Enter the Gungeon is planning a new update next month.

This is the second major update to the game, and it seems explicitly intended to make the game more accessible. I think this is a very good thing and hope other games in the genre take note.

Quote:

Our primary focus was to make the Gungeon a more generous place, while retaining options, for players who really engage with the difficulty of the game.

If you tried Gungeon in the past and found it too hard, too stingy, or too slow- this update will be the version for you. If you liked it just the way it was, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered as well.

I count myself as someone who really enjoys the core gameplay loops of Enter the Gungeon but found it a little too difficult and stingy to truly hook me. I have played it off and on since I bought it for PS4 back in April 2016, and I've gotten enough use out of it that I don't regret the purchase, but I haven't come close to beating it and I haven't gotten that deep into its more complex systems, mostly because I find it both A) frustratingly difficult at times and B) too reliant on RNG. Frankly speaking, a run in Enter the Gungeon can be either amazing or frustrating depending on whether you get decent weapons in the first few chambers. You can beat bosses with the starting guns, but it requires a lot more precision and is a lot less fun than if you get one of the more powerful or at least entertaining weapons to play with.

I'm not alone. Enter the Gungeon's trophy information shows that something like 10% of players who start the game actually finish it even once, and as for the post-game challenges etc... they all have strikingly low completion rates. Under 1% of the gamers who buy this game get the platinum, which is very low for a game as good as Enter the Gungeon. (By comparison 4% of players have the Plat on Enter the Gungeon on Truetrophies.com, while 26% have it for Dark Souls. So yeah.) And Enter the Gungeon is very very good. It has responsive gameplay, visually pleasing graphics, lots of fun puns and comedy, and just generally feels polished to a sheen, unlike many Indie games that ship with rough edges.

It's just too damned difficult.

The combination of the reliance on RNG and the VERY high grind factor (each boss drops 1 or 2 pieces of currency and each unlock, of which there are hundreds, can cost as much as 8, and the unlocks just populate items into the dungeon, they don't actually guarantee you'll EVER see them) mean that people play the game, enjoy its polish, and then move on without seeing a lot of the content they paid for.

A lot of other roguelikes are similar. Rogue Legacy, which admittedly has been on Playstation Plus, skewing the numbers, shows only 13.6% of players have beaten the last boss, let alone done the optional content. A lot of other Roguelikes are the same way. They are too difficult for the playerbases they are attracting. I did finish Rogue Legacy but not Flinthook, which is another roguelike I really enjoyed playing but fell off of because I wasn't making enough progress.

There are some people who will read all this and say "Good! These games should be hard to finish!" My response is...grow up. Games, like any other form of media, should meet their audience where they are. While you're never going to have everyone who plays your game finish it, the goal should be that at least 60% do. Having games where almost nobody gets to the end means A) you're spending money creating content that most of your customers just won't see and B) you're creating something that dissatisfies your customers before they're done with it. Both are bad.

And in the case of roguelikes it's often the curve that's the problem. Could I get good enough at Enter the Gungeon to beat it? I absolutely think so. I can pretty reliably get to the third floor and I've been to the fourth and bosses get easier as you see them more and learn their patterns. But the grind and the feeling of lack of progress makes this experience not all that fun. It's made worse by the fact that the shortcut guy's costs are outrageous (for a shortcut to floor 3 he wants 3 pieces of armor at once, which is EXTREMELY RNG reliant and requires near perfect play to boot) and that you can have runs where you play for 20 minutes without getting 1 good gun. It's frustrating and annoying and it's, frankly, bad design. An easier more generous version of this game would be a BETTER version of this game. I'm glad they're making one.

Don't make me waste my time practicing over and over just to see the base content in the game. I don't find it fun, and the trophy information shows that MOST people don't find it fun. It's design that appeals to a few hardcore fans (who are disproportionately concentrated in the game development and media community) and alienates far too many.

But what's to be done about those hardcore fans? Shouldn't there be games for them too?

Yes, of course, but there are lots of ways to make games that appeal to both the hardcore and the more casual. Difficulty levels can help with this. Optional content either during or after the game can provide different challenge levels (and Enter the Gungeon has a bunch of this, even though its base critical pathway is too difficult for most of its players.) DLC focused on just the hardcore can work. And of course the occasional game that's focused on just the masochistic (or hyper skilled) audience is fine. But a whole genre being focused on them is a bad idea, and Enter the Gungeon seems to recognize that it pitched itself at a level where its audience can't meet it.

As gamers get older a bunch of things happen. A) Their reflexes slow. Not so much that they can't play games anymore, but enough that games on the higher difficulty curve become less accessible. B) They have less time to play. That means less time to learn a game and grind it out. C) They have more money. That means a lot of things, but among them is they have less patience for a game that doesn't feel rewarding.

Game designers (many of whom are single people in their 20s and early 30s) should recognize their audience and build games appropriately. And then they can add stuff to challenge and engage the most hardcore. But if 90% of the people who were interested enough in your game to buy it don't end up finishing it, you done messed up.

Roguelikes as a genre have done messed up. To the point where many people don't even want to deal with them anymore. Part of it is about the nature of the genre (which prizes replay value over the quality of the experience of each run) but I think part of it is the difficulty too. Who wants to buy a game when they know they'll likely fall off halfway through?

Kudos to Enter the Gungeon for trying to address this problem. I hope more games in the genre do so moving forward.

Note: Every time I post something like this a bunch of people from the "I like games hard and I don't care about other people's experience" school show up. Okay fella, good for you. I feel like I've addressed that point so if you want to make it please engage with the argument that games can be built for both the mainstream and harcore audiences through optional content/difficulty levels/targeted DLC. Also, every time I say games are too tough, and bring up objective data to support it, I am told to Git Gud. I love that and its very constructive, so please let me know I need to Git Gud in the responses.

This makes me happy. I was very much into Rogue Legacy when Enter the Gungeon came out, so I bought it, but never started playing partly due to needing a break from rogue-likes and partly due to hearing that it was particularly stingy and random. I was turned off Spelunky due to its randomness and stinginess. Rogue Legacy, I felt like I was making some progress every run. So many Spelunky runs just left me salty after some random shit occurrence killed me. Anything that puts Enter the Gungeon closer to the Rogue Legacy end of the rogue-like spectrum is good in my book.

I mean, I agree with you for the most part but at the same time I've played and failed to complete a whole bunch of these roguelikes and never once thought I didn't get my money's worth. I played them a bunch and enjoyed the time I spent with them and moved on when I had enough. In some cases I've even gone back to them a while later and gotten back into them and finished them off.

I guess what I'm saying is that I agree that figuring out ways to make them more accessible is probably a good thing but I also don't think that where the genre is right now is that much of a problem.

Also, the name of the Gungeon update made me think of Community and now I want to go re-watch some Community.

@imhungry: I'm not saying that I've never enjoyed a roguelike even if I didn't beat it. I explicitly said I like Enter the Gungeon even though it's too hard, and Flinthook too. There are others I don't like partially because they're too hard (I am sure I will be attacked for this, but I just don't really like Binding of Isaac, even though I have tried it on multiple platforms) but I can definitely enjoy a game even if it's too difficult for me.

On the other hand, I would like the games more if they were more rewarding, and I actually think it is a problem for the genre, because I know other people who are being pushed away by the situation. You never want someone to see your game and think "Well it looks good, but it's going to be frustrating and I'm never going to finish it..."

A lot of people are souring on roguelikes and it's partially because they're so tough they just become repetitive and annoying and frustrating. If the genre wants to keep an audience beyond its hardcore fans, it needs to be more accessible.

Enter the Gungeon is full of great puns and very high quality writing. It has some of the best comedy flavor text out there, and a ton of really fun joke guns (like a barrel that shoots fish, and a mailbox gun that shoots letters but also has one package in the clip that acts like a rocket.) If you like the title of this update you will probably like a lot of the writing in the game.

@bigsocrates: I had this same issue with FTL (over reliance on RNG) which made me really sad because it was basically a near-perfect Starfleet Battles video game, but without the license. I've never completed more than a quarter of the unique quests, and I've always had to play the game on Easy (which just adds more generous loot tables).

I do agree that roguelikes need to to put more and more focus on accessibility. It's fine to have the super hard modes for that crowd, but I'm glad the Enter the Gungeon devs were able to strike this balance.

This was a good, interesting read until I got to the grow up part. Seems needlessly antagonistic...

Since 2012, almost all of my gaming time has been devoted to finding a game as good as Spelunky. Looking at new game releases, if I don't see the phrases "Rogue", "Procedurally generated", or "Permadeath" on the page, I close it. I've spent hundreds of hours bashing my head against a wall in dozens of games. I want to feel exactly how Spelunky made me feel.

Spelunky is hard. Objectively, I can see that. Though at this point, after hundreds of hours, all but a few challenges in the game are pretty trivial to me personally. But Spelunky is and always will be just as hard as the very first time I tried it. The only thing that changed was that I got better at playing it. That's the kind of game design I'm looking for. I want a game that feels brutally unfair when I start playing it. But, as I play it more and more and understand the systems and mechanics, I understand that it's not unfair, it's just unforgiving of mistakes. Mistakes you can learn to avoid. When I buy a new Rogueish game, if I make any significant progress on my first, or even my first couple of tries, I feel like my time is being wasted. This game isn't pushing me to learn it.

I'm only speaking about my own preferences here. Obviously more options for more people are better. But I think a game has to be designed around the kind of difficulty curve I'm looking for from the beginning. Adding in a more accessible option after the fact is great. But if the game were designed with both options in mind from the beginning, I'd wonder how many developers would focus on the easier mode, then add more health to the enemies, say it's Rogue mode and call it a day.

Ah, maybe I'll be able to get past the third floor now...

@luchalma: I was not saying that people who like hard games should grow up. Like what you like. I just can't stand gaming 'elitists' who moan because games are more accessible. They don't exist too much at Giant Bomb but they're out there. That's who the comment was directed at.

As for the substance of what you said...I wouldn't worry too much. I think that the people making roguelikes are very much like you. They want the same things that you want. They will continue designing games that you want to play. But I disagree that you can't make games like you're talking about more accessible.

How? There are a bunch of ways.

1) Put in an "Adventurer's mode" with double the health. Health is the easiest mechanism you can use to make games more accessible because it permits more mistakes. Spelunky but you start with 6 hearts is easier, but it's still fundamentally the same game. And you can make it clear through the menu that it's meant to be played with 3 hearts. Hide a secret ending in that mode, put special achievements/trophies there, whatever. Offer the 6 heart mode but push towards the 3 heart mode.

2) Optional areas that push you harder than the main game. Both Spelunky and Enter the Gungeon have these, though they are already tough main games. This is less ideal than option 1 because it means the hardcore player still has to go through the content they don't like as much, but it can still offer that burning challenge.

3) Some kind of easy mode with special items or whatever that make the game easier. This is similar to 1 (though harder to balance) but would work. You can even hide this mode behind a certain number of failures (the way some old games used to offer you an easy mode if you died a lot.)

I really don't think you have to worry about roguelike designers making the "easier" version first and then making the hard mode an afterthought. It's clear that what THEY want to play are the harder modes. But accessibility can be designed after the core game. The alternative is if the masses (the 90% who never finished Enter the Gungeon) stop buying roguelikes then the hard core will have many fewer to play. If the masses are financially supporting the genre the genre should be designed to give them a good time too.

I think a decent example of this is Galak-Z. That game was too difficult, turned people off, didn't sell well, and they didn't even end up finishing it. That's the risk you take when game design is inaccessible.

Great! I bought Gungeon on a whim back when it was released, enjoyed it then fell off because I hardly ever got farther than floor 4. I also "messed up" and fixed the elevatir way to early, wich bummed me out.