Oh, actually, speaking about difficulty.
Did anyone else notice for Resident Evil 7 one of the pre-order bonuses is having the hardest difficulty unlocked from the beginning? There's also that item 'survival' pack thing, but I find that a little odd. I really don't care too much about the pre-order stuff, I will be pre-ordering the Deluxe Edition of RE7 on Steam when it's available to get the bonus post-release episode & short story episodes, but I find the difficulty thing to be interesting, maybe not the smartest move on Capcom's part, but something to talk about. As a pre-order it kind of fails since it feels like, why lock people out of it from the start otherwise? And it's unlockable anyway, how come?
But then it being unlockable, and a pre-order bonus, makes me wonder how it differs from the normal game. It makes it seem like there's some big differences in the game's hardest difficulty. More-so, Capcom have done big differences in difficulty before, Revelations 1 fiddled with Infernal Difficulty which made big changes to enemy placement/number, and item placement, and some much tougher enemies appeared much earlier in the game. Revelations 2 also did some things with enemy placement, it included some trickier placed enemies on the hard difficulty to make it harder.Then some older Capcom horror games had this; REmake had harder enemy placements and less health and ammo items on hard, Director's Cut had an arranged mode, Haunting Ground & Clock Tower 3 had recolored versions of their stalkers with much harder AI behavoir and new attacks they could do on you when playing on their unlockable hard difficulty modes.
And since they have an unlockable hardest difficulty, but will let this difficulty be available from the start if you pre-order, does imply to me that maybe there's some big differences in RE7's Hardest difficulty compared to its other difficulties, like maybe some remixed elements, different enemy placement, maybe if more personalized enemies they have new challenges to them, item placement differences, etc. And I am going to pre-order and I will have it unlocked from the start, and when I play these games I like to play from the default highest difficulty available, so I'm really debating if I should do my first playthrough on this difficulty for a real blind challenge with excitement and tension, or if I should just do my first playthrough on the non-unlockable hardest difficulty and then do that one for the next playthrough.
I think I need to know more about RE7 and its hardest difficulty to fully make this judgement, but I think it's a bit odd it's an early-unlock pre-order bonus, and I'm wondering what that might imply for the difficulty itself, and debating if I should go for it on my first run or not. If it's just the same game, but harder, then I probably would. But I would love for it to make some huge changes to the game design to be harder, with additional things and changes, but if it does that then maybe it'd be best for the second run, but part of me hopes it has severe differences for replayability.