Here we go again

[AlienDiplomat]

From Software has led the charge in pushing cheap, heat-seeking physics-defying fake difficulty and easy to design 1-shot "mechanics" that force people to pound encounters into muscle memory like a robot rather than actually using their intuition or imagination like a human being. Such things are far easier to design and require much less dev time or skill, and there is a huge community of people chasing that formula, believing masochism and muscle memory to be the ultimate bragging badge of "skill."

Now we see RPG games that use to be about story instead embracing the robot paradigm. We now get intelligence-insulting smile songs and hello kitty island adventure characters where once there was plot and character development, and instead of interesting story encounters you get increasingly easy to design formula content that panders to the Elden Ring robot model of unimaginative difficulty and hoping the ego of the git gud elitists will keep people from noticing how much less we are getting in exchange for beating our basal ganglia against lazy encounter design.

[Metaknigh]

...

Did you miss what this thread is about? There's nothing about what you're talking about here.

1) There's no 1-shot mechanics in this place.
2) What are you talking about with masochism, the game is expecting the player to know how to play it after 100 levels.
3) Memorization and understanding what tells/mechanics are has always been a staple of ffxiv.
4) If you have grievances with the MSQ story, wrong thread.
5) What is any of your second paragraph, the thread is about a dungeon boss being "hard", even if it's not.

[Altina_Orion]

Did you miss what this thread is about? There's nothing about what you're talking about here.

1) There's no 1-shot mechanics in this place.
2) What are you talking about with masochism, the game is expecting the player to know how to play it after 100 levels.
3) Memorization and understanding what tells/mechanics are has always been a staple of ffxiv.
4) If you have grievances with the MSQ story, wrong thread.
5) What is any of your second paragraph, the thread is about a dungeon boss being "hard", even if it's not.

This is true, nothing will one shot you unless you have 3-4 stacks of vuln. Tanks get even more free hits.

[AlienDiplomat]

What I am suggesting is that the same design philosophy behind Elden Ring and similar games has been creeping into other titles, this one included. Any time the community points out the memory puzzles, untelegraphed rofl stomps, and other difficulty changes that are far beyond what any previous expansion introduced, the same vocal crowd of "git good" elitists who are somehow not OK with staying in their extremes and insist that NORMAL mode content all needs to be designed for them too chime in, just like I see endlessly on Steam and Reddit posts for those other games.

This philosophy is toxic because it gives devs an excuse to skimp on content. Why bother designing multiple tiers of difficulty? Just make everything more difficult and let the elitists insult the "crybabies" and "carebears" who have the audacity to believe that paying for a sub should entitle them to normal mode difficulty in normal mode content, or feel cheated when suddenly the difficulty expectation is ramped up dramatically on the content they used to enjoy with no real alternative?

I have witnessed this community cannibalize itself rather than admitting that fewer difficulty modes means paying the same for less. But so long as the content we get is what THEY want, people don't seem to care what others are losing. It is a fundamentally selfish view and leads to diminishing returns for the game. But Steam can't seem to sell enough "souls-like" games so I guess we don't need any other type of game anymore.

Why even bother writing a story?

[Altina_Orion]

What I am suggesting is that the same design philosophy behind Elden Ring and similar games has been creeping into other titles, this one included. Any time the community points out the memory puzzles, untelegraphed rofl stomps, and other difficulty changes that are far beyond what any previous expansion introduced, the same vocal crowd of "git good" elitists who are somehow not OK with staying in their extremes and insist that NORMAL mode content all needs to be designed for them too chime in, just like I see endlessly on Steam and Reddit posts for those other games.

This philosophy is toxic because it gives devs an excuse to skimp on content. Why bother designing multiple tiers of difficulty? Just make everything more difficult and let the elitists insult the "crybabies" and "carebears" who have the audacity to believe that paying for a sub should entitle them to normal mode difficulty in normal mode content, or feel cheated when suddenly the difficulty expectation is ramped up dramatically on the content they used to enjoy with no real alternative?

I have witnessed this community cannibalize itself rather than admitting that fewer difficulty modes means paying the same for less. But so long as the content we get is what THEY want, people don't seem to care what others are losing. It is a fundamentally selfish view and leads to diminishing returns for the game. But Steam can't seem to sell enough "souls-like" games so I guess we don't need any other type of game anymore.

Why even bother writing a story?

I actually still want a harder difficulty. The dungeon is still quite easy after a run or two. It would be nice if they applied the new "Quantum" mechanics to dungeons to make them far more challenging.

[EusisLandale]

untelegraphed rofl stomps, ~ far beyond what any previous expansion introduced

Might I direct your attention to Coincounter? A boss from the launch of the game. It took about 7 years for him to get his attacks telegraphed.