Helldivers 2 Director Defends Elden Ring Difficulty Always Cater to a Select Audience
Gluttons for punishment.
The topic of difficulty inevitably crops up whenever FromSoftware drops a new release, and we once again find ourselves knee-deep in that old discourse. The director of one of the more mechanically unforgiving PS5 games of 2024, Helldivers 2, has defended the design choices made in Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree expansion with the familiar refrain: "A game for everyone is a game for no one."
Arrowhead director Johan Pilestedt popped up on Twitter to disagree with an unsuspecting account's opinion. In response to Indoor_Carrot's completely valid take that they only felt relief when defeating a boss in Dark Souls, not accomplishment, Pilestedt explained the secret to success is actually in catering to a select audience; in the case of both studios' fans, sadists, gluttons for punishment who glory in overcoming impossible-seeming odds, the more brutal, the better. Pilestedt says that "good game design is evoking emotion more than anything" in another thread, and we find ourselves agreeing with that sentiment.
Read the full article on pushsquare.com