Insanely Hard God of War: Ascension Trial Likely to be Patched

It turns out that one section of God of War: Ascension is a bit too hard for the gaming populace. That section is the Trial of Archimedes, a multi-wave battle that takes place near the end of the game that has no checkpoints and few health drops. GoW message boards and fan sites alike have been flooded with complaints saying that the trial is near impossible. Heck, even noted reviewer Adam Sessler said he spent over six hours attempting to beat the trial!

According to Destructoid, the God of War team has taken notice. Lead developer Todd Pappy said that he himself tuned the difficulty of that segment, but he did not mean for it to be so hard. As a result, that section of the game is going to be patched very soon in order to reduce its difficulty.

However, this sets an interesting and somewhat disturbing precedent. We, as gamers, have effectively complained about the difficulty in a game so much that the developer is toning it down for us. This has happened before in fighting games and some shooters and sports games, but those were just general tweaks to the game’s A.I. controlled bots, not an alteration of a pre-programmed game instance.

So which God of War: Ascension is the real God of War: Ascension. Is it the old difficult one that will soon be lost to the ether of time after the patch or the new defanged one that the gaming populace has cried out for? What will happen to gamers who preferred the hard version. More to the point, will this be how games evolve in the future? Will difficult games simply be nerfed by popular demand? As veterans of the NES age, we hope not. The Trial of Archimedes is hard but it has nothing on the Battletoads speeder bike!