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.