Video Games Are Becoming Easier?

Zaffy

Well I was just playing some New Super Mario Bros, and I suddenly realised. Games are becoming easier and easier.

Examples:
Original Super Mario Bros, if you accidentally miss timed that jump, you'd fall into the hole and that'd instantly be a game loss.
These days you have wall jump and helicopter hats to help you out

Legend of Zelda, I have definitely heard people complaining due to the simplicity of Twilight Princess compared to say, Ocarina of time and Majoras mask.

And there are definitely more examples, anyone else agree/disagree?

Nevyn

Yes they are, people expect to be able to finish the game and see/play all the content they are paying for.

Corholio

Not really to be honest. Some of the most difficult games ive ever played have come out in the recent past, Ninja Gaiden series, Devil May Cry, F.E.A.R etc

Some of the later levels in Mario is quite a challenge actually, i dont remember SMB 3's later levels being quite that tricky. I think it's case of maybe games are a bit shorter these days for whatever reason.

Retr0gamer

Corholio wrote: »

Not really to be honest. Some of the most difficult games ive ever played have come out in the recent past, Ninja Gaiden series, Devil May Cry, F.E.A.R etc

Unfortunately these games are few and far between these days. Games are getting easier but these days games get so big that adding challenge would be a put off. Back in the old days games could be beaten in an hour but would need weeks of practice to get to that level.

Corholio wrote: »

Some of the later levels in Mario is quite a challenge actually, i dont remember SMB 3's later levels being quite that tricky. I think it's case of maybe games are a bit shorter these days for whatever reason.

Mario 3's later levels were way tougher. I'm finding world 9's levels an absolute breeze in NSMB Wii. I also amassed 99 lives by world 5 without trying. Also you had to beat Mario 3 in one sitting.

Easier games are kind of a necessity now with games being 20+ hours in some cases. Still sometimes it gets ridiculous with games were you can't die and rechargeable health being too lenient. Still I never want to see tough games like Persona 3, Ninja Gaiden and Gradius V not getting made. Can't wait for Bayonetta!

Overheal

Depends. Many FPS have the difficulty settings. But the New Normal is the Old Easy, definitely. You need to be playing at least Advanced or Even Expert on a few titles to get the old school feel.

And Yeah like Thaed says its sometimes very annoying to get stuck on a stage of the game and not see the rest of it. Still, Skipping feels sleazy.

Play Ace Mode on some of Konami's Games though. ZoE2 is a trip. But the greatest example is the sniper in MGS3. Hardest Boss I have fought in many years. And he's beaten me. Only long after I stopped caring about the game did I hear about the Dying of Old Age Feature that Kojima installed into that part of the game. Still - thats the Right kind of skipping

Zaffy

Overheal wrote: »

Depends. Many FPS have the difficulty settings. But the New Normal is the Old Easy, definitely. You need to be playing at least Advanced or Even Expert on a few titles to get the old school feel.

Reminds me of Contra 3 (Super alien protector rebels = PAL version), where on expert, you litterally had monsters spawning everywhere on the 1st level.

Stercus Accidit

The biggest problem isn't that the games are easy, its that the easy or medium setting is the one that is focused on during the design period.

A game with a good hard setting is an amazing thing, its a real challenge and test of skill, and when done right feels like the full game - think goldeneye and the additional objectives and rewards you get.

Nowadays, it seems medium is default, and hard isn't designed at all. MW2 for example is a game with infinite health, but you have to wait 5 secs in a corner to survive, the difference between hard and medium is you spend a ridiculous amount of time hiding in the corner, this is bad design. In a game with 100 health to start, and med kits etc., you have to protect that health, and hard settings are designed, in MW, you get hit before you can react, shoot, crouch, wait, repeat, and is a prime example of infinite health easy games trying to do a hard setting and failing.

The last good game for a hard setting I played was army of two(a year ago), nothing genre defining really there, the co-op was great fun though, and on hard I certainly retried levels several times, with different tactics. It is another sit it out til you revive game, but on hard it wasn't as poorly implemented as MW, the necessity to rescue and revive your comrade made getting killed more than a quick blast through a menu, it made the game hard.

Games which reward the hard setting offer new stages etc., and new game modes, a good game on medium can be a great game on hard, forcing deeper thinking about how you play. Limited health also, you will never play a level on 25 health in MW, because you cant, ever play L4D, with no med kit, with 10 health? Its tense, and limited health is the staple of a real game, infinite health is lazy for designers and players, designers because the whole game will need to provide just enough health to survive, and is a delicate balance.


I agree, there has been a decline in good, hard games, and its down to the 10 yo demographic and there abouts that have taken to console gaming by force, PC gaming seems to have avoided it! When I see that latest shooter advertised, I know what I'm getting, set pieces, explosions and visuals, crouching for 5 seconds, and mediocre game play. I miss good hard games, I enjoy a challenge, and that challenge should be a balance of skill and patience, biased towards skill. A tedious hard game may require only patience, and thats the one you should turn off and forget about.

gizmo

Corholio wrote: »

Not really to be honest. Some of the most difficult games ive ever played have come out in the recent past, Ninja Gaiden series, Devil May Cry, F.E.A.R etc

Well I found FEAR 1 rather easy and FEAR 2 (on the PC) disgustingly so. The others are a different kettle of fish though, they are designed to be punishingly hard (in some cases compared to other mainstream titles, in others simply in general) and basically say to the player "Well **** you, if you want to finish me then you'd getter get good". These games are great in my opinion but I would imagine go unfinished by a large number of people who play them.

From a developer point of view however, with the rising budgets for games and frequent polls showing that people generally don't even finish them, they seem to have begun shortening them.

Kiith

One word....

Demons Souls.

johnny_ultimate

Being tough seems to be a design choice these days. Many developers go out of their way to make their games challenging and skill based, and in many cases it works wonderfully - Demon's Souls obviously being the current poster boy for hard as nails games (and rightly so), and Bayonetta looking like a refreshing challenge. Yet being difficult isn't always a good thing. I had an absolute blast playing Uncharted 2 on normal, the way it is meant to be played IMO - fast paced, (almost) instant restarts, no difficulty brick walls. Many games focus on pacing and momentum - being ridiculously hard can sometimes damage that. A poster above correctly pointed out MW2 as an example. I played through it on Hardened, and by the midway point I was regretting it. The tedium of ducking behind cover everytime you got shot damaged many of the setpieces, and shows up some of the weaknesses of the gameplay (whereas sections such as the snowy sniper section show up as far stronger design).

I don't want all games to be hard, nor do I want them all do be easy. Zelda Spirit Tracks is one I'm playing at the moment that seems to have a very sensible difficulty curve. At first it is mostly a walk in the park, but having just finished the second temple it is full of fun, tricky and rewarding puzzles. At the same time, I can't wait to get my ass kicked by Bayonetta, but New Game + in Demon's Souls (where they up the already unforgiving difficulty) is something that I'd need a hell of a lot more time to tackle.

Overheal

Kiith wrote: »

One word....

Demons Souls.

Thats two words.

Retr0gamer

Zaffy wrote: »

Reminds me of Contra 3 (Super alien protector rebels = PAL version), where on expert, you litterally had monsters spawning everywhere on the 1st level.

Contra 3 was considered too easy back in the day, found it a breeze myself other than the 3rd level boss that just took some patience. Contra Hard Corp on the megadrive, now that is a hard game.

o1s1n

I generally find that because of this, you don't get the same sense of elation and joy that you did upon completing a hard as nails platformer 15 years ago. It's more like a film has come to its end.

Games by and large are never going to be like that again. Rather than feel sad, just go back and play some older 2d sprite based games for that hard as nails buzz. There's nothing like it. And if you're finding console games too easy, go for some arcade games and stick to one credit. Whatever you do, do not continue once you've died. If you think you feel good after completing a hard console game, just wait until you can 1 credit a hard arcade game.

Monotype

I think it depends on the game. While we don't really see any "Nightmare mode" in most games now, I think, in general, many are a lot easier than they used to be. I noticed this first in Half-life 2, when I decided to try the hardest level, thinking I'd be slaughtered, but I found I was only caught in a few places. I am by no means that good, and would only rank averagish in most online games. That's with some practice.

It's probably to try to appeal to a wider range of people and make themselves feel good about themselves. I couldn't count the number of games in the past where I'd be struggling forever in the same spot, especially platform games with no difficulty setting. To beat some of those games would be a life's work!

Oh yeah, and there was also bioshock where you couldn't die? I thought that was a bit strange. Didn't use the clone machine ever in that and just used saves if I died.

Maximilian

I don't think so really. I think games are less frustrating now in terms of difficulty. I have bad memories of a game called China Miner on the C-64.

Take any game and crank up the difficulty level and you'll usually find a challenge.

One that springs to mind that gave me a good challenge recently (I had to rethink many battle strategies) was Dragon Age.

noodler

Nearly finished Uncharted 2. Played it on hard and its still pretty easy bar the odd extra bit of enemy spamming.

Still, makes a nice change from Demons Souls and the anger.

Creature

Maximilian wrote: »

One that springs to mind that gave me a good challenge recently (I had to rethink many battle strategies) was Dragon Age.

I was just gonna mention that. Some seriously ****ed up hard battles in this game. I was locked in an epic half hour fight with a Revenant the other day. I had to walk away in the end because I could only take off less than half his health. I better get a bloody good reward when I finally kill him.


I'm also playing through Machinarium at the moment. It's a wonderful little game but it doesn't hold your hand at all and has had me seriously scratching my head at times.

L31mr0d

Ok well I already posted about this recently in a similarly themed tread, so here's what I wrote

L31mr0d wrote: »

I think the difficulty of a game is relative to the individual though. Games haven't gotten easier, we have just become more used to them and we know the rules now.

Lets take a simple example. Sonic, I can clear all the original games in a few hours without dropping a life and I don't even need to try. When I was a kid those games gave me weeks of entertainment as I would die, lose my continues and then have to start from the beginning again.

Now, relatively speaking, Sonic could be seen as a hard game. Imagine if games forced you to begin right from the start again if you lost all of your lives, nowadays it's unheard of. But, comparatively, it isn't a difficult game, once you know the rules and follow them. The same is true of all games, once you learn the rules, the game becomes proportionally easier (don't crouch behind red barrels... etc)

The issue in regards to MP and competing against humans is that there are no rules. Take Demon Souls for example, there is one boss that, if you are connected to online, will usually get controlled by another person who is playing the game at the same time as you. Now, in comparison to the other bosses he is quite weak, but, as a human, he has no pattern, you can't watch him, learn his weakness and exploit it. The human character knows about the boss, knows his weaknesses and protects against it.

Another example of not following the rules, in the arena that you fight him in it is littered with chairs, which, while fighting, you use to put between you and the boss to block his approach. Upon fighting a human character, he proceeded to pre-emptively destroy all the chairs before I entered the room to remove this option. In the context of the story it made no sense for this character to be going around destroying his own chairs, but in the context of the in game competition it did. A human is not bound to any characteristics and is infinitely more complex to predict than an AI character.

tl:dr version: It doesn't matter how difficult the game may initially seem, because, as it is bound by a set number of rules eventually it will become predictable and seem inconsequentially easy in comparison to a human player.

cherryghost

quoting yourself will cause an implosion of biblical proportions.


and yes, they're becoming easier. if the recent POP games have taught us is, if you make a mistake, just rewind time. :rolleyes:

ShadowHearth

well games were harder, but shorter, becouse they had no savve system.

now they make easyer games, but they have alot more content.

If you whant harder, try to play games on hardest difficulty, i do that with FPS for maximum reality. I beated MW2 on hardened in first night in around 8 hours... but i had alot of quick load moments...


Now you sohuld ask: is it bad thing or good? I think its good, as alot more people play games now, i still have a huge list of games on NES that i newer beated, just becouse of insane difficulty!

Maximilian

Creature wrote: »

I was just gonna mention that. Some seriously ****ed up hard battles in this game. I was locked in an epic half hour fight with a Revenant the other day. I had to walk away in the end because I could only take off less than half his health. I better get a bloody good reward when I finally kill him.


I'm also playing through Machinarium at the moment. It's a wonderful little game but it doesn't hold your hand at all and has had me seriously scratching my head at times.

+1 on Machinarium. A gem of a game that.