Balatro is the third roguelike where I surpassed 100 hours in playtime (the other two being Binding of Isaac and Slay the Spire). Needless to say, I really like this game.
However, Balatro isn't perfect. And while the game has a lot of amazing qualities, I noticed the game starts to show its cracks as you get into higher difficulties and 100% completion.
And normally, I don't focus on just the negatives. However, there are plenty of people that adore this game and have talked about its strengths. I figured y'all can forgive some criticisms. Plus, I am going through a 10+ losing streak on a Gold Stake run, and I need to vent.
I suppose that's a good segway.
By the way, I am writing this under the impression you have played a good chunk of Balatro. For that reason, I will be glossing over some of the nuances of Balatro's mechanics. Im not going to try to explain every little mechanic like interest, card types, and how useless Superposition is.
Now, for those who don't play Balatro, and for some reason ignored what I just said in the last paragraph, Balatro has an escalating difficulty settings where each setting adds an additional modifier. This culminates in Gold Stake where all the modifiers are active at once.
Now, as a fan of roguelikes, there are three things I look for when it comes to whether I enjoy a roguelike: It should give you interesting decision dilemmas. It should have a nice balance of preparation and improvisation. And most importantly, luck should have little impact on the outcome of the win condition.
Balatro, on lower difficulties, does all three magnificently. The fusion of the decision dilemmas of poker with roguelike elements is an inspired idea. The shop system is beautifully designed to create scenarios for players to prepare for future blinds and pivot to escape from sudden failure states. And with the additional modifiers of boss blinds and booster packs, you are giving a nice mixture of good luck and bad luck to play around.
On Gold Stakes, however, this uproots that balance and forces the player to rely on more luck dependent strategies.
On the surface, the conceit of Gold Stake is a nice way to test the player by throwing all the modifiers at once. And in the vacuum, the modifiers are interesting ways to make you adapt. Of those modifiers, the four most interesting ones are: Eternal Jokers which force players to keep the Joker for the rest of the run. Perishable Jokers which do the opposite, disabling the Joker after five rounds. The last Joker, the Rental Jokers, which deduct $3 from your wallet after every round. And finally, the first round of every ante offers no reward.
Individually, all of these modifiers are interesting. They either force you to be more conscientious on how you spend money and approach blinds, or they punish you for using situational builds which you shouldn't really be doing anyway.
With Gold Stakes, they dogpile all of these modifiers putting you at the mercy of the RNG. I feel this especially in the early game. When you start, you complete the first blind. And in the most ideal circumstance you will start out with $7* which allows you buy maybe two things in the first shop (*Yellow and Green Decks starts off with more due to their perk). Here are the most common scenarios I run into with the first shop:
1. You leave with no Joker.
Jokers are the most important resource in the game. However, very few Jokers work well by themselves. You can say they are synergy reliant. This means you want a Joker that has a scaling effect or are just good by themselves (like Stuntman or Shoot the Moon). Some players advise just picking a lesser Joker than can at least hold you over until you find something better, but I feel Gold Stakes discourages that. You hate to commit to a run only to find that run won't give you the time of day. You might as well reset until you get a decent one. Why bother committing to a weak early game in hopes for a better late game. At the end of the day, you are still relying on luck.
2. You cripple your economy with a Rental Joker or bad investment.
Money is the second most important resource in the game. The main importance comes from its ability to reroll shops and opening booster packs. They are in essence your way to fight against the luck of the game.
However, you get very little money early on especially with the small blind modifier. The problem is you also need to accumulate money since you gain more through interest. This means you aren't buying or rerolling to get the right Jokers. So again, you can commit to saving money and get fucked later on by bad rerolls and Jokers. Or, you can reset again and again for something decent so you can properly bolster your economy in the early game.
And all of this is only the problem because the margin for error with Gold Stakes is very small. You have to score higher than usual. The modifiers make some Jokers more unviable, harming your chances of getting something good from the shop.
It creates a very reset heavy roguelike, and it makes the early game of Gold Stakes a fucking slog.
And oh yeah, the 100% requires you beat Gold Stakes with every Joker card. Some of these jokers are extremely rare. In other words, good luck grinding this tedious shit out.
I suppose the question is how can we maintain the intended difficulty of Gold Stake while not making the early game so tedious?
For one, I feel the reroll should be retooled to be cheaper in the early game and more expensive in the late game. Rerolls are basically unusable in the early game since you have so little money. I think at least for the first ante, rerolls should start off at $2. To balance this, you can make it progressively more expensive as the ante grows.
I also think Rental Jokers needs to be retooled. While Eternal and Perishable Jokers have drawbacks, they don't cripple your early game as much as Rental Jokers do. I think Rental Jokers should function like Perishables. Starting off as free, but become a financial cost after a few rounds. You can make it more expensive to make this debuff more of a punishment. This makes Rental Jokers less frustrating in the early game when you have less money while still keeping their intended difficulty intact.
I also think more interesting skip rewards wouldn't be remiss. Some of them are outright bad in Gold Stakes such as one free Uncommon or Rare since they are still capable of being debuffed by the Joker modifiers. Here are a handful of suggestions: Vouchers are half off. Boss Blinds are debuffed for one turn. A virtual Masseuse that comes by and gives your player character a massage while you play like they do in some casinos.
I also think adding a button where the boss blind gets an additional modifier in exchange for a special award would be great. Beyond spectral packs, there aren't that many high risk high reward situations, and those are my favorite aspects of a rogue like. I would like to see more of that in Balatro.
Of course, I say all of this not knowing whether these ideas or similar ideas were tested or considered during the development of the game. For all I know, this is about as good as the dev could make it without compromising the difficulty.
I want to say again that Balatro is a great game. However, the Gold Stakes early game keeps me from considering this as one of my favorite games. I hope in future updates that Gold Stakes gets refined further to allow just that little bit of flexibility.
No comments:
Post a Comment