For anyone with this opinion, I know this will likely not change your mind but I hope in some way this shift of perspective might.
Card games.
Yugioh is the most premium example, but all of them have fallen into this trap at this point. The Yugioh of your childhood doesn’t and hasn’t existed for decades, why? Because all card games follow this montra, because if they ever make a set that isn’t more broken than the last, nobody buys it.
Now, a game that used to be a back and forth of numbers, playing funny monster cards and setting spell cards before passing back to your opponent, extending to 15+ turn games that, to be fair weren’t exactly ‘skill expressive’ for yugioh but allowed anyone to get into it. Has since devolved into 1-3 turn games, a player comboing off for 15-20 minutes, the other player playing 1-3 cards that either out that board due to their obscene broken nature, or get countered. And then either THEY then combo off to finish the game, combo off enough to lock their opponent out of the game after breaking their board, or surrender.
This is the direction Darktide is taking, and this is the direction every single game will take if you ‘just buff everything and never nerf’. Another fantastic example that I’ve brought up in a few posts is Destiny 2. That game is functionally unplayable, as throwing a grenade results in 3-4 particle effect aoe explosion detonations that wipe the screen, resulting in 5-10 buffs flashing across the side of your screen, all of which making you immortal as you then activate your melee ability (functionally a second grenade at this point), do the exact same thing, and then shoot your gun maybe, and that’s only if you didn’t just get enough of your Transcendance bar to ignore your guns entirely. The game can’t provide good levels of combat challenge, because you shift between two waky equilibrium of ‘everything dies before me and I am a god’ and ‘the enemy just 1 shot me because they physically can’t hurt me other wise this is bull’.
Havoc was already doing that in it’s previous iterations, but was made rather fun/exhilarating as you had ways to somewhat mitigate it, and if you didn’t want the tightrope walk you could play lower level havocs or go play Auric for fun. Now, Arbite is so obscenely busted that Auric gets tripped over so long as theirs just one with a dog on the team, Havoc gets tripped over in the highest difficulties by a pack of them not even using/abusing Golden Toughness. And unlike Ogryn, who you can say is at least ‘balanced’ around the fact they can’t go very fast so can still get caught out if they aren’t careful, this class has passive movement speed for breathing and is able to go at mock ten with gob tones of stamina thanks to their weapon choices, and has a dog that gives them infinite forgiveness as it does half their job for them and functions as a free grenade every 5 or so seconds.
If one wants further proof, see my reply here:
I saw a comment by Ragnarok101 in another forum that put it succinctly (paraphrasing a bit though as I don’t wanna go find it again), but until the Arbite update, Ogryns where a bit overtuned but fun to play and still felt fun to have on the team as they where slow, so all the tinies got to get to the enemies first, have a bit of fun, and Ogryn’s then cleaned up after them. A good balance was struck, life was good, and while outliers like the Duelling Sword existed, they wouldn’t outright ruin games, just make them go a bit faster and make people complain about their efficiency on the top end.
Arbite broke all that over their Knee and said ‘f that, I’m the captain now’. They push faster than any class outside a Zealot (who might get a few melee swipes in before they catch up), they are as immortal as an Ogryn, they have a dog that AoE clears waves every pounce thanks to applying 8 BLEED AND ELECTROCUTION + BRITTLENESS as they sail through the wave to their target (the Veteran Grenade applies 6, in case anyone was wondering, and that’s on a 60 second cooldown unless you’re in stupidly high havoc with Demo Team). Don’t want the dog? Bam, enough stats to make even the Ogryn blush, and a trip mine that functions as a ‘smite but good’, and stuns literally everything for 15s while being on a 60 second CD. Let Castigators 80% Damage reduction carry you through any of the time in between, and you functionally can’t die.
There’s been complaints about Auric being ‘toned down’, and sure, the story missions being in the QP pool makes some games feel sparse and garbo. But this feeling isn’t because of Auric (despite some screencaps coming from story missions and seeming like the enemies where halved), this is because of Arbite. I open my steam replay, go to the last Auric game I played of the night (which felt like ‘slightly above a normal damnation, maybe’), this is the amount of kills.
We tripped over this. The one death was Ser-Stoic pushing forward a bit to far, not timing the dodge for a Crusher overhead, and and us simply needing to deal with the wave and not quite being able to get to him before enough of the slams brought down his HP. Beyond that? Smooth sailing, 3k kills, walked through like a slighty stiff breeze. All thanks to our canine companions and our ability to mash the attack button after everything got stunned by them.
You buff every class up to this level, game becomes unplayable. People will be running 40 level Havocs ‘just for the fun of it’, tossing on their Infantry Lasgun that cleaves through the wave and sets everything on fire on weakspot hit, while you shout and everything gets knocked over and electrocuted and set on fire. Zealot casts invis and suppresses everything on screen, before popping out and doing it again, while Psyker gets hit in the face by a Crusher overhead and goes from 20-60 peril because of ‘warp shielding’ or some sh!t and laughs as his Inferno staff now brittles to target by 80%. The director is crying and lagging excessively as Poxwalkers where replaced with crushers 8 patches ago, and they die so fast the difference is hardly noticed beyond the model being hard to see past. The token Arbite is still brought along because dogs are annoying and it’s nice to invalidate them completely, but everyone still complains about Trappers, who are now spammed 30 at a time just to give any semblance of difficulty while 15 snipers sit on the roof across from you and all die to one BB that applies 8 stacks of Soulblaze to everything around them.
This is not a game anymore, this is a VFX simulator, and if you want that, you can go play Destiny 2. It is that, it has been that for half a decade, and continues to double down on being that. But people came to this game because it provided challenge AS WELL as a bit of OP fun, and stuck with this game because it let you bounce between both. That isn’t the case anymore, and what went from ‘a minor re-adjustment to the big man and some touch ups on some weapons’ became ‘Arbite solo wins the entire game by itself no contest’. I had a game yesterday where all of my team mates DC’d (it was an inferno QP mission, half way through the floor became lava and they all died and understandably left, I decided to press on because ‘f it why not’). I won that match. I trounced, the rest of the mission, and the only times I was scared was the two trapper spawns that happened between me and the exit. I solo’d the captain at the end, nothing but bots at my side. And I say this not as a ‘pro gamer flexing’, I should have died. When nobody else filled the rando slots (likely because haha server), I should have been dead to rights by something, and any time before this I would have been. I wasn’t, I won, and I laughed a depressed laugh and gave myself a ‘gg’ in the chat before leaving.
This game will become that, and the funniest Irony imaginable is if they go through and over buff everyone to the point of this game dying off, then finally release solo mod because ‘why not? players can’t die anyway, might as well let them have all the kills’.