Misery, I side with Chemical art here.
My opinion : people that claim to want challenge are also strong-headed, never stop beating the bushes and are generally noisy. Therefore they hog the forums, never stopping to make their opinion known... but in the end... Most players don't even get to the forum and for all I can tell, love the base game with no additions. Because mods download numbers are way way below game sales quantity.
I don't think that the silent majority has your point of view. They want a game that's enjoyable, and easy game can be enjoyable (Mario ? Diablo ?).
About the AAA market, it's boring "to you" but you're the minority actually. Otherwise it would not be the AAA market. It'd be an indy market.
SR's mistakes were no meta progression, too hard, genre completely saturated, no PR (not that the PR for raptor was better), bad reviews (I'll get to that in a moment). Game itself is nice and plays well, with good controls.
About the reviews, have you even read them ? How many, 90% are from Arcen's forum ? Felt that way at start. It looked like someone paid fans to write them. There were few if any "independant" reviews there at start. I think that must hurt the game the most. I mean I go there, I look at reviews, I see "fanboy review, fanboy review, fanboy review..."... Also, the fuss that people on the forum have made by responding to the first negative review ? Come on people. That was an horrible idea. That repulsed me.
Actually, I mostly ignored reviews from Arcen's community. No offense to anyone here of course, but while those are nice they're also not as helpful, they're most likely to be biased. That, and for pretty much everyone that fits into that category, I'd already gotten a whole lot of feedback from them in the game's beta phase. The reviews would have just reiterated on that.
That being said though, we seem to have more then the usual amount of community members that absolutely will say they don't like something if that's the case. The really honest sort. Though, again, I'd already heard stuff from them on the forums here; none of that would have been new. Just reiteration. Though again, any reviews from anyone were still appreciated.
In other words, I was never concerned about the reviews, really. And one way or another, this is a genre I understand *a lot* about (stepping away from just Isaac here). I've played... most of the games in this genre. I've beaten most of them. And this genre is made of two other genres that, for about a decade, have been my core focus as gaming goes. I know the part of the audience that I'm speaking of. All of these things are the reason why I, someone with zero development experience aside from TLF's expansion (where I just designed Obscura patterns and balanced ship stats, and considering what TLF is that's not even remotely a big thing in it) was brought into this project at all. Outside of balance issues... which I absolutely expected would happen from day 1 (and which is also totally fine)... if there was something genuinely wrong with the game from the point of view that this side of the audience was coming from, I'd have spotted it (and the one thing that DID go wrong, the hitbox size, was indeed changed). I'm a very negative person and tend to be extremely critical of my own designs (hell, the enemies/bosses that I REALLY don't like in the game are all my own fault); I'm not immune to my own hate, is an unpleasant way to put it. Though obviously I don't consider high difficulty to be an issue, but then... neither does the subset of players I represent, which is the subset that many decisions within this game were designed to attract.
As for that bit about the response to a review.... I *think* I know which one you're talking about. I don't remember who else jumped in on that one, but I remember my own reasons for it, and frankly, have snapped at people about OTHER games too for those same reasons; I don't reserve stuff like that just for favorite developers like Arcen. The issue though was that my connection to the game should have stopped me from doing that; but as it's an oooooold habit, it happened anyway. Not long after I basically decided "You know what... screw it. Making ANY response wether positive or negative on a review is just asking for derp", and simply stopped.
Regardless though, meta progression of the type you guys bring up simply was not going to happen here. Again, EVEN ISAAC DOESNT DO IT. And even I consider Isaac to be my favorite of this genre; yes, moreso than SR. Doesn't matter that I worked on SR: Isaac is still my personal fave, probably always will be. But the point is, even that game, seen as the best of the best, has no stat-based meta progression.
Now, if you very specifically and ONLY mean UNLOCK-based meta progression... THAT is a different story. Though, as Chris pointed out elsewhere, we simply didn't have enough items in the game to do this. Isaac does it, a lot, but then Isaac has a deeply absurd number of items in it... and that's NOT counting things like consumables. But in SR? We had nowhere near a number that would have allowed us to do that in a satisfactory way. Which, again, is one thing I rather regret, even though I don't like unlocks myself.
But that other type of meta-progression absolutely was not happening.
What? Meta progression is the bane of roguelikes and "challenge-likes" games. If this game had meta progression it would either a) start out WAY too freaking hard or b) be so laughably easy in the end that you wouldn't want to play it. Instead you know exactly what to expect every time you start a new game, randomness notwithstanding and that is exactly how a game like this should be.
Exactly. That "laughably easy in the end" is exactly why that idea is so loathed (and I don't mean by me), and why it was not going to happen in this game. That's basically my entire point summed up without my rambling, hah.
Also I can't really understand the "too hard" bit. On normal this game is fair and reasonable and completely beatable after 5-10 games once one starts to get the hang of pattern learning and movement. This coming from a guy who never plays shmups or bullet hells normally. On hard the game very much is hard, but that's why it's called "Hard".
Aye, to a degree this is true. Normal mode is not balanced just by me, definitely not. That's the mode where Chris checked it over himself, (as did the others, everyone really) to make sure that it was at a level he thought it should be at. Many things I made were toned way the heck down for that mode. Hard mode, on the other hand, is my doing. But it's not intended that players START on hard unless they're already experts in the genre. It's meant for those that feel they've absolutely mastered normal mode. Normal mode, to most, seems doable, as you say here.
Though, even that is quite subjective. I still know people that think Normal is impossible. Even the earliest bosses.
Which I guess brings up a sticky issue with ALL of this: There's just no way to take a game like this and get the difficulty so that it's JUST RIGHT for everyone. It cant be done. There's ALWAYS going to be people that it's too hard for, or people that it's too easy for. This is what the difficulty modes are for (more casual players are meant to pick the lower ones) but a lot of people seem to have issues with the idea of picking the lower ones, so.... they just don't. I can understand that. The point is, we tried to make sure there was a wide range of challenge levels available here, but it's always going to be too extreme towards either end for some. There's ALWAYS going to be frustrated players with a game like this. Always. I hate that that has to be the case with this genre, but.... like I said, Isaac isn't immune to that too, and it's on the top of the pile, even to me.