I hope they’ve gone further towards the old combat style and stealth gameplay. I never liked the new one of just being an ‘assassin’ by openly running through a fort and stabbing each enemy with spastic animations until their arbitrary and chonky healthbar depletes.

@surely_not_a_bot will remember that

No different than someone calling a janitor a “sanitation engineer”. Fancy titles make people happy.

“sanitation engineer”

It’s to keep design space open and to minimize developer work.

Let’s say we decide to keep an overperforming gun. It does all the things. It has all the ammo, all the damage, all fire rate, all the reload speed. Now, all future weapons have to be made with that as a consideration. Why would players choose this new weapon, when there’s the old overperformer? The design space is being controlled and minimized by the overperformer. Players will complain if new weapons aren’t on the level of the overperformer.

Now, let’s say we have ten weapons with one clear overperformer. Now, we can either nerf a single weapon to bring it in line with the others, or buff nine weapons to attempt to bring them up to the level of the overperformer. Assuming the balance adjustments of each weapon are the same amount of work, that’s 9x the effort. However, if we assume we do this extra work to satisfy players, now we have ten overperforming guns and players find the game too easy, so now we also have to buff enemies to match. However, the game isn’t designed to handle these increase in difficulty. Players complain if we just add more health to enemies, so we have to do other things like increase enemy count, but adding more enemies increases performance issues. It’s a cascading problem.

I consider nerfs a necessary evil. It’s absurd to ask developers to always buff weapons and give them so much work when they could be developing actual additions to the game. Sometimes, a weapon really does need a nerf.

Yeah, the title of this post, the meme’s upper text, and the rest are all at odds and I’m just confused as to what OP is going for.

Is the point that consoles are the AAA industry and services normal people with normal needs? How does this mean we should boycott it?

Are we being tongue-in-cheek? Are we not supposed to boycott the AAA industry?

Why does this meme single out ‘console peasants’ as normal people? Is normal bad? Is irregular bad? Is PC bad? But PC gamers also care about gameplay and are regular people? How much sarcasm is supposed to be here?

OP, WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

Not really, disappointing also includes a failure to fulfill hopes, not just expectations. You can expect an outcome and also be disappointed by it.