Difficulty isn’t dying in video games - it’s dying in AAA games. Most indie developers are still brave enough to introduce new challenges, though some follow the trends set by big companies. The problem is that, in the past, most developers were real gamers with ideas, teams, and just enough luck and money to create the games they wanted. Now, those developers have retired, and "big business men" are running companies that still carry the same old names. Their main goal is making money, so they play it safe. And for them, "safe" means the game shouldn’t be too hard. Everyone loves winning, so they'll like our game, right? I often hear people say this is the right decision because most players are casual. They just want to relax on the couch and play a fun game without frustrating bosses or dying every few minutes. But I think this is a lazy mindset - both from developers and, therefore, from gamers nowadays. Look at how difficulty settings work in most AAA games today: - Journalist Mode - Just hold the stick forward. - Easy Mode - Press any button. If you get stuck, you’ll get a hint or a helping hand. Enemy health? Reduced for you. - Normal Mode - You’ll have to press the right buttons. No hints… until later. - Hard Mode - The same as Normal, but everything is doubled (health, damage, XP). - Super God Mode - One life, no saving between locations, or all stats tripled. Why would anyone choose a higher difficulty in this setup? Hard mode should require strategy, learning mechanics and combos, analyzing characters to make the right choices, and studying the environment for shortcuts or hidden treasures. Most "casual players" have never experienced a well-structured challenge that encourages them to push their limits. They don’t know how it feels to truly "level up" in real life after mastering a game. For them, difficulty is just pressing buttons while sweating. Difficulty should inspire, not discourage.
Beautiful comment, I absolutely agree thank you for spitting these facts Learning the games mechanics because you're actually trying to progress is all part of the magic of a good game
Playing it safe means making games as accessible as possible, across as many platforms as possible, and providing the most consistent and predictable gameplay as possible. The best games don't do any of these things. Steep learning curves, no compromises on gameplay or fidelity for weaker platforms, and not afraid to throw wrenches into the gameplay loop. These metrics have too much variance to fit into a ROI chart, so the suits at these AAA studios control for these variables by making generic and forgettable products with a micro-transaction storefront. Indies will continue to push and prop up the gaming industry while the Diablo 4's and Assassin Creed's extract as much value as they can.
@CrackedJust1n Complaining matters, but I want to take this opportunity to share games that truly challenge and respect players. You need to try Hollow Knight, Tunic, Animal Well, Celeste, Baldur’s Gate 3, Noita. It goes without saying - the Dark Souls series of games, but also Black Myth Wukong and Lies of P. Even after playing hundreds of games, I still believe Elden Ring, Tunic, and Hollow Knight are masterpieces of difficulty done right.
@CrackedJust1n Pretty L take on RDR2 but quoting u by ur own words “usuk at video games “so I wouldn’t expect u to understand that in RDR2 taking magical potions is an optional thing because u don’t have to if ur a hardcore role player that try’s to go the realism route infact I challenge u to make a video of u playing rdr2 without taking any magical potions in or out of combat limiting yourself to only regain health by sleeping at camp,hotels or eating at the saloon😂while playing with free aim no aiming assist and no d3ad3ye then you’ll realize there was a whole other game on the surface u didn’t notice was there The Whole time 🎉😂 broaden ur horizons RDR2 caiters to different player styles simultaneously
Fortnite 2025 experience: land at a named location, nobody else landed with you. run around the map for 10 minutes and kill 15 bots, your whole team is separated because they’re trying to steal eachothers bot kills. A real team finally shows up and kills your whole team because you forgot fortnite is supposed to be a pvp game. Que up and repeat.
yeah man, it's hard to play this game nowadays with this shitty experience being such a regular thing lol. atleast with friends it's always atleast a little bit fun, but solos it's just terrible.
I try to act like all the enemies are real but even that doesn't work because of just how bad the bots are. Fortnite is an absolute joke of a "PvP" game because of the Bot Problem.
nooo, I've been quite consistently playing with my friends and there are still a majority of bots even though we win really often. luckily ranked exists, no bots there.
You missed one BIG point. Black ops 6 may have lost 44% of its player base then 38% of the remaining players. But the people who are left spend money in the cash shop like their life depends on it. So they don’t actually care about player retention, they care about whale retention. Can they keep the person that spends $1000 a year in the shop? You just paid $60 for the game, they already got your money, you don’t matter anymore. That’s why battle passes exist, it’s why pay to win exists. To get you to spend more than just $60
This is sadly the reality. A few years ago a shareholder meeting presentation regarding whales leaked: basically they aim the game at the 0.1% of players with zero impulse control. 1% of players pay around 10$ a month, while the 0.1% pay way over 100 (I think their average was around 200-300). That tiny amount of players is enough the focus the entire game around it. They are abusing addiction and I think its horrible, that nobody speaks about it.
Nahhh they care. They need krill to feed the whales. Also, that extra $1000 will not account for the 4 million units of lost sales and “engagement”. The data they are collecting is worth more than what these “whales” spend.
Fortnite: adds bots to lobby to carefully ensure all players have a similar win rate. TF2: God joins the lobby, plays Soldier, and dominates the lobby with a shovel.
I remember getting scared whenever I saw someone with a soccer skin or John wick skin in early Fortnite, now days it’s boring fighting in that game because almost everyone is a bot until you meet real players in the final 5.
crazy how nowadays i average 15 kills in a round and early fortnite id average like 0 and its not like im good i haven’t played since spiderman season …which was 5 years ago in 2021
Everyone has to be the star nowadays. You can’t just be decent anymore, and if you are, you’ll feel like you’re not. “Cause when everyone’s super, no one will be.”
Thats called rapidfire. Also rockstar admitted they added for "difficulty" but broke into making in sp as well. Even they did on rdr2 and would do on gta 6 as well...
The "pain of defeat" and " joy of victory" is actually the whole point of video games as the piece of media . If I wanted to watch a movie , I'd do that , but if I boot a game, I want to PARTICIPATE in it.
Damn right. Video games have the unique opportunity of actively engaging with the player and pulling them into the world's and problems. If Mario was a movie (yes I know) then Mario would always save the princess. But Mario is a game. Every death, every game over, and every rage quit is you failing to save the princess. A book or movie can't truly give you that.
@PROTOBLUES90 When i was a kid i would always get pissed as i couldn't get a solo win in Fortnite. In retrospect, i cherish those losses as Fortnite lost its charm and exhilaration when i actually won for once. Video game companies are trying to make games into movies, an easily digestible piece of media that leaves no room for the protagonist (you) to fail at your goal and make you feel good towards the end. That's why people love plot twists and bad endings like infinity war because it challenges your expectations. No one going in to the theatres thought Thanos would have actually won.
Eh I think that’s selling games as a medium short. It’s interactive nature I think should allow it to have potentially the best stories possible. Not saying that’s what dispatch is but much of the joy of that game, dispatch, is in the decisions and good writing that accompanies the decisions. Obviously loss and victory will generally always be a factor in anything that requires inputs in a certain way, but to say that winning and losing are the whole point of games is dumb as fuck and imo the same kind of idea that people who claim games are just beeps and boops have
@alwest4472 Let me put like this , I more than welcome good writing and a story in video games , especially since due to their interactive nature, they could immerse you much deeper within the depths of their universes than any book or movie. But games since the dawn of times were about direct and active participation in it , if I'll have to choose between good story and bad gameplay or good gameplay and bad story I d pick gameplay without any second thoughts. If in your opinion valuing gameplay mechanics over the story in the piece of media which core feature always has been gameplay in comparison to any other form of media is " dumb as f...ck" , well so be it ,enjoy your movie experience while I enjoy mine.
“Engagement based matchmaking” IS skill based matchmaking. The only possible difference is how many bots they throw at you because people want to win more than they are supposed to.
only game i’ve seen do bots right is titanfall. it doesnt try to make the bots look like players, and killing players gives many times the score of killing bots. at the same time, the bots allow new players to learn the game and somewhat contribute to their team in a high skill ceiling game.
@CrackedJust1n Remeber when Og was brought back again a few months back and there were no bots! it was so fun and amazing bc it was hard. theres no challenge anymore and it leaves you constantly feeling bitter because you die in a dumb way to someone worse
@retro_in_paris It was crap because it's was hard by PLAYERS, not because this was NEW experience for someone, and instead of exploring this map(i couldn't before. bcuz i had laptop that was crap even in year of release - 2012). We need full bot gamemode. PvP is killing pve and this is bad.
It is important to note that Black Ops 6 launched on Xbox Gamepass on the day it was released, so many gamepass players would have downloaded and played it then dropped it because they just wanted to try it without spending the $60 to buy it.
I agree about the bots but I think there is intrinsic value to having skilled based match making in multiplayer video games. I remember when Fortnite first started and everyone was at the same skill level where there was no need to have skill based matchmaking. Everyone was fumbling through building and all of that. But now? There is such a high skill ceiling with fortnite that it legitimately did alienate new players. Fortnite was different than say call of duty or halo. Once you die, your game is done. You can’t endlessly respawn until the match is over. Which made it incredibly hard for anyone to really learn how to get good at the game when you are dying so quickly within a game. I don’t think you can apply the same value of difficulty from a single player game to an online multiplayer game. Let’s take the game of Rocket League, a game that is ridiculously mechanically difficult and has skilled based matchmaking. As someone who has played that game since 2017, if you have a player just learning the game and none of the games were skilled based matchmaking, they would never be able to touch the ball and be able to grow as a player. Why? The average player in Rocket League is ranked at diamond. A bronze player struggles to touch the ball or even be able to get it into the net. It would make the game unplayable for them. There is a line when it comes to difficulty. In a single player game, for the most part, the enemies rarely change, the final boss is still the final boss. You can keep playing the game over and over again and you can know what to expect. You can either memorize pathing or try to figure out the optimal strategy for killing a particular enemy. But when you play against random people in a game lobby with no rhyme or reason to the match making system, there becomes a barrier to actually trying to learn and become better at the game. You can’t learn how to be better than a player that has a 1000+ hours on top of you in a single match. They don’t have predictable movements. They’re not going to spawn in the same place every time. Every game is unique. And when the average player is way above in skill level then an entry level player, you see an issue. No one wants to play a game that they can’t fucking play. Lmao
I will also say that there is value to having bots in a video game to an extent. This has been a thing in online video games for quite some time. You can play bot matches in League of Legends, Overwatch, etc. It helps newer players be able to get a feel for the game and learn how to play in an environment that won’t just constantly have them die over and over where they can’t even give them a chance to learn the controls. People need to be able to have a good way to practice a video game. There is also the idea that there might not be enough players within your skill ranking to have a balanced match, which is why you might see more and more bots in games like Fortnite because the majority of players are not new to the game. There might be people who’ve never even held a controller before that try to play the game. Although I would suggest to not play an online shooter as your first video game you ever play. Lol and people will complain about match making wait times once they get rid of bots.
@Bigboigoinlong Bots in private lobbies should be more common! From someone who's played games for a majority of my lifetime, I really enjoy single player experiences against bots. It helped me hone my skills against the bots as I slowly increased the difficulty till I was overpowering the highest level bots that were literally cheating. But putting bots in a lobby while playing against people is a totally different thing. The Skill Based Matchmaking he's talking about isn't the same skill based matchmaking you want. Most games have "bootcamp" skill lobbies for people who are brand new to a game and only lets them off the leash after a certain skill level is reached. Which was the WHOLE point of Skill Based Matchmaking. The problematic SBMM is when you reach a certain skill level instead of being taken off the leash you are just put on a slightly different one and that collar just never gets removed. Anytime you get too cocky you get thrown into the sweatiest, bitchless, unemployed lobbies Satan can manifest. These "Leashes" are so tight that you are essentially just always playing against yourself until you reach a certain skill level and you don't have to sweat anymore but every 3rd person in the lobby is a hacker. I don't want SBMM gone. let me make that clear as day. I just want the leash to be way looser so it still feels organic.
@BigboigoinlongHey now everyone, you ain't supposed to think about the people that want to have fun. It's all about the grind whether your having fun or not. Obviously.
I was always just going with the flow. So sometimes I was like "did I win or lose?" after the screen was gone. Losses didn't tilt me because I didn't care, and wins didn't excite me because I didn't pay attention to it. To be honest I was only there for the gameplay. One of the best cod moments for me was 1v1's with friends. When I played that it always mattered if I won or lost,but we were equally skilled which was perfect due to it being a challange but not bullshit. I miss the difficulty of those matches.
No there's nothing cooler than having badass music in the background while your characters celebrate victory especially in a match that you didn't think you're going to win in any way
Tbh for a game like rdr2 for most people the experience of exploring and eating and wearing appropriate clothes is more about being immersed in the world than difficulty. Also I would hate if Arthur felt worse to play cause he wasn't upgraded at the start of the game. That is literally Arthur in his prime lol.
yea, i died a lot in the start. you get better as you progress, it is also a story game so i quite like the easier difficulty. i found myself exploring a lot and taking it slow even though i got super good at the combat. it took me about 72 hours to complete the story because i was so immersed. it also made me cry, so…
@hotdiggityschweinehund rdr2 easy? It must have put me and my buddy into an end game event right at start then without telling us. The nearest mission for us absolutely destroyed us ruining our experience of the game.
If an immersive mechanic is largely optional, it's more like dipping your toes in than actually immersing yourself in the world. It's asking you to care about the world rather than actually making you care, but since the writing and acting in RDR2 were so good you were already emotionally invested so the immersive mechanics were just gravy. Honestly if not for the great writing and acting, RDR2 wouldn't be anywhere near as widely loved as it is today, and there would be a lot more heavily critical video essays about how the gameplay was nothing special and that the world felt more like a old west theme park
Skill-based matchmaking, in concept, should consistently put you in the lobbies of people of a similar skill level who challenge you to match their skill and have a good time by challenging yourself. Instead, it’s a plague upon gaming that basically engineers whether or not you win. Games aren’t fun because you win, games are fun because you have to put in the work to win.
@JGBrosGaming yes some games do, it’s literally what a ranked mode is, but what everyone is complaining about,including the original commenter, isn’t actual skill based matchmaking
I’m still genuinely sad I never got a legit Fortnite win before the bots took over, which is sad because I genuinely could have but I never had enough ways to play the game consistently thanks to my mom’s phone being the only way for me to play it.
difficulty idea: if you die - all your and your family member's personal information gets put on the internet, an automatic trojan virus included with the game puts a 5 million dollar bounty on your head and the game automatically explodes your pc the best part: you will die constantly and you will never be able to win it because the final boss has infinite health
@okk2005 founder of oculus vr palmer lucky made it in 2022 as a reference to sword art online (this part I'm not 100% sure), google it. Basically if you die in-game headset explodes irl and so does your head. No one's ever used the headset, for obvious reasons (I hope)
This is partly why I enjoy fighting games. Winning or losing comes down to the decisions made by both players. Every match gives you the opportunity to learn and improve
Epic removed bots and skill based matchmaking when they released og season 1 a couple months ago and so many people praised them and the game felt fun again, but then people complained because they want easy wins.
your whole argument kinda breaks down into the idea of money. Video games are no longer a passion project, theyre products. They removed the intense emotions because they dont make us much money as an algorithm. Money ruins joy in good things
Video games were never "passion projects" except for rare exceptions like Hollow Knight. They are overwhelmingly (and have always been) commercial products. They exist to make money.
Videogames have always been made by people with passion. But they are restricted by the monetary incentive or they will lose their job. Some games let the creativity and passion shine through more than others, but it’s a product they are selling at the end of the day.
@RicochetForce This is saying nothing. All business exist to make money, all businesses were once started with a passionate founder, but not all business have retained that same passion. Video games would not exist today as we know it if that initial first console and game wasn't made by a guy with a passion for making something new.
@RicochetForcei disagree the best example is balatro, dude (yes one dude) made games for his friends and when they tried this game they told him he needed to list it because it’s fantastic. almost won game of the year. schedule 1 also is doing insane was (almost) made by 1 guy. i am working on making better versions of games that aren’t focused on income. i have a sudoku app basically done with a ranked system and no ads. you can watch an ad for an extra life in solo play but not ranked. i decided to make it because every sudoku app is stuffed full of ads and i just wanna play 😂
Yea I'd rather play a single player game with some difficult but rewarding combat like TLOU or Dark Souls than get spoon fed kills against robots in a PVP game. It just doesn't feel rewarding without that additional level of understanding that you are fighting against real players, and once the illusion is broken, it kills the experience.
I used to suck in most video games and had to learn how to play strategically to compensate, now i as an adult, i play better and if i use a bit of strategy like i got used to in most games the whole challenge become disappears, it feels like there are no more games made for me except competitive pvp ones, but when i play old games, then the feelling of being challenged appears again
That's a paradox that sounds terrifying - to me - all things considered... *_"You will be a god among men..."_* ● Harlan Wade's first words to the newly-born Point Man of F.E.A.R.
I think something to keep in mind is because the gameplay philosophy is changing when it comes to mainstream developers. Games back then were stuck on what I call the arcade game philosophy. They were made to keep you playing so you can spend more money on their game. That’s why it was so difficult. And now we are transitioning to a period we’re making it as easy as possible and keeping you in your chair constantly consuming, makes them more money. Things are finally changing. Just something I thought about. All about the money. Edit: I made this comment before watching the video lol. And his first point of replay-ability also takes into account. My original point was just something else to think about, but I digress.
This literally every other match. Walking around lackadaisacal with the assumption those footsteps are a bot have cost me big time. I'm t alking Shotgun pumped into SMG in
fortnite really is built for the widest audience imaginable. Same thing happens in marvel rivals i've heard you get matched against bots every once in a while. I think there are still plenty hard games like cs2 or the finals where sbmm is absolutely neccessary to not get destroyed by players with half a year of in game time.
This is one of the reasons why I play a lot of roguelikes. They have a tendency to bring in interesting difficulty options and each run lives or dies with the way that you play around the circumstances. Every single loss can tell you the mistakes that you made and even though many have a lot of RNG elements, most roguelikes have been pushed to the point where the genuinely good players can win almost every single run they start. One of the most enjoyable parts about a game is the process of improving. It's more fun to get good at a game than it is to be good at a game.
Hades is a roguelite but i just have to give a shoutout to the heat/fear system. one thing is making the game harder, another thing is choosing how you want to make the game harder faster enemies? deadlier traps? less rng manipulation (hades gives you a lot of options to inject choice into how your run goes, so this is actually really brutal)? time limits? pick your favourite, and then some more, for the statues
I don't hate bots in games like Fortnite, but there shouldn't be as much as there are, it should be like 20 max, having more than half the lobby be braindead AI sometimes is a joke, another issue is sometimes when you get to the endgame and its the last guy against you, you come to find out it's a bot, which is so anticlimactic and lame, all bots should be wiped from the game automatically by the final 10 players...
Part of the reason for the bots is to decrease matchmaking queue times. It's much faster and easier for the MM algorithm to find 15-20 players(4-5 squads) who meet some basic connection and skill requirements, then fill out the match with bots than it is to just find 70+ players. Not to say it can't be done with a game as popular as FN, but more people would complain about getting wiped in the first few minutes of a match just to spend 5 more minutes loading into the next match where it happens again every time they play.
To be fair if a bot got to final circle you are probably in a very low skill lobby right? Since you know that bot had to presuably kill at least some players to get there. I guess technically you could have also killed a bunch of people or have ratted and already killed the person who killed everyone. The bots offing themselves when it get to final X would be possible i assume, but would it actually be a better play experience to just randomly win when you get to top 10 as all the bots end themselves?
Something interesting that happened is that when Fortnite OG released for the first few days Skill based matchmaking was disabled and it was hard but it felt like how Fortnite was when I first played where I wasn’t good and I had to think about every move I did so I can stay alive and winning I felt accomplished but of course they eventually put in Skill based Matchmaking I just wish there was an option to turn it off
Back in 2018, I remember seeing my girlfriend (who never played online games) really enjoying Garden Warfare 2 multiplayer on my Xbox One when she came to my house. I always saw her playing & she kept getting better match after match. She started jumping to avoid getting shot, took cover, waited for enemies to run out of ammo, etc. But nowadays, when we mostly play Fortnite, I honestly don't see her-or myself-getting better. It feels like the only game I can play with her aside from co-op stuff, which sucks. Epic spoon-fed us so carefully & deliberately that it made our skills worse. With all the bots, we don't jump, we don't take cover-we just play. It sucks. To the point that I don’t even think this is "gaming" anymore-it’s more like an interactive movie where we press buttons. I say this because the outcome of your actions always feels artificial in these games. You just know that if you do good in one match, you’ll do worse in the next-or vice versa. That didn’t used to happen. Before, you never knew what could happen, because your actions always had consequences. Since the suits took over this industry & discovered is more profitable than movies, sadly I think gaming is destined to die, and is already dying.
Algorithms do work from a monetary perspective but it robs most players from a rewarding gaming experience. Ofcourse there are smaller exceptions to the rule, but it doesn’t compare to the majority. And on top of that a lot of people who are not tapped in to this stuff don’t even know how it’s affecting their gaming experience.
I don't dislike the idea of being a god in a video game the difference here is the con. It's one thing to mess around in creative with godpowers and have fun with it. It's another for a game to give you that power and sell it as an accomplishment especially when it comes to multiplayer bots and matchmaking. I only want to be a god if I have the knowledge and awareness of it and thats what i want to do in that moment rather than an underhanded selling of real pvp when it's mostly bots when I want a realistic experience.
in Rdr 2 there really should be a hardcore mode to make it super realistic, but there is a fine line between difficulty and pure inconvenience, the player does not need to be punished that hard, just hard enough. Rdd2 is unique tho, is more of a movie than a game lowkey
Man I swear to god every time I play a new release I immediately turn the game off after a couple of hours of play because of how flagrant the "hand-holding" has become. This is why I love the older GTA titles despite all the flaws they have the unpredictability in gameplay and the absurd difficulty of some missions is what makes it engaging. I played through RDR2 twice and on my second playthrough I barely touched any of the upgrades or legendary animals and still felt like I was the terminator
I'll never forget the feeling of absolute dread and horror of playing Elite Dangerous in open (the gamemode where you can meet other players), jumping to a highly popular star system and seeing a hollow triangle pop up on your radar, knowing damn well that hollow triangle is a player trying to catch and kill you for no reason other than being extremely sadistic.
This is exactly why I quit playing fortnite about 2 seasons or less after they added bots to the game. It was too boring and unpredictable to know if I should try hard on this one person, or just shoot at them because they're an idiot bot. It felt fake and took the thrill out of the game.
Old COD never had SBMM. in a 2010 interview with engadget Vonderhaar said "There is no skill-based matchmaking. There never has been in any CoD game." Considering he was the lead designer at Treyarch, I think he would know. And considering there was no incentive to lie back then, I think he would be telling the truth. Certainly seems more credible some random tweet reply from an engineer trying to quell complaints about SBMM in the modern era that people cite as proof SBMM has always existed.
ive seen people complaining about sbmm in videos dating as far back as black ops 2, would you say these videos are completely based on nothing until mw2019?
@AmyCherryLMAO 2010 was before black ops 2. Blops 2 supposedly had SBMM based on the SPM of the party leader although I believe it was removed shortly after launch to improve queue times. Although having tested it back in the day, I couldn't tell any actual difference in game. Advanced Warfare is the first game with noticeable SBMM.
This is why Elden Ring is one of my favourite games of all time. It completely nails that experience of becoming a god through trials and tribulations that I don't think any other game gets close to really replicating.
@dubbie7879 as someone on NG3 I feel comfortable saying no. Elden ring is easy. just spam R2 or L2 and you win every fight. im not a sweat or anything but I struggle more with Ragnarok then with elden ring.
Something that saddens me about fortnite is that back in chapter 2, a youtuber by the name of sypherpk had made a video about bots and how are they a problem but after the video he recived a massive backlash for talking about bots negatively which probably why he no longer crtizise, and since the majorty wants bots epic will defintly keep them and increase them, which is evident by when fortnite OG relased (for like the 3rd time or so) epic made it with no bots but quickly reverted because people hated the fact there are no free kills and now they have to learne and practice instead of the game play itself. It is really sad that epic can add a weapon that let the game play itself and people call it the most fun thing to ever existed, as much as I understande that not everyone can play enough so they could improve or learne the game and just want to play, it shouldnt be at the cost of not making it fun to others who want challeng, it should be balanced were both can have what they want without ones feeling left out because they cant, or dont have time for it.
Yeah I was really exited for og purely because there wouldn’t be bots and it was only like that for about 2-3 days because all the bad players just complained
@Agatha-z3g yeah and I belive after they complained they stoped playing the mode anyway and say stuff like "og mode bad" and "this mode is made for nostalgia only". I miss when back in the day when a bad player complain they tell him to get good instead of wanting epic to make skill less weapons and ruin the game just for the sake of one sided fun.
bots being in fortnite is the main reason i quit this game. the funny thing is i won my first game of fortnite that i played in C3 S4 but it was bots...
@CrackedJust1n I feel like its because they dont rush people anymore, It feels like they havent re-programmed ai since they were first added 6 years ago in chapter 2
Ngl, your channel's quite entertaining/informative, man. At least every now and then aint gonna get stuck in my usual monotone routine all along. Gg and keep going
When it comes to difficulty, one of my favorites has to be "Lethal" from Ghost of Tsushima because it forces you to use the tools given to you and it balances the game by making you die faster but enemies as well. You should try it out if you haven't, it's an amazing experience.
@CrackedJust1nNah i played ghost of tsushima on hard the game is pretty easy. Granted I haven't played it on lethal its basically an assassin's creed game.
@Th3_b3an That's why epic should make a mode that's specifically just bots for if you just wanna turn your brain off and play some br casually OH WAIT THEY DID. THRICE Playground, Battle Lab, Creative Royale. And they fucking killed them. ALL of them.
tarkov is the most difficult game ive ever played im 200 hours in and still havent even touched half the maps even pve is difficult and tarkov just feels so rewarding to get good at
@ it’s very fun but your first couple hundred hours is literally just learning most of the game pve tarkov is really good for learning it but you will have to watch some RUclips videos, offline mode with bots turned off is also good for exploring i really don’t wanna deal with the rampant cheating situation which is why i like pve more right now but as i get better i may turn to pvp whe you do try i’ve literally never had an adrenaline intense game, tarkov just having so many realistic features and one of the only live service games that doesn’t have a battle pass if tarkov had unicorn farts like bo6 i think id quit the game lmao if you try tarkov good luck bro it’s a very steep learning curve but it is extremely rewarding when all of its complicated in game systems come together and you actually feel like u know what ur doing
my friend let me play tarkov when the wipe first started and it was really fun then when the flea market went back up, we stopped, and like my father told me about the birds and the bees, she told me about the cheaters, and that god forsaken wiggle...
@VenViViris28 lmao that’s why i play pve especially after the recent ai update that removed 200m aimbot from scavs before that pve was basically just fighting raiders 24/7 but now it feels a lot more similar to pvp just without a lot of the bs in the regular game another reason i like pve more is because a lot of the pvp fights are really just whoever makes less noise and sits still for 20 minutes wins but on pve you can be a lot more aggressive even with bad load outs
Payday 2 Death Sentence will forever beat me up. Yeah, I've beaten a few heists in loud on it, but it really shows how hard gaming used to be just half a decade ago.
Yeah, of course, because high difficulty is when you either use meta or die from 2 bullets, while wasting half your mag offing just one regular grunt... No, thanks.
I think having easier difficulties as an option is important. There are some people who just flat out, can’t engage with a product at a high skill level, or don’t want to put in the time, but still want to experience the art at a less invested level. However, higher difficulties should always be the norm. Not because every game needs to be Dark Souls, but because rising to a challenge is more fun than having victory brought to you. Ease should _an_ option, not the only option
"Rising to a challenge is more fun than having victory brought to you." Let's not start making absolute statements. This does not apply to as many people as you think. The most popular games on the planet are easy and simple.
Relavently easy should also not be the default option. As you generally want the default difficulty to be how the game is designed and balanced around. Easier or harder difficulties can be bad, but the default difficulty should be balance for a fair experience for your core audience.
a lot of games put "this is the intended experience" in the difficulty description. it's never "normal" or easy, but one of the hardest ones. i always go with that difficulty. my doom mod defaults to two difficulties below the intended experience too because people complained it was too hard
The problem is humans avoid activities where they lose even if they enjoy them more. Just like how people naturally minimize effort even to their own detriment
It's funny how history has repeated itself. I recall these same arguments during the Xbox 360/PS3 era, roughly 2008 - 2011. People were saying Triple-A games were too hand-holdy and easy. Things got shaken up thanks to From Software in 2011 with the release of Dark Souls, encouraging games to be difficult again. These days, though, I usually repeat myself a lot when folks complain about the modern market. We now have both a rich history of older games to play and indie games that are challenging and engaging.
You make good points. But what about Souls-like, Rogue-likes etc? It's very trendy to have a hardcore difficulty at the moment, especially among indie games. But for most big budget games, yeah I agree. And Skyrim is an especially good example when compared to Morrowind, which didn't have quest markers, and made you start each town with a low reputation so you needed to convince people to even talk to you. That was something else.
I'm glad Morrowind was my first elder scrolls game because it gave me the opportunity to appreciate everything skyrim is and isn't Morrowind was awesome
People always made me feel weird for hating the bots like I was a sweat but this video puts it perfectly. There’s no thrill in outsmarting a mindless machine designed to help you win and you have to invest more time in the game to get those genuine player interactions that are memorable because they play out in a variety of ways. Those moments where you hesitate to shoot the low health non threatening player looking at the wall waiting to be executed. Or predicted a player would make a move that you set up a perfect counter for. Solid video essay
I think bots can be done well, but I agree that fighting the ones that just exist to feed points (Fortnite) and the ones that are super inconsistent (Ready or Not had AI that were sometimes braindead and sometimes capable of wiping out your entire squad with a Makarov) really doesn't feel good. Making the AI feel believable (I can't think of any games that excel with this) or leaning into their non-player nature (Titanfall) can really help avoid the pitfalls that have been mentioned here.
17:34 while I understand you point….. grown adults who work a 40+ hour week jobs and want to play for a little bit to chill after work with a game that isn’t Fortnite need modes where their game isn’t telling them to do what they do in real life 😂 the sims did that
what are you trying to say games should not be difficult cause of casual players thats the entire issue with modern gaming most AAA games nowadays are just straight up boring and not worth it cause of the fact it is so accesable to casual players.
skill based machmaking be like: -lose game -lose game -somehow win a game -get thrown into a lobby full of sweats that wombo combo your a$$ -lose game -lose game
![YFG Fatso - Mental [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/eSGT8vDqcP0/mqdefault.jpg)
Difficulty isn’t dying in video games - it’s dying in AAA games. Most indie developers are still brave enough to introduce new challenges, though some follow the trends set by big companies.
The problem is that, in the past, most developers were real gamers with ideas, teams, and just enough luck and money to create the games they wanted. Now, those developers have retired, and "big business men" are running companies that still carry the same old names. Their main goal is making money, so they play it safe. And for them, "safe" means the game shouldn’t be too hard. Everyone loves winning, so they'll like our game, right?
I often hear people say this is the right decision because most players are casual. They just want to relax on the couch and play a fun game without frustrating bosses or dying every few minutes. But I think this is a lazy mindset - both from developers and, therefore, from gamers nowadays.
Look at how difficulty settings work in most AAA games today:
- Journalist Mode - Just hold the stick forward.
- Easy Mode - Press any button. If you get stuck, you’ll get a hint or a helping hand. Enemy health? Reduced for you.
- Normal Mode - You’ll have to press the right buttons. No hints… until later.
- Hard Mode - The same as Normal, but everything is doubled (health, damage, XP).
- Super God Mode - One life, no saving between locations, or all stats tripled.
Why would anyone choose a higher difficulty in this setup? Hard mode should require strategy, learning mechanics and combos, analyzing characters to make the right choices, and studying the environment for shortcuts or hidden treasures. Most "casual players" have never experienced a well-structured challenge that encourages them to push their limits. They don’t know how it feels to truly "level up" in real life after mastering a game. For them, difficulty is just pressing buttons while sweating.
Difficulty should inspire, not discourage.
Beautiful comment, I absolutely agree thank you for spitting these facts
Learning the games mechanics because you're actually trying to progress is all part of the magic of a good game
Playing it safe means making games as accessible as possible, across as many platforms as possible, and providing the most consistent and predictable gameplay as possible. The best games don't do any of these things. Steep learning curves, no compromises on gameplay or fidelity for weaker platforms, and not afraid to throw wrenches into the gameplay loop. These metrics have too much variance to fit into a ROI chart, so the suits at these AAA studios control for these variables by making generic and forgettable products with a micro-transaction storefront.
Indies will continue to push and prop up the gaming industry while the Diablo 4's and Assassin Creed's extract as much value as they can.
@CrackedJust1n Complaining matters, but I want to take this opportunity to share games that truly challenge and respect players. You need to try Hollow Knight, Tunic, Animal Well, Celeste, Baldur’s Gate 3, Noita. It goes without saying - the Dark Souls series of games, but also Black Myth Wukong and Lies of P.
Even after playing hundreds of games, I still believe Elden Ring, Tunic, and Hollow Knight are masterpieces of difficulty done right.
Dahm, stole my future comment. I was about to comment about how great fromsoftware is but thanks for the extra game recommendations🙂
@CrackedJust1n Pretty L take on RDR2 but quoting u by ur own words “usuk at video games “so I wouldn’t expect u to understand that in RDR2 taking magical potions is an optional thing because u don’t have to if ur a hardcore role player that try’s to go the realism route infact I challenge u to make a video of u playing rdr2 without taking any magical potions in or out of combat limiting yourself to only regain health by sleeping at camp,hotels or eating at the saloon😂while playing with free aim no aiming assist and no d3ad3ye then you’ll realize there was a whole other game on the surface u didn’t notice was there The Whole time 🎉😂 broaden ur horizons RDR2 caiters to different player styles simultaneously
Fortnite 2025 experience: land at a named location, nobody else landed with you. run around the map for 10 minutes and kill 15 bots, your whole team is separated because they’re trying to steal eachothers bot kills. A real team finally shows up and kills your whole team because you forgot fortnite is supposed to be a pvp game. Que up and repeat.
so real lmfao the real person in the last minute always catches me so off guard
yeah man, it's hard to play this game nowadays with this shitty experience being such a regular thing lol.
atleast with friends it's always atleast a little bit fun, but solos it's just terrible.
and my fucking friend tries to defend it saying that the lobbies fill faster, dude can't you wait 20 more seconds?
Lmao this LITERALLY just happened to me
I try to act like all the enemies are real but even that doesn't work because of just how bad the bots are.
Fortnite is an absolute joke of a "PvP" game because of the Bot Problem.
The callout "it's just a bot" in Fortnite says it all.
When me and my friends play we always say “it’s a real player!” Because there so rare 😂
@Agatha-z3g same
I fight so many sweats nowadays... Y'all really just playing it once after not for a while.... Obviously it's going to give you all bots 😂
@CORKFFLa game with millions of concurrent players should not need bots
nooo, I've been quite consistently playing with my friends and there are still a majority of bots even though we win really often.
luckily ranked exists, no bots there.
You missed one BIG point. Black ops 6 may have lost 44% of its player base then 38% of the remaining players. But the people who are left spend money in the cash shop like their life depends on it. So they don’t actually care about player retention, they care about whale retention. Can they keep the person that spends $1000 a year in the shop? You just paid $60 for the game, they already got your money, you don’t matter anymore. That’s why battle passes exist, it’s why pay to win exists. To get you to spend more than just $60
This is sadly the reality. A few years ago a shareholder meeting presentation regarding whales leaked: basically they aim the game at the 0.1% of players with zero impulse control. 1% of players pay around 10$ a month, while the 0.1% pay way over 100 (I think their average was around 200-300). That tiny amount of players is enough the focus the entire game around it. They are abusing addiction and I think its horrible, that nobody speaks about it.
Nahhh they care.
They need krill to feed the whales.
Also, that extra $1000 will not account for the 4 million units of lost sales and “engagement”.
The data they are collecting is worth more than what these “whales” spend.
The issue is when the whales leave because there's nobody left to flex their cash-shop drip on.
Many games are designed with phycological elements included to hook & trap players into feeding the developers an endless stream of money.
They still lost millions and even whales can't carry the economy of the game they need player to flex on why would they spend money otherwise
Fortnite: adds bots to lobby to carefully ensure all players have a similar win rate.
TF2: God joins the lobby, plays Soldier, and dominates the lobby with a shovel.
TF2: Makes it self catter to comp players and ruin the old fully casual system it had
@ElDous1whaaa whaaa whaaa
you know tf2 has skill based match making too right?
@duckesomeonly in comp
@luk4323wrong
I remember getting scared whenever I saw someone with a soccer skin or John wick skin in early Fortnite, now days it’s boring fighting in that game because almost everyone is a bot until you meet real players in the final 5.
Wich is why i play og mode
crazy how nowadays i average 15 kills in a round and early fortnite id average like 0 and its not like im good i haven’t played since spiderman season …which was 5 years ago in 2021
idle games are too difficult
we need to go "fully automated, no touch needed" games
SOMEBODY HIRE THIS GUY
isnt this a interactive movie
@ElDous1eh interactive movies still have 'interactive', not fully automatic; usually you have to click 'next'
@JNJNRobin1337movie
@JNJNRobin1337 if we market movies as games, then we can get 60$ per ticket!
Everyone has to be the star nowadays. You can’t just be decent anymore, and if you are, you’ll feel like you’re not.
“Cause when everyone’s super, no one will be.”
beautiful comment
dropping the incredibles quote is diabolical. Cold, but diabolical
I miss when you had fun with the game. Now I get spotlight syndrome on every game I play even single player games.
🔥✍️
Inflation!
GTA V balances the mind numbingly easy auto-aim with those AIs that unload a 30 round mag into you in half a second
It's kind of funny how hard GTA Online is compared to the singleplayer
GTA v story mode was hard
@owenhans3633 no it wasnt
@mr.nuggies3087 if it had gta 4 driving and rdr2 weapon system and no regen health and more recoil
then yes, it wouldve been hard
Thats called rapidfire.
Also rockstar admitted they added for "difficulty" but broke into making in sp as well.
Even they did on rdr2 and would do on gta 6 as well...
The "pain of defeat" and " joy of victory" is actually the whole point of video games as the piece of media . If I wanted to watch a movie , I'd do that , but if I boot a game, I want to PARTICIPATE in it.
Damn right. Video games have the unique opportunity of actively engaging with the player and pulling them into the world's and problems.
If Mario was a movie (yes I know) then Mario would always save the princess. But Mario is a game. Every death, every game over, and every rage quit is you failing to save the princess.
A book or movie can't truly give you that.
@PROTOBLUES90 When i was a kid i would always get pissed as i couldn't get a solo win in Fortnite. In retrospect, i cherish those losses as Fortnite lost its charm and exhilaration when i actually won for once. Video game companies are trying to make games into movies, an easily digestible piece of media that leaves no room for the protagonist (you) to fail at your goal and make you feel good towards the end. That's why people love plot twists and bad endings like infinity war because it challenges your expectations. No one going in to the theatres thought Thanos would have actually won.
Eh I think that’s selling games as a medium short. It’s interactive nature I think should allow it to have potentially the best stories possible. Not saying that’s what dispatch is but much of the joy of that game, dispatch, is in the decisions and good writing that accompanies the decisions.
Obviously loss and victory will generally always be a factor in anything that requires inputs in a certain way, but to say that winning and losing are the whole point of games is dumb as fuck and imo the same kind of idea that people who claim games are just beeps and boops have
@alwest4472 Let me put like this , I more than welcome good writing and a story in video games , especially since due to their interactive nature, they could immerse you much deeper within the depths of their universes than any book or movie.
But games since the dawn of times were about direct and active participation in it , if I'll have to choose between good story and bad gameplay or good gameplay and bad story I d pick gameplay without any second thoughts.
If in your opinion valuing gameplay mechanics over the story in the piece of media which core feature always has been gameplay in comparison to any other form of media is " dumb as f...ck" , well so be it ,enjoy your movie experience while I enjoy mine.
Not it’s not. They’re for fun and just dominating on easy can be fun
“Engagement based matchmaking” IS skill based matchmaking. The only possible difference is how many bots they throw at you because people want to win more than they are supposed to.
Should be titled "Guy discovers Silent Hill Soundtrack and is obsessed"
I am, silent hill 2 and 3 ost is a trip
Fortnite NEEDS a togglable option to remove bots, and if you play a match with bots the mode should be called "Fortnite bootcamp"
genius. Epic needs to hear this
I’ve been saying this for years but it’s easier just to play ranked and past like silver there’s no bots
@Agatha-z3g ranked is ass did you tried to play it?
@Agatha-z3g leveling makes no sense, and there are bots past silver
Wait there's bots in ranked now? Was there always? I thought there weren't.
16:07 „I want to die! … in game“ 😂😂
18:57 Grizzly takes your gun and reloads while he is trying to kill you
Bots kill multiplayer games, so glad someone is finally speaking on this
Bots DO kill multi-player games, the point of online is to connect us together not divide us in between npcs
and I want bots in older cod games and hackers free with playable private quick match lobbies.. support on crack also lol
only game i’ve seen do bots right is titanfall. it doesnt try to make the bots look like players, and killing players gives many times the score of killing bots. at the same time, the bots allow new players to learn the game and somewhat contribute to their team in a high skill ceiling game.
@CrackedJust1n Remeber when Og was brought back again a few months back and there were no bots! it was so fun and amazing bc it was hard. theres no challenge anymore and it leaves you constantly feeling bitter because you die in a dumb way to someone worse
@retro_in_paris
It was crap because it's was hard by PLAYERS, not because this was NEW experience for someone, and instead of exploring this map(i couldn't before. bcuz i had laptop that was crap even in year of release - 2012). We need full bot gamemode. PvP is killing pve and this is bad.
It is important to note that Black Ops 6 launched on Xbox Gamepass on the day it was released, so many gamepass players would have downloaded and played it then dropped it because they just wanted to try it without spending the $60 to buy it.
I say a video game is fun when you had laughs and light frustration when trying not to die.
yes
God of War 2005.
I agree about the bots but I think there is intrinsic value to having skilled based match making in multiplayer video games. I remember when Fortnite first started and everyone was at the same skill level where there was no need to have skill based matchmaking. Everyone was fumbling through building and all of that. But now? There is such a high skill ceiling with fortnite that it legitimately did alienate new players. Fortnite was different than say call of duty or halo. Once you die, your game is done. You can’t endlessly respawn until the match is over. Which made it incredibly hard for anyone to really learn how to get good at the game when you are dying so quickly within a game. I don’t think you can apply the same value of difficulty from a single player game to an online multiplayer game.
Let’s take the game of Rocket League, a game that is ridiculously mechanically difficult and has skilled based matchmaking. As someone who has played that game since 2017, if you have a player just learning the game and none of the games were skilled based matchmaking, they would never be able to touch the ball and be able to grow as a player. Why? The average player in Rocket League is ranked at diamond. A bronze player struggles to touch the ball or even be able to get it into the net. It would make the game unplayable for them.
There is a line when it comes to difficulty. In a single player game, for the most part, the enemies rarely change, the final boss is still the final boss. You can keep playing the game over and over again and you can know what to expect. You can either memorize pathing or try to figure out the optimal strategy for killing a particular enemy. But when you play against random people in a game lobby with no rhyme or reason to the match making system, there becomes a barrier to actually trying to learn and become better at the game. You can’t learn how to be better than a player that has a 1000+ hours on top of you in a single match. They don’t have predictable movements. They’re not going to spawn in the same place every time. Every game is unique. And when the average player is way above in skill level then an entry level player, you see an issue. No one wants to play a game that they can’t fucking play. Lmao
I will also say that there is value to having bots in a video game to an extent. This has been a thing in online video games for quite some time. You can play bot matches in League of Legends, Overwatch, etc. It helps newer players be able to get a feel for the game and learn how to play in an environment that won’t just constantly have them die over and over where they can’t even give them a chance to learn the controls. People need to be able to have a good way to practice a video game. There is also the idea that there might not be enough players within your skill ranking to have a balanced match, which is why you might see more and more bots in games like Fortnite because the majority of players are not new to the game. There might be people who’ve never even held a controller before that try to play the game. Although I would suggest to not play an online shooter as your first video game you ever play. Lol and people will complain about match making wait times once they get rid of bots.
@Bigboigoinlong Bots in private lobbies should be more common! From someone who's played games for a majority of my lifetime, I really enjoy single player experiences against bots. It helped me hone my skills against the bots as I slowly increased the difficulty till I was overpowering the highest level bots that were literally cheating. But putting bots in a lobby while playing against people is a totally different thing. The Skill Based Matchmaking he's talking about isn't the same skill based matchmaking you want. Most games have "bootcamp" skill lobbies for people who are brand new to a game and only lets them off the leash after a certain skill level is reached. Which was the WHOLE point of Skill Based Matchmaking. The problematic SBMM is when you reach a certain skill level instead of being taken off the leash you are just put on a slightly different one and that collar just never gets removed. Anytime you get too cocky you get thrown into the sweatiest, bitchless, unemployed lobbies Satan can manifest. These "Leashes" are so tight that you are essentially just always playing against yourself until you reach a certain skill level and you don't have to sweat anymore but every 3rd person in the lobby is a hacker. I don't want SBMM gone. let me make that clear as day. I just want the leash to be way looser so it still feels organic.
@BigboigoinlongHey now everyone, you ain't supposed to think about the people that want to have fun. It's all about the grind whether your having fun or not. Obviously.
its crazy to me that so many people defend bots
Does anyone else not even pay attention to the "Victory Screen" in COD?
In 2025 yes
I was always just going with the flow. So sometimes I was like "did I win or lose?" after the screen was gone. Losses didn't tilt me because I didn't care, and wins didn't excite me because I didn't pay attention to it. To be honest I was only there for the gameplay. One of the best cod moments for me was 1v1's with friends. When I played that it always mattered if I won or lost,but we were equally skilled which was perfect due to it being a challange but not bullshit. I miss the difficulty of those matches.
No there's nothing cooler than having badass music in the background while your characters celebrate victory especially in a match that you didn't think you're going to win in any way
Tbh for a game like rdr2 for most people the experience of exploring and eating and wearing appropriate clothes is more about being immersed in the world than difficulty. Also I would hate if Arthur felt worse to play cause he wasn't upgraded at the start of the game. That is literally Arthur in his prime lol.
yea, i died a lot in the start. you get better as you progress, it is also a story game so i quite like the easier difficulty. i found myself exploring a lot and taking it slow even though i got super good at the combat. it took me about 72 hours to complete the story because i was so immersed. it also made me cry, so…
@hotdiggityschweinehund rdr2 easy? It must have put me and my buddy into an end game event right at start then without telling us. The nearest mission for us absolutely destroyed us ruining our experience of the game.
@dragonray2850they’re talking about single player, the online is a true Wild West of fuck shit
@alwest4472 There's a difference? Maybe I'll have to try single player again. I assumed it was the same experience
If an immersive mechanic is largely optional, it's more like dipping your toes in than actually immersing yourself in the world. It's asking you to care about the world rather than actually making you care, but since the writing and acting in RDR2 were so good you were already emotionally invested so the immersive mechanics were just gravy.
Honestly if not for the great writing and acting, RDR2 wouldn't be anywhere near as widely loved as it is today, and there would be a lot more heavily critical video essays about how the gameplay was nothing special and that the world felt more like a old west theme park
Skill-based matchmaking, in concept, should consistently put you in the lobbies of people of a similar skill level who challenge you to match their skill and have a good time by challenging yourself. Instead, it’s a plague upon gaming that basically engineers whether or not you win.
Games aren’t fun because you win, games are fun because you have to put in the work to win.
Yes yes and yes winning in general has always been a reward thing, I think it's good for people to feel a little risk once in a while to earn that
Because nothing uses skill based matchmaking, they use engagement based matchmaking which is a different thing entirely
@theblackdragongamer3069 yes they do?
@JGBrosGaming yes some games do, it’s literally what a ranked mode is, but what everyone is complaining about,including the original commenter, isn’t actual skill based matchmaking
Valorant is actually an example of a pure sbmm which in theory is very good but it’s completely ruined by smurfs
"Losers queue and winners queue dosen't exist"
-Someone who dosen't know how algorythms work.
I’m still genuinely sad I never got a legit Fortnite win before the bots took over, which is sad because I genuinely could have but I never had enough ways to play the game consistently thanks to my mom’s phone being the only way for me to play it.
0:44 in low level lobbies it's actually more like 80 bots vs 20 players, lol
Absolutely wild
Believe me it's even worse. If you play on console/phone at low level, YOU'RE THE ONLY HUMAN IN LOBBY
@m1hairu that's crazy lol, might as well make a singleplayer mode by that point 🤣
Number one reason why i stopped playing fartnite
difficulty idea: if you die - all your and your family member's personal information gets put on the internet, an automatic trojan virus included with the game puts a 5 million dollar bounty on your head and the game automatically explodes your pc
the best part: you will die constantly and you will never be able to win it because the final boss has infinite health
somebody hire this guy
there was that one game that would delete random programs on your pc every time you won. including but not limited to system32
How about a vr headset that kills you if you die in-game? It actually exists
@bhuvangunessee
Are you talking about in fiction or IRL? Because I've never heard of that.
@okk2005 founder of oculus vr palmer lucky made it in 2022 as a reference to sword art online (this part I'm not 100% sure), google it. Basically if you die in-game headset explodes irl and so does your head. No one's ever used the headset, for obvious reasons (I hope)
1:56 As a big Green Day fan, that was very funny
What's your favorite album? Imo Nimrod and Warning slap so hard but honestly most of their albums are awesome
Yeah
I was very surprised Green Day randomly came up I was like 'ok what?' LMFAO
I have 170+ liked songs on spotify 🪦🪦🪦🪦🪦🪫
@CrackedJust1n nimrod is so underrated, and so is 21st Century Breakdown imo 9.5/10 album
Greenday sucks
This is partly why I enjoy fighting games. Winning or losing comes down to the decisions made by both players. Every match gives you the opportunity to learn and improve
0:10 and i suck at having fps
*Dell from 2013 intensifies*
@akramabbar684
*Intel Pentium with Intel Graphics intensify*
@LeshaTheBeginner *i3 and HDD intensifies*
Epic removed bots and skill based matchmaking when they released og season 1 a couple months ago and so many people praised them and the game felt fun again, but then people complained because they want easy wins.
Thank god. Hated how hard 90s games were
18:15 only 500 hours? That's rookie numbers.
thats like one hour a week, pathetic
"If you cannot lose, did you truly win?"
0:50 Elden ring “hold my beer”
your whole argument kinda breaks down into the idea of money. Video games are no longer a passion project, theyre products. They removed the intense emotions because they dont make us much money as an algorithm. Money ruins joy in good things
Video games were never "passion projects" except for rare exceptions like Hollow Knight. They are overwhelmingly (and have always been) commercial products. They exist to make money.
This is why I love indie games
Videogames have always been made by people with passion. But they are restricted by the monetary incentive or they will lose their job. Some games let the creativity and passion shine through more than others, but it’s a product they are selling at the end of the day.
@RicochetForce This is saying nothing. All business exist to make money, all businesses were once started with a passionate founder, but not all business have retained that same passion. Video games would not exist today as we know it if that initial first console and game wasn't made by a guy with a passion for making something new.
@RicochetForcei disagree the best example is balatro, dude (yes one dude) made games for his friends and when they tried this game they told him he needed to list it because it’s fantastic. almost won game of the year. schedule 1 also is doing insane was (almost) made by 1 guy. i am working on making better versions of games that aren’t focused on income. i have a sudoku app basically done with a ranked system and no ads. you can watch an ad for an extra life in solo play but not ranked. i decided to make it because every sudoku app is stuffed full of ads and i just wanna play 😂
Nothing's more depressing thank watching aRUclipsr even the skilled ones like sypher getting nothing but bot kills for the first 5 mins of the match
Yea I'd rather play a single player game with some difficult but rewarding combat like TLOU or Dark Souls than get spoon fed kills against robots in a PVP game. It just doesn't feel rewarding without that additional level of understanding that you are fighting against real players, and once the illusion is broken, it kills the experience.
TLOU combat is art
I used to suck in most video games and had to learn how to play strategically to compensate, now i as an adult, i play better and if i use a bit of strategy like i got used to in most games the whole challenge become disappears, it feels like there are no more games made for me except competitive pvp ones, but when i play old games, then the feelling of being challenged appears again
22:00 being a god isnt fun , becoming one is fun
That's a paradox that sounds terrifying - to me - all things considered...
*_"You will be a god among men..."_*
● Harlan Wade's first words to the newly-born Point Man of F.E.A.R.
"It's about the journey, not the destination" ahh
I disagree. Just let me be god from the start
I think something to keep in mind is because the gameplay philosophy is changing when it comes to mainstream developers. Games back then were stuck on what I call the arcade game philosophy. They were made to keep you playing so you can spend more money on their game. That’s why it was so difficult. And now we are transitioning to a period we’re making it as easy as possible and keeping you in your chair constantly consuming, makes them more money. Things are finally changing. Just something I thought about. All about the money.
Edit: I made this comment before watching the video lol. And his first point of replay-ability also takes into account. My original point was just something else to think about, but I digress.
the bots in fortnite keep me on my toes, I never know if those foot steps are a silly little bot or someone who can actually kill me
Lol I never thought of it that way
Bro dont u remember before bots were u had to be always on your toes because no body was a silly boy and everyone could possibly kill you
@ I have owned fortnite since before battle royals existed, I bought into STW early access and even signed up for the alpha in 2011
@ and h like bots 😂
This literally every other match. Walking around lackadaisacal with the assumption those footsteps are a bot have cost me big time. I'm t alking Shotgun pumped into SMG in
fortnite really is built for the widest audience imaginable. Same thing happens in marvel rivals i've heard you get matched against bots every once in a while.
I think there are still plenty hard games like cs2 or the finals where sbmm is absolutely neccessary to not get destroyed by players with half a year of in game time.
Souls games laughing in the corner.
Okay, quick note:
There's all this stuff, and then there's rain world
This is one of the reasons why I play a lot of roguelikes. They have a tendency to bring in interesting difficulty options and each run lives or dies with the way that you play around the circumstances. Every single loss can tell you the mistakes that you made and even though many have a lot of RNG elements, most roguelikes have been pushed to the point where the genuinely good players can win almost every single run they start.
One of the most enjoyable parts about a game is the process of improving. It's more fun to get good at a game than it is to be good at a game.
Isaac and Risk of Rain goated
Hades is a roguelite but i just have to give a shoutout to the heat/fear system. one thing is making the game harder, another thing is choosing how you want to make the game harder
faster enemies? deadlier traps? less rng manipulation (hades gives you a lot of options to inject choice into how your run goes, so this is actually really brutal)? time limits? pick your favourite, and then some more, for the statues
Rogue lineage
I don't hate bots in games like Fortnite, but there shouldn't be as much as there are, it should be like 20 max, having more than half the lobby be braindead AI sometimes is a joke, another issue is sometimes when you get to the endgame and its the last guy against you, you come to find out it's a bot, which is so anticlimactic and lame, all bots should be wiped from the game automatically by the final 10 players...
20 max is the perfect number
SO TRUEEEE i was saying this like 2 days ago
Part of the reason for the bots is to decrease matchmaking queue times. It's much faster and easier for the MM algorithm to find 15-20 players(4-5 squads) who meet some basic connection and skill requirements, then fill out the match with bots than it is to just find 70+ players. Not to say it can't be done with a game as popular as FN, but more people would complain about getting wiped in the first few minutes of a match just to spend 5 more minutes loading into the next match where it happens again every time they play.
To be fair if a bot got to final circle you are probably in a very low skill lobby right? Since you know that bot had to presuably kill at least some players to get there. I guess technically you could have also killed a bunch of people or have ratted and already killed the person who killed everyone.
The bots offing themselves when it get to final X would be possible i assume, but would it actually be a better play experience to just randomly win when you get to top 10 as all the bots end themselves?
Something interesting that happened is that when Fortnite OG released for the first few days Skill based matchmaking was disabled and it was hard but it felt like how Fortnite was when I first played where I wasn’t good and I had to think about every move I did so I can stay alive and winning I felt accomplished but of course they eventually put in Skill based Matchmaking I just wish there was an option to turn it off
Bro here literally breaking the Geneva Convention to get a minor Edge 19:30
meanwhile i can't stop dying in all my games
Back in 2018, I remember seeing my girlfriend (who never played online games) really enjoying Garden Warfare 2 multiplayer on my Xbox One when she came to my house. I always saw her playing & she kept getting better match after match. She started jumping to avoid getting shot, took cover, waited for enemies to run out of ammo, etc.
But nowadays, when we mostly play Fortnite, I honestly don't see her-or myself-getting better. It feels like the only game I can play with her aside from co-op stuff, which sucks. Epic spoon-fed us so carefully & deliberately that it made our skills worse. With all the bots, we don't jump, we don't take cover-we just play. It sucks. To the point that I don’t even think this is "gaming" anymore-it’s more like an interactive movie where we press buttons. I say this because the outcome of your actions always feels artificial in these games. You just know that if you do good in one match, you’ll do worse in the next-or vice versa. That didn’t used to happen. Before, you never knew what could happen, because your actions always had consequences. Since the suits took over this industry & discovered is more profitable than movies, sadly I think gaming is destined to die, and is already dying.
You should stop playing fortnite it has been bad since 2020
You should try TF2, especially if you can find some good community servers.
15:21 works in ranked, not casual
Algorithms do work from a monetary perspective but it robs most players from a rewarding gaming experience. Ofcourse there are smaller exceptions to the rule, but it doesn’t compare to the majority. And on top of that a lot of people who are not tapped in to this stuff don’t even know how it’s affecting their gaming experience.
YES YES YES if more people actually knew how matchmaking worked I'm sure sbmm wouldn't be nearly as successful with engagement as it's been
Every second kill in Fortnite is named anonymous[Random number]
Im supprised to hear Demolition man was soo hard for most.
I don't dislike the idea of being a god in a video game the difference here is the con. It's one thing to mess around in creative with godpowers and have fun with it. It's another for a game to give you that power and sell it as an accomplishment especially when it comes to multiplayer bots and matchmaking. I only want to be a god if I have the knowledge and awareness of it and thats what i want to do in that moment rather than an underhanded selling of real pvp when it's mostly bots when I want a realistic experience.
in Rdr 2 there really should be a hardcore mode to make it super realistic, but there is a fine line between difficulty and pure inconvenience, the player does not need to be punished that hard, just hard enough.
Rdd2 is unique tho, is more of a movie than a game lowkey
Nah, it's more like a book.
rdr1 had a hardcore mode, which is one of the many reasons why its still the GOAT and much better than that interactive movie
Man I swear to god every time I play a new release I immediately turn the game off after a couple of hours of play because of how flagrant the "hand-holding" has become. This is why I love the older GTA titles despite all the flaws they have the unpredictability in gameplay and the absurd difficulty of some missions is what makes it engaging. I played through RDR2 twice and on my second playthrough I barely touched any of the upgrades or legendary animals and still felt like I was the terminator
Try out black myth wukong, you'll miss that guiding hand
@SunSh1neFN that's literally the easiest souls like game you can buy. all bosses besides like 3 take like only 3 attempts too kill.
If a new 3d universe gta game comes out with a bigger map and more shit to do I will sell my kidneys for it
@SunSh1neFNI can‘t believe, you recommended Wukong over Lies of P.
You want a game that doesnt hold your hand? Try warframe. And then tell,if you like hand-holding,or not
I'll never forget the feeling of absolute dread and horror of playing Elite Dangerous in open (the gamemode where you can meet other players), jumping to a highly popular star system and seeing a hollow triangle pop up on your radar, knowing damn well that hollow triangle is a player trying to catch and kill you for no reason other than being extremely sadistic.
Well, Fortnite added Hatsune Miku so all’s forgiven
Enter the gungeon is very hard, I hope they keep that challenge in the sequel
The sequel is exit the gungeon, no?
Whoa, i forgot about that Halo Breaking Benjamin song. I forget what it's called, but it's in the background staring at 9:33
1:04 go play helldivers 2. youll remember you old relationship with the you died screen
Sending in an eagle...
Was just thinking the same thing.
What about here?
FOR SUPER EARTH
The shotguns absolutely slap every single termite silly man
This is exactly why I quit playing fortnite about 2 seasons or less after they added bots to the game. It was too boring and unpredictable to know if I should try hard on this one person, or just shoot at them because they're an idiot bot. It felt fake and took the thrill out of the game.
21:19 innocent moon caught me off guard lol
Old COD never had SBMM. in a 2010 interview with engadget Vonderhaar said "There is no skill-based matchmaking. There never has been in any CoD game."
Considering he was the lead designer at Treyarch, I think he would know. And considering there was no incentive to lie back then, I think he would be telling the truth. Certainly seems more credible some random tweet reply from an engineer trying to quell complaints about SBMM in the modern era that people cite as proof SBMM has always existed.
ive seen people complaining about sbmm in videos dating as far back as black ops 2, would you say these videos are completely based on nothing until mw2019?
@AmyCherryLMAO 2010 was before black ops 2. Blops 2 supposedly had SBMM based on the SPM of the party leader although I believe it was removed shortly after launch to improve queue times.
Although having tested it back in the day, I couldn't tell any actual difference in game. Advanced Warfare is the first game with noticeable SBMM.
Everytime i play a new game i just put it on ultra difficulty because its the same as normal but an extra title amd less health
I’m not going to play a game where it tries to psychologically manipulate me into playing more through literal dead internet theory
1:28 "difficulty is dying"
The humble ultrakill:
I wish my life was so easy that I would want my video games to be harder lmao.
This is why Elden Ring is one of my favourite games of all time. It completely nails that experience of becoming a god through trials and tribulations that I don't think any other game gets close to really replicating.
I have bad news...
@eeeeee1028what happened?
@aguywithnolife9101 There's a joke among the elden ring community being that it's the easiest game in the "series".
Stupidly unreasonably large health bars and lingering hitboxes is far from good.
@dubbie7879 as someone on NG3 I feel comfortable saying no. Elden ring is easy. just spam R2 or L2 and you win every fight. im not a sweat or anything but I struggle more with Ragnarok then with elden ring.
9:25 halo didnt invent its control scheme. Star trek voyager: elite force on the PS1 did.
Something that saddens me about fortnite is that back in chapter 2, a youtuber by the name of sypherpk had made a video about bots and how are they a problem but after the video he recived a massive backlash for talking about bots negatively which probably why he no longer crtizise, and since the majorty wants bots epic will defintly keep them and increase them, which is evident by when fortnite OG relased (for like the 3rd time or so) epic made it with no bots but quickly reverted because people hated the fact there are no free kills and now they have to learne and practice instead of the game play itself. It is really sad that epic can add a weapon that let the game play itself and people call it the most fun thing to ever existed, as much as I understande that not everyone can play enough so they could improve or learne the game and just want to play, it shouldnt be at the cost of not making it fun to others who want challeng, it should be balanced were both can have what they want without ones feeling left out because they cant, or dont have time for it.
Yeah I was really exited for og purely because there wouldn’t be bots and it was only like that for about 2-3 days because all the bad players just complained
@Agatha-z3g yeah and I belive after they complained they stoped playing the mode anyway and say stuff like "og mode bad" and "this mode is made for nostalgia only". I miss when back in the day when a bad player complain they tell him to get good instead of wanting epic to make skill less weapons and ruin the game just for the sake of one sided fun.
Then don't complain about sbmm
*Cries while fighting Isidora, The Voice of the Dead*
respect for doing this video without mentioning dark souls, its honestly starting to become a cop out in video essays like this
bots being in fortnite is the main reason i quit this game. the funny thing is i won my first game of fortnite that i played in C3 S4 but it was bots...
How bots make it to top 2 is beyond me
@CrackedJust1n I feel like its because they dont rush people anymore, It feels like they havent re-programmed ai since they were first added 6 years ago in chapter 2
Play ranked then. It's not that complicated
Ngl, your channel's quite entertaining/informative, man. At least every now and then aint gonna get stuck in my usual monotone routine all along. Gg and keep going
When it comes to difficulty, one of my favorites has to be "Lethal" from Ghost of Tsushima because it forces you to use the tools given to you and it balances the game by making you die faster but enemies as well. You should try it out if you haven't, it's an amazing experience.
I've heard Ghosts of Tsushima is hard on the normal difficulty, that's insane lol good for you
@CrackedJust1nNah i played ghost of tsushima on hard the game is pretty easy. Granted I haven't played it on lethal its basically an assassin's creed game.
Rainvow six vegas 1 and 2s difficultys also made both you and the enemy die quicker.
@CrackedJust1nthe game is not remotly hard. Esp conaidering you have checkpoints every like 5 minutes.
10:27 OH MY GOD YOU BROUGHT BACK MEMORIES I DID THAT EXACT THING
5:03
The NPC stuck inside the pillar.
When it comes to fortnite I dont care. I just wanna relax
This is the fundamental issue with people who complain about easy games, not everyone wants to sweat their ass off
@Th3_b3an
That's why epic should make a mode that's specifically just bots for if you just wanna turn your brain off and play some br casually
OH WAIT THEY DID. THRICE
Playground, Battle Lab, Creative Royale.
And they fucking killed them. ALL of them.
why is this channel so underrated
Thank you for the nice comment Erdna 2 :)
So true
tarkov is the most difficult game ive ever played im 200 hours in and still havent even touched half the maps
even pve is difficult and tarkov just feels so rewarding to get good at
I really gotta play tarkov
@ it’s very fun but your first couple hundred hours is literally just learning most of the game
pve tarkov is really good for learning it but you will have to watch some RUclips videos, offline mode with bots turned off is also good for exploring
i really don’t wanna deal with the rampant cheating situation which is why i like pve more right now but as i get better i may turn to pvp whe
you do try
i’ve literally never had an adrenaline intense game, tarkov just having so many realistic features and one of the only live service games that doesn’t have a battle pass
if tarkov had unicorn farts like bo6 i think id quit the game lmao
if you try tarkov good luck bro it’s a very steep learning curve but it is extremely rewarding when all of its complicated in game systems come together and you actually feel like u know what ur doing
my friend let me play tarkov when the wipe first started and it was really fun
then when the flea market went back up, we stopped, and like my father told me about the birds and the bees, she told me about the cheaters, and that god forsaken wiggle...
@VenViViris28 lmao that’s why i play pve especially after the recent ai update that removed 200m aimbot from scavs
before that pve was basically just fighting raiders 24/7 but now it feels a lot more similar to pvp just without a lot of the bs in the regular game
another reason i like pve more is because a lot of the pvp fights are really just whoever makes less noise and sits still for 20 minutes wins but on pve you can be a lot more aggressive even with bad load outs
Thats why you do self imposed challenges like No Coins in Mario, Nuzlockes in pokemon, or whatever abomination I’m doing in miitopia
11:53 You just showed an example of how algorithms are good for society though
Payday 2 Death Sentence will forever beat me up. Yeah, I've beaten a few heists in loud on it, but it really shows how hard gaming used to be just half a decade ago.
Yeah, of course, because high difficulty is when you either use meta or die from 2 bullets, while wasting half your mag offing just one regular grunt... No, thanks.
I think having easier difficulties as an option is important. There are some people who just flat out, can’t engage with a product at a high skill level, or don’t want to put in the time, but still want to experience the art at a less invested level.
However, higher difficulties should always be the norm. Not because every game needs to be Dark Souls, but because rising to a challenge is more fun than having victory brought to you.
Ease should _an_ option, not the only option
Well put! Easy should be an option but not the only option
"Rising to a challenge is more fun than having victory brought to you."
Let's not start making absolute statements. This does not apply to as many people as you think. The most popular games on the planet are easy and simple.
@RicochetForcethis whole video is about that absolute statement that you’re saying not to make, you just want to argue.
Relavently easy should also not be the default option. As you generally want the default difficulty to be how the game is designed and balanced around.
Easier or harder difficulties can be bad, but the default difficulty should be balance for a fair experience for your core audience.
a lot of games put "this is the intended experience" in the difficulty description. it's never "normal" or easy, but one of the hardest ones. i always go with that difficulty.
my doom mod defaults to two difficulties below the intended experience too because people complained it was too hard
i have still never played skyrim in my life wdym replaying?
Never too late to start!
Perfect time to play oblivion or morrowind.
The problem is humans avoid activities where they lose even if they enjoy them more. Just like how people naturally minimize effort even to their own detriment
The amount of people who tell me they are legendary at fortnite when i know they have bots and or children is ludicrous.
It's funny how history has repeated itself. I recall these same arguments during the Xbox 360/PS3 era, roughly 2008 - 2011. People were saying Triple-A games were too hand-holdy and easy. Things got shaken up thanks to From Software in 2011 with the release of Dark Souls, encouraging games to be difficult again.
These days, though, I usually repeat myself a lot when folks complain about the modern market. We now have both a rich history of older games to play and indie games that are challenging and engaging.
You make good points. But what about Souls-like, Rogue-likes etc? It's very trendy to have a hardcore difficulty at the moment, especially among indie games. But for most big budget games, yeah I agree. And Skyrim is an especially good example when compared to Morrowind, which didn't have quest markers, and made you start each town with a low reputation so you needed to convince people to even talk to you. That was something else.
I'm glad Morrowind was my first elder scrolls game because it gave me the opportunity to appreciate everything skyrim is and isn't
Morrowind was awesome
Uh what? Theres no town reputation system in morrowind? Theres just the disposition system eith each individual character.
@robertharris6092 I didn't say there's a "town reputation system". lol
People always made me feel weird for hating the bots like I was a sweat but this video puts it perfectly. There’s no thrill in outsmarting a mindless machine designed to help you win and you have to invest more time in the game to get those genuine player interactions that are memorable because they play out in a variety of ways. Those moments where you hesitate to shoot the low health non threatening player looking at the wall waiting to be executed. Or predicted a player would make a move that you set up a perfect counter for. Solid video essay
“Video essay” and it’s just a guy talking about something. Bro this is just a video.
I think bots can be done well, but I agree that fighting the ones that just exist to feed points (Fortnite) and the ones that are super inconsistent (Ready or Not had AI that were sometimes braindead and sometimes capable of wiping out your entire squad with a Makarov) really doesn't feel good. Making the AI feel believable (I can't think of any games that excel with this) or leaning into their non-player nature (Titanfall) can really help avoid the pitfalls that have been mentioned here.
@ngikjegjangbiueaWhy not copy what Tencent does with their games and only have bots if you are new and later just send them in a multi-player match
Realizing how sbmm/eomm works feels like putting on the sunglasses from the They Live movie.
"difficulty is Dying in video games"
elder ring,hollow knight and armored core in the corner: 👁👄👁
17:34 while I understand you point….. grown adults who work a 40+ hour week jobs and want to play for a little bit to chill after work with a game that isn’t Fortnite need modes where their game isn’t telling them to do what they do in real life 😂 the sims did that
what are you trying to say games should not be difficult cause of casual players thats the entire issue with modern gaming most AAA games nowadays are just straight up boring and not worth it cause of the fact it is so accesable to casual players.
@pascalstrijker3985Blaming it all on the casuals of course
@Xyzenax ofcourse a game made for everyone is a game for no one
@wolfmendroiteka3985
Holy unemployed
Just-1n TIme
*Just1ns all over the place*
@CrackedJust1n NGL i have your channel if i ever get bored Just-1n case
skill based machmaking be like:
-lose game
-lose game
-somehow win a game
-get thrown into a lobby full of sweats that wombo combo your a$$
-lose game
-lose game
where did the sweats come from they are all good so would they ever deal with bots.
I agree with him, like knowing when you're going to win is just bad and you don't get the same accomplishment it feels like a math class
bro is out here casually shitting on everyone’s favorite games😭😂