I will never, ever understand the general bitching in the difficulty sector of game talk. Easy, hard, ultra hard or journalist easy, who gives a shit? Difficulty is a choice, the player WILL chose ease if he wants to, it used to be all the player had to do was run the game with ~console = 1 and he could just press ~, type GOD, and play the game without dying, NO ONE ever questioned it or admitted to it but...
...video games have become so autistic it's like 80s schoolyard of "lol you can't even football" when someone just hates sports.
Did I use cheats? Sure, I still do, I love fucking around in video games, apply a cheat and start mayhem for the fuck of it. And sometimes I love running things like Metro at the highest difficulty and playing it Start to Finish with zero cheats, taking fails and trying again, full stealth, zero kills because it's fun.
And that's the ultimate question, is the game FUN? If it's fun because it's hard, GREAT, if it's fun because the story is awesome but gameplay sucks, so you cheat, AWESOME.
When did everything become a ladderboard thing? Just play the game your way and have fun. The bullshit around difficulty is gay AF.
And if you want to question me, question the MP games that let you essentially BUY cheats like % damage increases. SP games, who gives a shit, people somehow care that someone can get Cheat Engine and alter values and it's a huge drama but... game companies let you BUY cheats today and that's never talked about, do I pirate when I give myself 20k in-game currency in something like assassin's creed via Cheat Engine when I can buy it for hard cash from the Ubisoft store?
It's not real, do whatever, enjoy the experience, enjoy the challenge if that's what you like, enjoy the power fantasy if that's what you like, just don't fucking lie about what you're doing.
Sorry for the autistic rambling but the entire topic of video game difficulty is autistic. Full austists can go for leaderboards while I can just fuck the game over and enjoy it at home while messing with noone but my sense of being honorable or fair.