devtrackers.gg
I'm just gonna put this appeal out there:
If you guys really want to have a certain difficulty for the game, please consider tying that vision to some kind of unique and separate difficulty/mode/modifier where it's clearly advertised. Maybe look at other games like Darktide and its Special Operations, for ideas on how that could work.
"A game for everyone is a game for no-one" is a wonderful mentality, but making things feel so meek to use risks the game becoming basically for no-one anyway, you've got a really good audience here who are all loving the game, making things feel more fun in general won't kill your vision of the game, there are always creative workarounds in situations like this to keep most people happy. Many of us aren't asking for a power trip, we're just asking for weapons and stratagems to feel useful, after all that is how the game was advertised, "you're a squishy guy with a very powerful and advanced arsenal".
The game is very young still, so we wanted to adress the things that are overrepresented before we start making sweeping changes to the entire arsenal. In general most things are working as intended, so just touching the things that struggled/overperformed felt like a good start.
Then we wanted to adress the things that are giving a lot without any downside, the railgun should only be that good in unsafe mode, and the shield backpack simply lets you ignore a large part of the game, so it made a lot of sense to take those down a bit.
We want to make the game roughly balanced first.
If it turns out things are just too weak across the board once the players have stopped just scratching the surface, then that's when we rethink things. The game needs more time to mature.
Talking about special super hard things, well, we might have more stuff cooking for that.