The difference being the PS4 wasn’t backwards compatible. The remaster was intended for people who hadn’t and couldn’t play the PS3 version.

PS5 is backwards compatible, making this a little more bullshit.

There’s also a huge risk of this being misapplied. I remember way back in PS2 days, I was struggling with a jumping puzzle in the original God of War so much so that the game jumped in with a prompt offering to turn down difficulty. But turning down the difficulty in God of War reduces combat difficulty, nothing to do with the huge friggin’ hole I kept falling into from mis-timing jumps.

Honestly, every game I’ve played that offers scaling difficulty based on performance has been because I sucked at the platforming parts that they couldn’t make easier with a setting. Maybe it’s a hint that I should stop playing platformers.

Jaffe always struck me as a perpetual adolescent. The two GoW games he worked on were great for the time, but the stories were shallow excuses to showcase as much gore as possible. His other big property, Twisted Metal, was genre-defining gameplay but any narrative was just edgelord violence and/or crass humor.

The last “big” project I remember coming down the pipe from him was Drawn to Death, which took his signature juvenile tastes and combined them with horrible gameplay and eye-blistering art direction. As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t worked on a game since.

I’m not saying the new GoW games are perfect, but I wouldn’t say Jaffe has a trusted critical eye.

I think that’s more about WotC giving up on cons and tourneys than giving up on artists. If they’re having events at all, they’re not putting as much money into them as they used to.