Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Twenty-five years of accumulated convention, none of it in the game — spray patterns, utility line-ups and default positions are all things you are assumed to already know.

The movement is the skill ceiling and nothing in the game mentions it — the players beating you are using techniques that were never taught, only tolerated.

Aim matters less than knowing what the other team can do to you, and the roster is large enough that this takes a very long time to learn.

Building is a second game bolted to the first, played at a speed that looks like a bug, and the mode that removes it is where most people should start.

Nothing is hidden and nothing is easy: every technique in the game is visible from the first match and takes hundreds of hours in the hands.

Every wall, floor and ceiling is destructible and every one of seventy-odd operators changes what a room means, so the hardest part is a memory problem rather than an aiming one.

A hero shooter that lets you fly and climb walls, so the sightlines are three-dimensional in a way that punishes shooter habits learned on flat maps.

A subscription racing simulator with licence classes, a safety rating and no assists worth the name — the difficulty is that it is not pretending.

A MOBA played from behind the character, so half your abilities have to be aimed and the other half have to be aimed while something is aiming at you.

Slow, heavy and unforgiving — one bullet from someone you never saw ends thirty minutes, and the correct play is usually to not take the fight.