It baffles me that they create a great setting with a compelling story and then go “Nah, too easy, let’s push the difficulty to eleven, leet players only amirite?”

People who play for fun, to enjoy a moderate challenge and a good plot are prevented from doing so. I know about the “assist”, but the point is I should not have to google “why is Control so damn hard” to find out about it, nor should I have to dig in the menu system for help.

Games have been using difficulty settings since before Wolfenstein 3D, where “normal” is a balanced difficulty that an average gamer can handle. Experienced gamer can go for “Difficult” or “Nightmare”. What is gained by overpowering the player and preventing from enjoying the rest of the game?

I know this is nothing new, a lot of 80’s games were vicious, but when your game was 10 levels long and had to fit in 16KB, you had to make it challenging to keep the player playing. But in the mean time technology evolved and developers learned new ways to make engaging games that don’t rely on simple dificulty++ gimmicks. Or at least I they should have learned.

Maybe I’m simply bad at shooters? I don’t think I am, I’ve been playing for ages and I’m still quite good at it.

Ok, rant over. I’d love to love Control, but I can’t because it is not for me.