u/itsdoorcity

I see comments constantly that are some variation of "why does it upset you if the game has easy options" or "returnal enjoyers need saros to be hard to have a sense of superiority over the casuals who couldn't beat phrike"

none of this is true.

as someone who adored returnal, I didn't think it was particularly hard (except those drones in biome 3 at launch, fuck those things). if you play the game the way it was designed to be played it was IMO quite easy, but it still kept you on the edge of your seat because there was real risk to dying and going back several hours. At the same time, there was enough meta progression that nothing was truly wasted, you always got SOMETHING even if not a lot.

but I think that having a game with no difficulty options often is a better experience because you have 1 well defined experience that the development team has poured tens of millions of dollars and thousands of man hours into planning, building, testing and playing. the game ends up being balanced around one experience and that is objectively the best way to play that game because it's the only way.

adding in difficulty options inherently dilutes that.

now, before you get out your pitchforks, I completely understand that it's better from many angles if the game is more accessible and more palatable to a wider audience, and I genuinely agree with that. however I still think it should be clearer what the original challenge level is meant to be because that's going to be the most refined and the most intended experience by the creators, and then add in options to make it easier if necessary.

I think Hades does this well: you can progress through the entire game on God mode and lose nothing, but outside of that the game gets very challenging but gives you enough progression that you want to keep playing on regardless of whether you died or not. IMO Hades is the GOAT roguelite and when I saw the carcosian modifiers I thought Housemarque took a lot of inspiration from Hades and that it could give even more longevity to the game than Returnal had (I personally never played again after beating the final act).

In reality it looks like the game has genuinely just been watered down to accommodate the casual crowd. People saying "just raise the modifiers to make the game intentionally harder for yourself" are not seeing the full picture and not understanding the appeal of an intended challenge. if I wanted to raise the difficulty of any game I could do that without any settings. I could play with my eyes closed. I could play with my feet. I could do any number of things but unless the game has built in incentives am I going to bother with that? will I really be on the edge of my seat, hearing my heartbeat pounding in my ear when I'm near death if I know that I can just pause the game, move a slider and have no more fear? no way! they did this with ghost of yotei and rather than knock my head against a wall for hours against the samurai at the top of Mt yotei I just lowered the difficulty so I could move on, because I HIGHLY doubt many of even the devs that built it were even able to beat that guy on lethal difficulty (compared to GoT where the whole game was tough on Lethal but ultimately just an enjoyable challenge, but they didn't build 10 sliders for me to customise every aspect of the difficulty back then). you might think this is silly but I guarantee you 90% of saros are going to do the same thing here, there will be no more "I beat phrike!" celebration posts because literally anyone can beat any boss without having to rise to any challenge, AND those of us capable of beating said boss at a challenging level probably won't have that experience either unless we decide to just replay it later on but by making it harder for ourselves. this isn't a great outcome.

from many accounts, the people who enjoyed the challenge of returnal are right to be disappointed with this new casual-first approach. I don't want to raise modifiers purely so that the game takes longer for me to beat, I want to feel the satisfaction of besting a challenging, intended experience. based especially on /u/baraka_obama's review it sounds like the game has been made so easy that it's barely even a challenge anymore (permanent stat unlocks + easy modifiers + level select), and that IS disappointing no matter how much the easy crowd won't allow us to say that.

i don't want to gimp my own experience by raising modifiers with literally nothing to show for it, but it seems like with saros we will have to - and I'm sick of being told that it's a viable solution to the change in overall difficulty.