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.