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.

The hardest thing here is unlearning defence — you cannot outlast anything, and the deflect window is the entire game.

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 parry game wearing a Souls coat: dodging alone will carry you for two hours and then stop working entirely.

Souls difficulty plus a fighting game’s input list plus a loot game’s spreadsheet, and none of the three is optional.

Rise apologises for nothing in its expansion — the endgame Anomaly hunts are the hardest sustained content the series has shipped.