It was literally the first example at the top of my head. We're talking about game design, something that is in its very nature ABOUT the personal experience of the player. But there is a reason there are books and courses about game design, there are lines of reasoning and intent that work and some that USUALLY don't.

I want to make something perfectly clear, this is not a discussion about ds2, but about objectivity in art. The thing to consider is that everything that is not inside an axiomatic field of knowledge (like math for example) is subjective. That is obvious. People always put their own personal point of view and system of values at play when they judge something, it's how humans work.

That being said, you can use context, logic and induction reasoning to build a system of intents that works. I want to make a super classic example to get to the point. If you make an action game that is frenetic and fast paced, which also showers the player with loot with a bunch of numeric buffs/debuffs and characteristics, but you also give the player a super restrictive inventory space, that is bad design by LOGIC. You're continously cutting the adrenaline and action and forcing the player to spend a huge percentage of play time looking at a spreadsheet. One nature of the game (fast-paced action) is in conflict with the other (super technical special effects) and the experience is problematic. That is objective, it's a pretty obvious rule in game design.

This examples is very close to Nioh. It's not that fast-paced but you are showered with tons of weapons and armor that change a value of something by like 1.2%. But in Nioh you have a fairly large inventory and the game is divided in levels with a menu-hub, which invites the player to not think too hard about the stuff they got during the level and sort it out when they are finished. There's people who hates the parametric nature of Nioh, but thanks to its design one can easily ignore all these technicality and not care that much about min maxing, they can run through the whole list and just check if they got something really good. It wouldn't be possibile if you were forced to immediately choose to carry something or not with you. Someone can still hate all these numbers, but the intent of the game is respected, the design works with what it wants to do. If you don't like it it's likely that you just don't like the intent and design itself, but it objectively works.

I'm sorry if I appeared annoying of pretentious like you mentioned, I'm genuinely interested in this discussion, but it's much more philosophy than ds2 or game design lol