Superhard Games without difficulty options. Looking at you Soulsborne games; I appreciate that some people like a challenge, but I really think that whole genre would only benefit from giving the player options. I have noticed that seems to be getting more common though.
I’m torn on this… I love playing Dark Souls 1/2/3/etc for the world and the enemies and exploring and overcoming the difficulties and finding cool gear and weapons and trying out new builds.
But I also absolutely hate pretty much every single boss fight in the games.
Yeah, FFXIV makes is super convenient to revisit a place once you’ve already been there via the aetheryte, meaning you’re probably not going to visit it on foot more than a few times. This means you don’t really make that connection between zones (or at least, I didn’t) and thus don’t really view it as an interconnected world (the loading areas between each zone doesn’t really help).
I’m struggling to give proper credit to WoW because I’m not sure if its the staggering amount of time I played the game, the time of my life when I played the game (younger brain retaining knowledge better?), or the seamless transition between zones which lends it to sticking in my memory so hard as a ‘real, interconnected world’… probably a combination of the three, if we’re being honest.
And then just a lot of old nostalgia for NES games (Duck Tales, River City Ransom, TMNT, etc) and SNES/PS1 RPGs (Lufia, Super Mario RPG, Suikoden, Thousand Arms, etc)
But that main list contains the ones I either bought or downloaded because I loved the music so much.
Which is hilarious because people ‘turn down the difficulty’ constantly by using summons or ‘jolly cooperation’ all the time in the games and don’t seem to differentiate that from a difficulty option.