From an infamous data-mining incident, to changing the soundtrack in the remake, to a mini-DLC being compared to a popular fan remake, The Binding of Isaac has its share of fandom splits.
- Rebirth caused one initially from fans who didn't like the idea of rereleasing the game instead of getting more content and drastically changing the art style, but this one died off pretty quickly when Edmund mentioned that because BoI was made in flash, the game simply couldn't handle more content being added while still functioning. The trailers and screenshots that have shown the new synergy between items that formerly had none (like Loki's Horns + Mom's Knife) has silenced the detractors even further.
- The different soundtracks between the original game and Rebirth have divided the fanbase considerably. Some people like the electronic songs of the original + Wrath of the Lamb because it's what they grew up with or were first exposed to. Others like the darker ambiance and the new direction of the soundtrack of Rebirth. Although one thing that's near-universally agreed on is that Rebirth's theme for The Chest, "Sketches of Pain
" is awesome (especially since the theme in the original was just the normal boss theme.) - The super secret in Rebirth, The Lost, a Hidden Character. Hoo boy. What happened is that the game's creator put in a riddle that he anticipated would take months or even years for the whole community to solve. It was actually cracked in the week following the game's release, with the aid of people extracting data from the game's files and executablenote . This prompted the creator to angrily admonish the fans for ruining the riddle and announce that there will be no more such secrets in future expansions to Rebirth. There are many ways people are split over this:
- Was the creator's reaction justified? He and the developers put lots of effort to ensure that the riddle would not be solved accidentally, but still accessible with the hints delivered in-game, and would be a fun experience for people to solve together. People then circumvented all that and just read the solution from the files. Or perhaps the backlash was childish, punishing the whole community for the deeds of a single data miner (with whom most of the fans were angry as well). Besides, the creator has grossly overestimated the time it would take for a huge fanbase to solve the riddle together, despite this happening time and time again in Alternate Reality Games.
- How much the spoilers extracted from files actually helped solve the riddle. The general consensus seems to be that the riddle was already about 80% solved and would have been solved anyway in a couple of days at most, since the community had all the pieces and just needed to put them together. But there are claims that people only started getting hints after the first detail (that the solution has something to do with dying in a certain way) was discovered by looking at the game files. And regardless of that, some people say that the community circumvented most of the riddle anyway, since they were using cheats to immediately test out various circumstances instead of waiting for them to happen naturally in the game as was intended.
- It's highly controversial that the creator, despite wanting it to be an elusive secret, made unlocking it into an achievement. A secret achievement, but there are legitimate ways of looking at those on pretty much all of the game's distribution platforms. And not only that, but there are other achievements, and even in-game items, that require unlocking the super secret. At this point, people who were not interested in the riddle but just wanted to have 100% completion decided that anything goes, which might have prompted the data mining.
- Some say that it's a good thing that the creator will not be putting any more secrets like this into his games, because it was a poorly designed mess. It required way too much effort to be solved by any one person, so people not interested in the community (and this is primarily a single player game) or just left out of the loop at the exact time where fandom was working on the riddle would have no way of unlocking the secret (and any further items) other than just looking up the answer online. And there's the fact that while putting together clues may be fun, the unlocking itself requires a lot of time even if one knows all the steps and is a painfully boring, RNG-dependent grind that requires dying to certain enemies with certain characters in certain order (and dying in any but the right way will reset the sequence), which is completely unnatural and simply not a fun way to play the game.
- The Lost unlocking requirement was changed; all you have to do is hold a Missing Poster and die in a sacrificial room so you resurrect as The Lost. Needless to say, a lot of people are happy they changed the method, while others are pissed because now you can play with other characters, get super strong, and intentionally become The Lost before fighting the achievement-unlocking bosses, making the entire challenge of playing with him pointless. Either way, nobody likes how the devs did such a huge change without warning the players.
- Afterbirth got hit with a double whammy on November 4, 2015:
- On that day, a patch was released that severely nerfed Azazel and Lilith, more than halving the range and damage of the former's Brimstone laser, and doubling the recharge time of the latter's Box of Friends — although Edmund has since admitted that the Azazel nerf was a bit too harsh.
- The reveal that the patch added in new items that were supposed to already be ready at launch also caused some major outrage. Due to the fact that this patch went live exactly 109 hours after release, which was exactly the amount of time it took dataminers to unlock The Lost and the maximum value you can reach on the Greed mode donation machine, a fair few people believe that this is a form of petty revenge on Ed's part against the dataminers that he's taking out on the entire community, although Edmund has since stated that he has no ill-will towards the dataminers and that the items were missing due to an odd bug that he hadn't realized until a few days before the patch.
- And the game still doesn't have all the 120 new items after the 11/04 patch. Is Edmund lying about it to cover his "revenge"? Is the DLC simply not completed yet he released it anyways just to get Halloween sales while patching the missing content in and pretending an ARG is in effect to try and cover this up? Or is it really a bug and people should calm down since that kind of thing is normal during game release? He said "We weren't aware of the missing items" and that the bug happened due to "a thing" he can't talk about.
- Edmund confirmed on Twitter that the ARG is officially over and the full DLC is in game, the +120 items include the trinkets and co-op babies. Depending on who you ask, the ARG was either very fun, Edmund did a great job and the DLC is great, or the ARG was poorly done since many people didn't care, Edmund is an egoist for having locked content out for people that had nothing to do with this, and the DLC was underwhelming.
- Greed Mode, especially as of its post-patch post-ARG incarnation, rubs quite a few people the wrong way.
- To start, a lot of content is locked behind the "Greed Machine" found after completing any Greed Mode run. In order to unlock everything, including what was "unlocked" by the ARG, the player must donate a whopping 1,000 pennies to the machine. While that would be about 10 runs or so, the machine has a chance to jam every time you put a penny in. For every five cents you've donated total, the chance to jam increases by one percent, and each character has their own percentage. While the intent seems to have been to encourage switching characters, in practice it just lengthens what was already an unfun grinding experience. What makes it worse is that the only real "breaking" method is to use the Glowing Hourglass to constantly reset the fight so the player can donate... one cent. Without a Chaos Card, the player will have to fight Ultra Greed, an incredibly long fight, for hours. Greed Mode is seen as either a fun diversion, or a horribly balanced inclusion into the game. A recent update rebalanced the jamming mechanic, causing the percentage to rise much slower than before. Needless to say, there has been less criticism as of late.
- Greed Mode's final boss, Ultra Greed. His main gimmicks are his scaling health and dropping coins that affect the fight in various ways. While most people agree the concept is very fun, some people find his fight incredibly tedious, especially when you have to repeat it so many times. One patch gave him a ridiculous buff, doubling the health of the coins, and ramping up his health to an absurd degree, to the point where a character can be too powerful to ''damage'' him. Even after he was toned back down, fans were not pleased to find out that one of the donation rewards is "Everything is Harder 2", which buffs him again, and is very low on the list of donation rewards.
- The Stopwatch nerf — instead of permanently slowing everything down, it now procs on taking damage and the slowdown effect lasts for a single room. It's either a welcome change to an instant-win pick-up, or a pointless alteration turning an item that takes time and effort to unlock into something not worth bothering with. Additionally, it was still in the "special item" pool for a while post-nerf, which meant seeing it lowered the likelihood of getting another OP item. The outrage has died down a bit now that the Stopwatch is no longer a special item, and also triggers upon activating Holy Mantle.
- Item nerfing in general. Is it welcome to help balance the game, or is it unnecessary in a singleplayer game with no meta?
- Afterbirth+ is this, especially in comparison to the well-received Antibirth Fan Sequel. The additions the mini-DLC brought is argued to be underwhelming, with a Difficulty Spike that falls toward It's Hard, So It Sucks! territory, on top of having a Disappointing Last Level. Others argue that the DLC itself wasn't the main focus, but the mod tools, but the quality of said tools are also debatable. Supporters of the DLC argue that people were expecting too much out of it, along with a Vocal Minority of people who actually liked the higher difficulty.
- On the topic of Afterbirth+, the True Final Boss of the expansion. Depending on who you ask, it's either a fun and challenging boss with a unique design and gimmick or accused of having a lazy and uninspired design and a fight laden with Fake Difficulty.
- While many are very happy that The Binding of Isaac: Antibirth is going to be a canonical part of the game with the announcement of Repentance, many were not happy with Edmund McMillen's decision to have Ridiculon make new music for the expansion rather than going with Mudeth's music. Edmund himself stated that he liked Mudeth's music, but that he wanted to stay with Ridiculon to maintain musical consistency. Mudeth himself stated that he planned to make new tracks for the new stages and release the soundtrack as a mod, however, which helped a bit.
- There is also the matter that some of Mudeth's tracks ( the Secret Room theme for example) borrow leitmotifs from Danny's soundtrack from the original Flash game, which would obviously be a sticky situation due to legal reasons.
- The new boss added in Booster Pack 5, The Matriarch, is easily one of the most polarizing bosses in the entire game. People can't agree on whether she's a perfectly fair boss who brings some refreshing and much-needed difficulty to the Womb's lackluster boss pool, an unfair bullet hell who has way to many convoluted and screen-filling attacks for the player to handle on more lackluster builds, or whether she's fine as-is but would be better off in a large room similar to Mr. Fred.
- Repentance introduces some massive balance changes, which have so far been very controversial. These involve nerfing a lot of fan-favourite items like Brimstone, Guppy and Tech X while buffing bad items like Brother Bobby and Holy Water. Some fans say that these changes were necessary to stop Game Breakers from making the game too easy and to make every win feel deserved. However, others say they take a lot of fun out of the game and make every run too similar, as every item is now supposed to be more or less equally good, and that there's no point in nerfing items in a single-player game where the chances of encountering any one given item is a huge Luck-Based Mission.
- Another item change that has upset a lot of people is the change to Satanic Bible, originally per use it gave you a full black heart, making it a very useful item like Book of Revelations, however with the DLC it makes it so that it forces the boss and item room item to be a devil deal upon use. On one hand defenders have said you can simply wait till you beat the boss to use it with no consequence while detractors have stated that it still makes it just one use per floor in that respect, turning one of the most useful active items much more situational.
- The Tainted characters in general. On one hand people think they introduce very interesting ways of playing the game in alternative ways and can be very entertaining and broken in their own right, while detractors feel that they for the most part are unfinished and horribly unbalanced, either in their favor (like Tainted Cain, Tainted Samson, and Tainted Lilith) or horribly against them (Tainted Lost, Tainted Jacob, and especially Tainted Lazarus).
- Tainted Cain especially brings a lot of discourse, as his unique gimmick almost completely changes the game. Many players love Cain's ability to turn pickups into items, while others hate the fact that this means you cannot pick up any items outside of a few progression based exceptions. Many players have found themselves walking into game breakers such as Sacred Heart, Cricket's Head and Psy Fly, but found themselves unable to use them, with the items breaking down into pickups upon walking into the pedestal. His recipe rework broke the base a bit more, as some relied on the set recipes to circumvent the difficulty of the character, while others liked the fact that it brought him more replay value and gave him the element of randomness that pedestal items had.
