players. You got the ‘textbook’ GTO poker players and on the other side - the ‘Gut feel gambling’ poker players. Great video!

If Balatro let you preview the score, it would basically play itself. There would be no choosing anymore. You just click every card combination in turn to get the highest score. By the same logic, why not just highlight the best pick right away? Why allow the player to pick at all? Make it an "auto-battler" etc ...

I wonder if this also applies to fighting game developers, as some are very insistent in withholding all of a moves properties forcing players to head to wikis for detailed info, while others particularly smaller devs happily welcome people to poke around in training mode.

There is “sort of“ a score preview. If you will score enough chips with a hand to cover the entire Anti the score will light on fire when you have the hand selected but not played.

You can also design your game in a wiki-hostile way to preserve the necessity of exploration and experimentation. For example, say you have a roguelike like Isaac with mysterious items. You could randomize what sprite is shown (each could have an overlapping pool of fitting sprites)

The reason why the withholding of information in isaac doesnt really work is because there are several items that are either dangerous to you, or straight up kill you. If you have a good run early in the game, you just cant risk using anything for which you dont already have the info ingrained into your brain

One difference between Balatro and The Binding of Isaac is that in Balatro you usually know what the best hand is. What can occasionally happen is that you don't know if that best hand is good enough to beat the blind or if you need to chase something better.

The thought that someone would play Balatro just randomly like that without at least vaguely calculating your score is insane to me!

Binding of Isaac hiding it's item descriptions is a massive issue because not knowing what something does can put you at a massive disadvantage. Balatro doesn't have that issue because nothing is actually hidden. It's just not plastered on the HUD; which if you ask me is better because it allows for a style of play where you only feel the need to calculate things while at-risk.

Uhh, its not as much of a problem as this guy is making it. Nobody thinks this except the very very smallest group of players. The biggest thing ppl complain about is the bosses hard countering your builds. Which is a stupid but legitimate complaint. I am active in the Balatro gaming community i know what ppl are saying.

I encountered that issue in a board game recently and after some discussions I realized I was the only one caring. It can be so frustrating to know you could win but didn’t because you didn’t want to lose hours of calculation