Right — and I agree, it’s a good move — because a difficulty slider means the game was made with one mode in mind, and the player isn’t sure unless one is tagged “this is the way we want you to play” or something like that, and the others have dumb changes to make the game easier or harder.

Usually “normal” and “medium” means the default, but I don’t think it’s always like that. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the hardest difficulty is called “Give Me Deus Ex,” which implies that is the one they designed the game around. Likewise, the original Deus Ex just had sliders masked as buttons: Medium meant everyone did the same damage, what it says on the tin. Realistic meant everyone did more damage. Easy meant you did more damage and took less, and Hard meant you did less and took more. Easy is a fine way to play, but Hard is dumb. As a veteran player, I play DX1 on Realistic. That’s not a flex, the game is almost 30 years old. I’m not even that good at it, I just know where the enemies are and I always get the drop on them.

These days I usually just turn on all the assist stuff and the difficulty slider way down. I don’t care. Life’s hard enough, I don’t need my game telling me I’m not good enough. I play games to escape from real life bullshit. I’m 100% there for the story, not the challenge.

Control wasn’t originally like this, AFAIK… but with the Ultimate Edition you can straight up make yourself invulnerable. I own it on Steam, but my computers are Macs. Which it runs on. At 540p. Yeah… I like that they support Mac, but I’ll wait for a sale on Xbox. The game deserves better than 540p.

Isn’t that exactly what the first control did?