Quote Originally Posted by Issaella View Post
So it's fine to take Unreal away from me by massively increasing the difficulty, because I'm a filthy scrub who doesn't want to feel like they are taking a 3h organic chemistry final just to complete it?
I think the key issue here is that you're treating "Unreal" as though it is meant to be a difficulty level, akin to Extreme or Savage. It is not.

(Not, of course, that the game is always entirely consistent from fight to fight within a difficulty level even if it were, but I digress.)

I know this has been repeated multiple times already in this thread, but I'm going to come at the explanation from a slightly different angle.

Think instead of the "Unreal" duty as being like a movie theater; one month they might be running a noir thriller, another they might have a romantic comedy, and another time they might have a horror movie, or some classic science fiction. Most movie theaters are not dedicated to running a single genre forever -- much less the same single specific movie.

But having the theater say one movie's run has come to an end and start showing a different movie does not mean they are "taking the movie theater away" from someone who enjoyed the last movie they showed. It is, in fact, what the movie theater exists to do.

As does Unreal. It is, functionally, a theater that's like "Hey, remember this film? Some of you loved it back when we showed it for the first time. Some of you weren't in the neighborhood and so never got to see it properly. We've got a new restored high-quality print, and we're gonna show it again for a while!"

It's just that the movies are previous fights. And just like different movies can be from different genres yet still be shown in the same theater, different past fights revisited in Unreal can be of widely varied difficulty levels because... well, they're "high-quality restored prints" of fights that already exist.

Saying that because the previous 'currently playing attraction' in Unreal was easier, all others should be -- and that otherwise it was "taken away" from you -- is kind of akin to going to the movie theater and saying that because the last movie that was shown was a science fiction movie, all the movies shown there should be, and demanding that if the next movie is Casablanca, instead of just restoring the print they should remake it to be Star Wars, otherwise they've taken the movie theater away from you.

That's not how movie theaters work... and it's not how the Unreal system works. Or is meant to work.

I agree there's certainly space in this game for more midcore content, though I'd say the devs seem to be shifting focus a bit already with extreme trials to try to make them fill that gap; the Endwalker extremes have all been extremely approachable.

But Unreal is not meant to be that content; it is not even meant to be a particular classification of difficulty at all.