“If you were turning on one cheat to make your game much easier to beat, what would it be? This tells you a lot more about your game than anything else.”

Heard this from a YouTuber called Surnex, and got me thinking. In reality there’s a lot of ways to cheese the idea behind this – as the answer would usually be “warp to end credits” if we want to get technical, but let’s take this in the spirit its intended.

For a game like Diablo, infinite health would be great but infinite damage would be much more useful. It’d accelerate farming speed.

Meanwhile, for a game like Elden Ring, I’d much rather have infinite health than infinite damage if I was trying to trivialize the game.

Flying might be even better because I could stay out of range of many bosses and use long distance combat options, while also bypassing obstacles and avoiding fall damage (invincibility hackers were a thing in some souls titles, and top players would still beat them by knocking them off ledges). However, considering the tight cooridors, caves, and interior environments, it wouldn’t be as universally useful as infinite health.

This demonstrates that Elden Ring is primarily about survival, while Diablo is primarily about power.

Meanwhile, what walled me as a kid playing Ocarina of Time wasn’t any combat challenge, it was confusion about where to go and how to navigate. Infinite health or damage wouldn’t have gotten me through the water temple much easier.

Most mario games would benefit from flying more than anything else. It’s about movement.

Animal Crossing would probably benefit from a speedup feature, both letting you gather resources faster and accelerating world time to advance the in-game clocks.

Minecraft’s most popular hack in multiplayer servers is usually “x-raying”, where you make all uninteresting blocks transparent, so you can see the diamond clusters deep in the earth and go straight to them. Getting the resources isn’t the hard part, finding them is. Once you find them you can make top tier combat gear or trade them for anything else you want.

FPS shooters would definitely benefit from infinite health more than anything, but aim botting might be even more effective in games with highly rewarding headshot multipliers and the potential to engage at long ranges with hit-scan weapons. Your opponent probably won’t take you out first anyway, so you can efficiently clean up the lobby. If you care about win rate only, infinite health is better. If you care about earning a meta progression goal, aimbotting might be better. If there’s no hitscan option though, you might be better off with infinite damage after all.

It’s an interesting lens to look through.