So...to get into some inside baseball here, this is sort of what happened while balancing the game.
1) We made up some patterns/attacks/etc and balanced the game how we liked it. Challenging, but not impossible.
2) People outside of the dev team started playtesting it and the common consensus was: "this is the hardest game we've ever played". Like, "i'm dying 30 times on the first phase of the first boss" type of hard.
3) We didn't really want to make a game that so hard that NO ONE could enjoy it but the best of the best, so the idea was to keep that difficulty as "expert" and then tone down the bosses for an easier mode we would call "Normal". Because of the way Cuphead is designed, (discrete health, multiple boss phases with pattern timing and sequencing) we couldn't just give the bosses more health and do more damage. That would just make the bosses take longer, not actually be harder (think of something like a Mario level with tough jumps. You can't just give Mario more health to get past it, you have to redesign the jumps to be easier). So, we started clawing back some of the phases, changing the obstacle patterns, reducing the sequencing a bit, that sort of thing. We called this "Normal".
4) Well, people started playing Normal and said that it was still hard. But we didn't want to make Normal any easier. We were pretty convinced that any dedicated person could beat normal by paying attention and persevering. We had enough play testing to factor it being "Dark Souls"-hard or "Ori"-hard, once people got down the cadence of a run and gun game (which most people haven't played that much, so it takes a bit to get into -- hold that shoot button!). But, some people don't come to games to be challenged. Their base expectation is to be able to beat something their first try. Modern games have conditioned people to be that way and that's totally fine. It's just not the type of game we wanted to make. We also figured there would be people who would just want to take in the art or fiddle around. Phil Spencer himself said that it would be in our best interests to put in an Easy mode. So we did. It claws back even more boss attacks, slows down patterns, re-sequenced stuff again, and for most bosses, just chops off the end of the fight.
5) So all that is fine. But as we continued to refine, we found that we could fit ALL of the boss patterns into Normal with some tweaks. So we did. Because honestly, as a dev, you kind of want people to see your stuff. You want people to play the breadth of the content you created for your game, you don't just want to relegate so much of it to the best of the best. We also know that something like 95% of players play on Normal and that's it. So all of the attack animations (in the broadest sense) are in Normal now. They are retuned and re-timed to fit with that difficulty, but they are all there and are fun. It did make the game a hint harder (and we re-sorted the boss order so the harder ones are nearer the end), but we feel it's worth it.
6) So in the most explicit sense, Expert mode bosses no longer have "new" attacks. But they are differently sequenced, sped, timed, and bullet patterns are different. In general, on Expert, there are more things to keep track of simultaneously.
Being successful at Cuphead comes down to...well, it follows similarly to kinda playing fighting games. It's about reducing your
mental stack. Most people when they first play are just OVERWHELMED with what's happening and they panic. But your actual decision matrix can be reduced a ton with some on the fly thinking.
Cuphead was made to be reaction based rather than memory based. Aside from knowing the general form of attacks and what they look like, there's not a whole lot to memorize. It's not bullet hell, where you find the "safe spots" and weave your way through an impossible maze of bullets out of attrition. There's too much player-targeted and random-sequenced attacks for that (though I'm sure there'll be speed runners who will find that stuff eventually).
Anyway, I'm interested to see how it goes when it gets into a lot of people's hands.
