Imagine if when you played Elden Ring and it had 3 difficulties, Easy, Normal, Hard. And to unlock Normal mode you had to beat the game on Easy mode first, for Hard you have to do Normal mode. While all of the damage, health of the mobs increase by 50% while you do 50% less damage because of the health increase and have to get the same items you already got from the previous difficulty so you can do the damage you were doing previously.
No one would play Elden Ring.
Now if we added the seasonal progression loop on top of this…
and the games that work like that add more content, its not the same item but 5% more powerful. also these games release in a state where the players can actually play said content without requiring repeated nerfs over the span of 6 months.
and not all games like this are pay 2 win but a majority of the games that work like this are pay to win.
No it’s the exact same game just harder, no new levels or bosses or mechanics.
Again what? Most of these games like elden ring that you pointed out have no cash shop or micro transactions in them and are for the most part single player games.
in all the games ive played that have NG+ they’ve added additional weapons and armors that are vastly more powerful than the default game mode, and most games with NG+ have a reason to do NG+ in for form of canonical endings.
and in wow this is all you get now for pushing up the difficulty.
Ok so as you haven’t played them let me list them out for you.
-20 mins till dawn
-Ace combat
-Bioshock
-Cuphead
-deadspace
-DMC
-Doom
-Wolfenstien
-Dragon Quest
-I miss the sunrise
-Kirby
-Max Payne
-Mass Effect
-Mega Man
-Silent hill.
Plenty more but you get the point. Your idea of nobody would play it is clearly wrong as all these games have had success. I even picked games from multiple genres to shut down that retort before it even started.
I think people would still play it. Because the fun in games is to have a challenge. If you start a puzzle you would not have any joy if you reveal the solution even though you can say you finished it.
Humans are very predictable in that matter. They have fun to face reasonable challenge. If something is to easy it’s boring, if it’s to hard it’s frustrating. WoW does a pretty good job in giving everyone a challenge without boring them. But if people push themselves over there suited difficulty level it gets frustrating very quickly.
I raid Mythic because Normal and Heroic are so anesthetized of difficulty that they have no tangible challenge to offer me, and act as stepping stones to split for tier and items. Afterwards, you go into Mythic and the tuning is (generally) tight enough to require actually playing well to make progress.
Usually.
Then there’s tiers like this one where everything pre-Smolderon was kind of a joke, and Tindral and Fyrakk were like facing Vegeta and Goku back to back.
Some people would still play. There are folks that like a challenge.
I usually only get a few mythic bosses each Tier, but moving up to Mythic allows me to have fun by choosing additional difficulty up to my comfort level. This way I can feel like I am actually participating and contributing to the success of a group. Whereas normal and heroic are usually too easy to do this and many players can easily beat them with minimal strategy. (Unless you are trying to do something like pug them without voice comms as your sole method of progression.)
This expansion Heroic has also felt easier than it normally does and several guilds I have been in quit once they achieved AOTC which left Mythic as the only place to go if I wanted to continue raiding.