"Vampire Survivors Only Works Because We're Stupid" 

It doesn't take a genius to realize that Vamp Survivor is so much fun because it's a cheap dopamine rush. One small success follows the next. And lots of colorful pictures. I love it.

It’s funny how he never brings up the fact that the guy who made VampireSurvivors used to make slot machine programs, so it’s completely understandable why he knows exactly how to stimulate a persons brain

I might have missed that being mentioned, but 2 additional things VS does: All health and damage values are multiplied by 10. E.g. when a weapon reads 5 damage in the files, it ends up being 50. And the second, weapon damage has a visual range of -5 and +5, but this is purely visual. The actual value of damage it deals is the center point. Meaning if you see 25 to 35, the hits actually deal 30. And I guess playing into that, Pentagram always shows 666 damage -/+ 5, but in reality it deals max HP as damage to the enemy. So if the enemy has maxHp of 800 and currently 200 left, it will deal 800 and show 661 to 671.

I don't even pay attention to the numbers. I pay attention to the gradual gain of power from vulnerable peasant to untouchable god. Along with the constant stream of upgrades & unlocks of new toys to keep me going. The game makes half an hour feel like ten minutes its so absorbing.

"You just run around in circles collecting pellets, how could that be fun?" Pacman: Am I a joke to you?

I remember when I was a child, I asked my dad if a rabbit's food was lucky. He told me "Well, it wasn't very lucky for the rabbit, and he had 4 of them".

Most people in this comment section kinda forgot the point that he isn't saying "Vampire Survivors is bad because of this:" but explain why it works so well. He isn't saying you shouldn't have fun but why you are having fun.

I decide what's fun. This is fun.

Asmon should play this game again his Vampire Survivors series is one of the best series I have seen on RU-vid.

I played so much vampire survivors the last two days that when I close my eyes I see experience shards converging to where the bridge of my nose is. You know that feeling when you look at somewhere very bright for too long and then get those flashes of light when you close your eyes? Yeah I have that for experience shards.

I have never met a person in my life who talked about their score in Mario. It is more like, "Did you ever reach the sky stage?", "Sure, that's easy.", "Nice", And the conversation process on "where the hidden passage is."

The person playing decides what is fun, the real idiots are the ones who let other people decide what "fun" is for them.

Magical survival was the game that vampire survivor was based off of. I played that game a ton, before vampire survivors came out. Both are fun.

Asmongold reacts are just... gold... he watches every single second of it, ads or patreon moments, and that is so respectful and nice of him towards the content creator.

I play VS with damage numbers on but I have literally never paid any attention to damage numbers or my score while playing (aside from maybe the end screen breakdown), I am too busy "surviving" and enjoying the game and I'm sure I'm not alone here, right?

The damage numbers going up in VS is satisfying sure, but honestly, it's the nature in which you progressively wipe enemies off the screen that keeps me playing more than the numbers.

i would argue that this game did so well because we're not stupid,we recognize a fun game as opposed to the AAA non fun crap that's been pumped out for years now.

I shut off the damage numbers almost as soon as i began vampire survivors because the numbers add too much clutter to an already visually busy graphic style.

Funny that I find magic survival more fun, turned off dmg numbers in vampires, and found this genre is a return to roots that reignite interests to retro games

@17:29 even without "inifinte Corridor" it got much easiert to kill Death, since you can simply get the Weapon that makes you Immune to damage for 2 seconds, evolve it so it adds "reduce every damage you take to 10" and either add +10 health regen or enough weapon cooldown, so that the 2 seconds invincibility is enough for you to regenerate another stack of Immunity with the weapon (it can hold 3 stacks). After that, you basically can stand there and wait for death to be killed by any weapon you limit broke till this fight.

Infinite hoard games like vampire survivor are popular... for kind of the same reason as tower defense, roguelikes, idle, mobile, deck building, and instance games are. It's mainly due to the amount of time that can be allocated into them and although some people can get hooked into playing it for hours due to the instant gratifications that they give, the reality is that a single round of play only takes around 30m to an hour to do, which people with busy schedules can spend time on. This is unlike casual indie games that can take around 3-10 hours to beat, or a full on mmo or rpg that can take hundreds of hours. Not everyone has time for it, but people will always have time to play a quick round. I know that i like to do a run of slay the spire or backpack hero at times. 👍

I loved Paper Mario because you do 2-3 damage with attacks and mobs have 6 health at the start. So in the late game when you reach 70 damage it feels massive.

6:41 I think it’s more about how the number goes up if goombas were worth ten and coins 100 thus relative values give you a bigger oomph. Pinball machines are relative to eachorjer so getting a score of 100k on one and million on another might be from the same set of physical actions but the other larger numbers feel better. It’s the line going up the relative increases in the system as you play that actually matters.

I actually turned numbers off and still played it until I unlocked everything. It was bittersweet, I have nothing left to do because I could just roll everything on Sigma and nothing is left to achieve.

Sold my neighbors kid to play this. Loved it.

I love Asmon react vids because he actually genuinely adds tons of commentary and interesting takes.

4:50 the reason behind Mario's 10-based pontuation scale is actually a not because "humans are stupid", but on contrary. It's because humans are smart. See, the thing is that they WANTED to implement these numbers rendered in the screen, so they HAD to multiply for 10 to put them ther. Because the sprites grid unit for these numbers are double their width. I'm not a NES programmer, but for curiosity sometimes I check some contents on it. So I might not be using the correct terms in here. For what I remember, there is a certain method of working with sprites in NES. You have a layer specifically to store the sprites, let's call is "spritesheet". It is 256 × 240, and It's divided by square blocks of 8x8 or 16x16 pixels. Mario was programmed with 8x8 pixels block. The way you program in NES is combining those "pieces" together forming images, which are colorized giving them different fixed "pallettes" of colors. So when you see goombas in the first and second stages, they are actually the same sprite with just different "hues". In the case of these numbers that popup into Mario's interface, they need 4 pixels horizontally and 7 pixels vertically each. So these "blocks" are too small to fit in a 8x8 block and are too big just to put a single number. So IF they wanted a 1-based system, they would have to, or: - double the grid size horizontally, or; - double the width of the numbers which would lead to a weird looking, or; - use the same sprites of the numbers at the top, which would be ugly and sometimes also confusing. Instead of having to deal with this problem, they just putted another 0 there. If you actually see the sprites of the game on the internet, you will see that these small number are stored as "102040508000". So what they do is simply combine these "blocks" with each other to render on the screen: "10""00", "40""00". You COULD produce then under overlaying then, but this to work you would have to change how the processor of the NES was designed... so no deal. We are also talking about 1985 in here, so it would cost A LOT of money just to NOT put a zero there. So it has NOTHING to do with "humans being stupid", but with a time when resources, memory and computing were pretty limited. We live in different times, where those resources are not so limited as before. So the solution is actually genius.. and ABSOLUTE NOTHING to do with psycology, but programming skills. Maybe some video producers might have some limited time, trying to produce theories under subject they know nothing about.

In Resident Evil games it's called DA (Difficulty Adjustment) and it tracks your performance, ammo count, heal pickups ect to dynamically adjust enemy behaviour and damage values. From what i know it's been a thing since Resident Evil 4. Unless you play the hardcore difficulty where your DA is always maxed out therefore makes the game overall more difficult in a casual sense but more predictable in speedruns for example. Of course there is also ways to manipulate your DA if you can keep track of it or use mods that output your current DA.

I feel that having an amazing ost in a game is greatly underrated in also determining how addictive a game can be

oh well, thats a crossover i didnt expect, ive been watching this channel for ages. yall should check out his 20 games you should have played series for good indie games

I mainly play turn based games and if they don’t show the enemy’s health bar and my dmg points then I wouldn’t normally get far in the game. There is indeed some frustration in the unknown. So if there are numbers visible and comprehensible then it does give a certain satisfaction

XCom 2 had all of its "To hit" values based off of where you and the Enemy were standing. (Which is why you could be standing next to a alien and completely miss, if you don't believe, download the game and test it yourself with save scumming.)

I remember a game exactly like this long ago, except it was a dude shooting aliens or zombies or some shit, getting power ups as you killed stuff. Was super fun!

He is forgetting to add that Machines are not random. It take a number and divides it by the time, then multiplies it by 10 and if it equals 1 or higher then you get item "X". In the case of Boarderlands 3, if your luck was over its max it wrapped the number around by minus the max value and would give you rare items based off of that number (I and several friends of mine killed one of the guardians over a 100 times with a relic that boosted the max rare drop to 1k (we had this equipped to everyone with shared loot on) and we kept on getting gray or green weapons.) Tiny Tina's wonderland probably suffers from the same problem.

I never payed slitest attention to damage numbers in VS. When it become possible to turn them of i did just that. It was always music, provided gameplay tricks and crystal clear sence of progression. Thats it.

I'm searching Asmon's channel for the vampire survivors video that he mentioned towards the end of this video. I can't find it. Can someone please post the video title or a link to it please.

Nope, the difficulty of Vampire Survivor scale with your level, not time. Enemy type change with time. The best example you can try to verify that is to go in library with Clerci. Grab the gem on the table, and take TRACER as first skill for your level 2. Then, stuck the tracer by going between the table and the portrait. Because clerci has +400% size bonus to everything until lvl 10, your tracer will cover more zone than your sprite. It will One Shot EVERY creature that goes at you, including your holy water that are still level 1. Effectively, this is one of the method to kill death, since death has 1 million hp multiplied by your level. Meaning that if you do it this way, when death appear, it is stucked at 2 millions HP. You then grab the red gem that coalesced all the gems in it, and you instantly level up to 100. Since death is already summoned, it will not gain extra HP from your level up. And by taking all the laurel, duration, attack speed and ice beam upgrade along with firepower, death can be killed, and thus unlocking you a character to play with.

Honestly what this game highlights is how important build diversity in games is… having enough builds to play around with and create is allot of content even for an 8bit game

7:42 you could argue that games got more complex with more options to get points and thus higher highscores on average

Divide all the dmg in wow by 100 and also the HP of everything, will be the same, but lower number show "low dps" even if it still the same

My monkey brain says it's fun, so, it's fun, that's it, nothing more, nothing less.

You know, I'm actually glad that I played gacha games in the long run because I feel like I've gotten more control of my addictive compulsions. I've been playing them free for about a year or so now. That level scaling issue is one reason Morrowind is one of my favorite games. Walk into the wrong place at level 1, get knocked helplessly to your knees by a single dagger throw from a level 30 bandit. Conversely, in the endgame, as you're becoming a legend, you actually feel like one.

I also like how the enemies crumble to dust when they die. It looks so clean

in new RE it's called difficulty adjustment, and speedrunners take intentional hits to lower hp of bosses cause it turns out that animation of a bite is faster than going around and finding more bullets to kill boss

Architect of Games makes such good videos, glad Asmon started reacting to those. Hoping to see more of this

Ultimately I agree with the statement: it's what you learn in Psychology 101. Human beings have seemingly stupid, illogical subconscious biases and reactions and it takes a lot of effort to recognise and even more to counteract them... which is why the vast majority don't try.

When I was getting my BS in Game Design we were taught to not inflate numbers. IIRC the professor explained that inflating your numbers turns your game into a slot machine and draws focus away from the intended core mechanics of your game. As a designer we want players to interact with the designed moment-to-moment gameplay not loot boxes or number roulettes. It also makes high scores more impressive when you don't bloat your numbers. 1,000,000 doesn't seem that large when you are getting 10,000 to 50,000 points at a time, but if you are getting 50, 100, 250 at a time the million seems way more impressive.

3:15 same thing for Classic WoW with numbers. getting more spell power / attack power and actually feeling your damage increase is just a good feeling.

I love Vampire Survivors. It's the one game I always make sure I have at 100% achievements. If you guys like VS I highly recommend Boneraiser Minions. It's inspired by VS but instead of weapons you are a necromancer that raises an army of demons and skellies to kill the enemies. It is my favorite VS like for sure.

This guy actually found the longest way to say "Humans think numbers are neat."

19:20 Fun fact: Actually, games don't handle RNG with Randomness, it's actually called PRNG, Pseudorandom Number Generator. It's impossible to create a Random Number as nothing in our Universe is trully Random, as everything happens for a reason, so we just make numbers that look random (by being unpredictable) to the player but also fair, for example: from numbers 1 to 10 in 100 attempts, PRNG should give you around 10x of every number (10 ones, 10 twos, and so on...) but not always exactly that and also in an unpredictable order, otherwise it would be predictable. If you are good at logic, you can test that yourself by trying to create a formula which will always result in a Random Number every time. Spoiler: It's impossible, but you can get pretty interesting results that will fall into the category of Pseudorandomness.

I love using games to help me get into the zone I love the state of mind you hit when working with a skill set you know so well you can clear you head and just react correctly.

This gave me so much playtime and enjoyment completing its challenges for the 100% When the DLC came out I was more than happy to throw some money over for it It wasn’t breaking the bank, and I’ve got other games that never gave me as much value for money 💰

all the comments misunderstanding the video really speaks to the level of media comprehension the average twitch watcher has

Pinball machine Theatre of Magic is an example of the opposite. It gave so many points for actions that scores sort of felt meaningless. It was a weird thing cuz the inverse was true for some machines I used to play.

The only thing I can think of is in the DLC for the first dark souls game when you get to Chasm of the abyss and killing 1 humanity gives you only 20 souls when at that point in your gameplay you would need on average 40,000 souls just to level up again. Not to mention they have a lot of HP and there are dozens of them.

I’m 42 and have been playing games since I was 5…this is a great fresh approach to an old school game … all parts work together and it’s nice to not be killing people who look more real than real life

My favorite part of vampire survivors is when you fight the vampire. Such a good part that was built up so well

The Mario example is a terrible one, because when I played Mario as a kid, I didn't even pay attention to those numbers. The score meant literally nothing to me and had no impact on my enjoyment of the game.

I used to play Ragnarok Online which was MMORPG. And the numbers were there. I never realized it is part of the appeal. Like, of course, when you have your mage lvl 23 doing like 430 damage with your Fire Bolt and then you deal 1,7k later, it is pretty cool. But the fact that the numbers just fly from the monster like blood actually. I only noticed it with Jupitel Thunder I think where the damage was being dealt more than those 10 blasts from Cold Bolt for example.

By this logic any sport would also be boring. "Football/Soccer, a sport where two teams run around chasing a ball and try to shoot it into the opposing team's goal. That's it."

Oh yay, Asmon finally stumbled upon Architect of Games! He's got REALLY good quality videos, well researched, well articulated, well structured. Sometimes you might disagree with some points but if someone's 95%+ on the mark, then I'm happy to hear their opinion even if it differs from mine, since there's a chance that I'm also just looking at a particular topic with some of my own tunnel vision :D

I played Magic Survival(MS) before I played Vampire Survivors(VS), and I fell in love with the gameplay loop of MS with the various upgrades. They updated MS to be more like VS, and now I really dislike MS and see no real reason to play it over VS. They used to have it where every 3 levels you could choose a trait to add to your skills, and now it's like VS where there is a stat item that pairs with a skill to evolve it.

"There's no real difference in mobs." 100% untrue. Certain mobs can shoot projectiles, have different movement speeds/patterns, have special spawn conditions, some will move through walls, others explode, etc.

The game is a good time killer, glad I found it for mobile.

He was the guy in school that you asked "Hey, how are you today?" And instead of saying "Good, you?", he'd go on a 1 hour long rant about how the universe is meaningless and life is unfair.

death kill was pretty easy back in the days as well since the HP of the enemies scale with your level.

I love these character builder games so much. Been really addicted to "brotato" lately.

I love the vampire survivors clone Mystic survivors. The beautiful version not the other one. It is really fun and find myself spending hours on it for no real reason other than it is fun trying new combos of weapons and strats.

I don't care if someone things Vampire Survivors is considered a bad game or good game by others. I picked it up because it not only looked fun, but was fun. Might have lots of good points and have a very convincing argument, but it won't change my mind after the fact.

Don't know about those numbers thing... never impact me on any game, i even find it annoying at some point. The only good thing about it is that it gives the player an general idea of where we are in term of progression. It helps testing some builds and so on.

6:05, definitely pushing DPS numbers in PoE. At a certain point it really doesn't do much, but hell, I'll spend 3 days grinding and crafting just to squeeze out a little more DPS, even though everything pretty much dies in one hit already.

This game is so damn addictive ❤❤

Being upset about how fun something is, shows how British this man truly is.

By the time v1 of VS came out the 5-win chest definitely doesn't come up by force, it took me three or four fully won games to see one.

0.1 makes sense for multiplier bonuses, but a) these are mostly hidden b) even then, multiplier bonuses are often intuitively underrated ("it's just 5%").

vampire survivors gets hella boring after you get everything, just end up being you standing still while the bible kills everything

This is why I enjoy auto play mmorgps on mobile. They are literally the next generation of tower defense. I grew up loving tower defense games, adjusting my towers and positioning and sitting back to see what my decisions do to the waves of mobs. Auto afk mobile mmos are the same exact thing, except instead of a static map with towers, the towers "your character" goes out and explore the world, and you get to watch as your decisions on the character build have results and tweak them as needed.

interesting video. I personally turn hit numbers off when possible. I find the floating damage counters distracting

a yes the numbers of ammo in survivals... last of us on max dificult you can have around 3 to 7 sniper bullets always. or re 4, if you have magnum ammo you get less from other bullets. but they keep improving those stuff

The numbers don't matter to me in Vampire Survivors at all, I have never once looked at them. The popup is satisfying in that it shows you how deeply you're cleaving into a big mob for example, but it could be a bunch of 45 hits or it could be 2,300,000 hits, and it wouldn't matter... What matters in the progression of VS is the FEEL of what the upgrades do your you, shifting from making you run away and narrowly dodge through little gaps in enemies, progressing all the way to barreling through big mobs unphased or even clearing the entire screen while standing still.

Vampire survivors is a complete contrast to what game are today and a perfect representation of the core reason why we play games in the first place. Vampire survivors is fun, that's all it needs to be.

6:13 How about when in games you collect 1/6th of an upgrade or something like that, where a whole number goes for a complete "something" that you get and you collect them in increments

Well when it came to older games like pinball the numbers make sense because people competing for high scores was a thing and it still does for games like that but the other cases where it’s single player and there’s no high score competition then it doesn’t.

Bro I watched this video the other day while playing the dlc for vampire survivors for the first time and was like that was a stupid video and continued playing the absolute banger that has a stupid amount of more variables that make it great other than damage numbers.

@11:42 lol everyone was fixated on the mario example and tuned out the speaker XD

regarding the probability, its the reacon why Spotify shuffle isnt actually random because if it was random it would play the same song several times in a row or it would play the songs in order they were before shuffeling sometimes. they are altering it so it "feels" more random for human brain

*Making money is an action. Keeping money is a behavior, but to "Grow and invest your money rightly is WISDOM” My greatest happiness is the 90k 💵 profits I get every 21days from investments*

There is a setting on Diablo 3 which allows you to shorten the numbers being displayed, so you get a little of the vanilla WoW flashy big dick numbers as a 161 B, T, etc. Seeing only the first three numbers has a profound effect on damage increases compared to seeing the 12 digits or more.

I don't know if I care about high numbers as much as how fast things die and how effective my upgrade choices/luck of the draw are.

22:24 Civ games are a special case since the difficulty options effects how both you and the AI are playing with, either positively or negatively. If you slide the difficulty down as low as Settler, you will be given higher odds and better selections of locations, resources, etc. in the background, while the AI odds are set to neutral, or having an disadvantage at the start. On the other hand, Deity will revoke the bonuses of the odds and selections in the beginning of the game and hand them over to the AI instead, even though their algorithms will still use the same foundation for it's strategies and responses to you and the environment. Like if an AI is military heavy, they will play with the understanding of whether they have those bonuses or not, but still stick to the same goal. This has varied from game to game, especially in 4 through 6.

The damage numbers mean something in Disgaea though because you do have to keep grinding to do more damage and then maybe some day you can kill Baal. But probably not.

I'm able to play Vampire Survivors during online DND sessions and it actually helps me better pay attention to the session. Playing the game prevents me from zoning out but it also doesn't require the part of my brain that comprehends words so it doesn't interfere.

about the numbers thing.,i think a single digit number usually represent something rare, like lives, levels etc, making single digit numbers more meaningful in that sense.., but more digits gives more magnitude where ever

In Eve Online, the most basic descriptor of currency is a million ISK; a 'mill'. A few mill will let you fit out a T1 frigate. Building a Titan costs 160 BILLION and takes several months.

The upgrades and "reward" feeling is what keeps the game, add that with a semi automatic killing machine that you become then you have the perfect recipe

The number part is 100% true at least for me, in WoW I stopped having fun over the stats squish since I was doing smaller number than in MoP at level 100, it was the first time I actually quit playing WoW for more than a year until Legion came out. The bigger my character number are the more fun I have, but I also have to work to deserve those bigger number by making my character progress, so seeing that progress taken away with those dumb squish ruined the fun of the game even if technically nearly nothing changed.

It's comparable to those old arcade games you'd drop $25+++ on back in the day, it makes sense it works, brings back a good time where you'd hit the arcade with the boys and just game

18:51 can't believe I didn't realize it was Persona 5 until I saw the glass panel cheat

scaling is good but only if they upgrade the enemies equipment and model and make them look different.