It’s kind of wild that in 2025, game difficulty is still treated as a rigid, one-size-fits-all setting. Players have such different needs and playstyles that locking the whole experience behind “easy/normal/hard” just doesn’t make sense anymore.
We’ve seen glimpses of progress—like the Tomb Raider reboot series, which let you set puzzle difficulty separately from combat. That’s the direction we need more of: modular design where players can fine-tune exploration, AI challenge, puzzle hints, waypoints, and resource scarcity independently. Someone who wants guidance and accessibility should be able to have it, while someone else can strip all of that away for a pure challenge.
Case in point: I was playing Control Ultimate Edition recently, and the waypoint system is flat-out broken. The in-game map is more confusing than helpful, and it’s not just me—countless forums mention the same frustration. That’s not smart design; that’s artificial difficulty. Creating confusion isn’t the same thing as creating challenge. The old “git gud” mindset doesn’t fit the reality of modern gaming.
At the end of the day, everyone spends their hard-earned money to enjoy a game. Yet too often, developers bend to a vocal minority that equates frustration with quality, making games harder for the sake of it. True accessibility and good design mean giving players the freedom to tailor their experience—not forcing everyone into the same box
