Quote Originally Posted by TheDecay View Post
Is this some weird gotcha attempt? Who in their right mind defends a game from locking its harder-than-story-mode difficulty behind completion of the entire game (which by the way is not hard at all if you played an action game ever)?

God of War allowed you to play on the highest difficulty from the get-go. NG+ in GoW actually only made GMGOW slightly easier because of gear carryover.

And yes, there is a lack of content in FF16, since it's 50 hours of movies and 10 hours of actual gameplay, half of which is to fetch 3 tomatoes for NPC #3501.
Why is Savage going to be delayed by at least a week going forward even though in the past they preferred to open it patch day? It's because Savage raiders who are playing a story focused game that's part of a story focused franchise wanted to be able to enjoy the story before they moved into the more challenging version of the content instead of having to rush through it at the start then replay the story later on a different character.


CBU3 has learned that most players don't want to go hardcore challenge mode from day one. They want to enjoy the content at a casual pace first. Not to mention that having the chance to play through the easy mode first gives them a chance to learn and study base mechanics so they're better prepared going into hard mode.

Does it not seem reasonable that they might want to incorporate that information into the design of other games?

If you don't like that design, don't play CBU3 games. Go play God of War. Go play Elden Ring. Stop complaining that a game is easy when all you've experienced is part of the easy mode and haven't managed to unlock the hard mode yet.