Are games getting easier?

I posted this in another thread, so ill just quote myself

myself said:
To be honest, I dont get why people like games that are so challenging that you die every few minutes. I mean, its like a rating now "Bah, I only died three times the whole time, this game sucks."

I dont know, for me its a very jarring experience to die in a game. It totall rips me out of the "experience" and reminds me im playing a game. Same goes for complicated controls or complex gameplay. If I have to look in the manual, or on a website to find out gameplay aspects, then i'll never be able to enjoy the game because i'll constantly be struggling with the game, and i'll never be able to just play without knowing in my head "this is a video game." I mean, it totally ruins any suspension of disbelief.

Not only that, but I dont see the fun in having to do things over and over just because one area is difficult. Thats the number one reason why I stop playing games and never finish them. If I die like 4 or 5 times in the same area, and have to play 20 minutes of game over and over again just to die in the same area... i just become frustrated and quit. Usually for forever.
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I find dying 20 times in some games not as bad as others. In Halo I remember playing through on legendary in Two Betrails I must have died that many times trying to get away from the bloody pyramid. But I still found it fun. I eventually worked out a strategy of sneaking down the pyramid to avoid most fighting and then a good way of using the environment at the bottom.

Then when I tried to play Halo 2 on legendary there was a sniper alley. After less than 10 deaths I was sick of getting my head blown off because I stood up from cover for a half-second so I just turned off the bloody Xbox.

A more recent experience is I was playing C&C: Covert Ops the other day. There's a mission where you start off with with a commando, two stealth tanks, a light tank, a flame and a few other paltry forces and you must break into heavily defended GDI base and destroy their advanced com. centre, which is at the back of their base and is protected by a mammoth tank, a commando and their entire force which has a good few medium tanks and an orca. I failed that mission over and over again until I worked out a strategy, by trail and error, to win. I loved it, absolutly loved it, even the failing.
 
Shoes_Buttback03 said:
Everyone has the right to play videogames dude. I stand here as a hardcore defending the casuals. Some people are just inept in there level of reflex, and to deny them a great game like HL2 just because they aren't as good as the elitist mean people is wrong.

GAMING FOR EVERYONE!
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YOU have no idea what the implication was. No Child Left Behind. The most annoying crap that I came across and was SO happy I graduated the freaking year before it came into effect. Bastards forcing us to take MORE useless exams. As far as games go it might as well be giving everyone some hardware that runs like crap. Unless it is absolute high end it's going to piss a lot of people off. Not as if such a thing would happen unless PC gaming becomes extinct entirely.
 
Raziaar said:
Games are certainly getting easier when we have stupid developers trying to pander to larger 'less game oriented crowds'.

Seriously, look at many games in the past while that have been made or are being made, and you will see that they are simplified so as to bring in less hardcore gamer types.
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Yes, damn those stupid developers trying to pander to the largest market - the casual gamer; goddamn them for trying to make their game more accessible to the most important people buying their game.

The less hardcore gamers are the overwhelming majority!
 
Saturos said:
I remember JakII when the casual noob gamers were complaining about the difficulty being too hard. JAKII!! Com'on, that game was easy as pie. :|
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Are you FREAKIN' kidding!? Jak 2 was a ****ing nightmare.

You haven't by any chance played Jak 3? Most people who found Jak 2 easy thought Jak 3 was hard as hell - the opposite for me. :|
 
Yeah I'd say so, but there are lots of in & lots of outs. There are very few PC games I've never finished and I've been playing PC games since the early 90's. Whereas on my SNES and Genesis consoles from that era there were many I never completed.
However I've always been more apt at using a mouse & keyboard than a handheld controller & most of my console games were side scrolling platformers which is not my strongest genre.

Some early video games had unintentional killscreens which ended the game i.e. Pacman, which could be argued was not designed with an ending in sight!
More thought and time I think is being put into game's storyline's (and the endings) for a varirty of reasons & the result is they negate the pick up & play idea like never before, pushing for a more immersive, journalistic experiance.

Another point about early video games & those for the PC was the lack of information surrounding games and your own expectations. I was more fickle back then but I bought more games on a whim that would get boring & subsequently never finished those because of it.
I like to think I'm alot better at Video & PC games now than I once was too!
 
DEATHMASTER said:
YOU have no idea what the implication was. No Child Left Behind. The most annoying crap that I came across and was SO happy I graduated the freaking year before it came into effect. Bastards forcing us to take MORE useless exams. As far as games go it might as well be giving everyone some hardware that runs like crap. Unless it is absolute high end it's going to piss a lot of people off. Not as if such a thing would happen unless PC gaming becomes extinct entirely.
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See your the elitist mean people I was talking about. Everyone has the right to buy and play videogames. This isn't China oh wait they have that too. Stop bi***** about nubs playing the game you play at a lower difficulty. People who do that are sadder then Jack Thompson.
 
Are games getting easier? Yes, I think so.

Is it a good thing? Yes and no.

Overall, it's a good thing because it's making games more accessible, but, like anything, the key here is to strike the right balance. Mainstream games, in my opinion, should be straightforward enough that any mentally capable person who is genuinely trying will be able to figure out what they need to do and then do it, but not so straightforward that you're never in any doubt whatsoever about what you have to do; that it requires no thought whatsoever.

Call of Duty 2 is a good example of the latter category, it's constantly reminding you where to go and what to do, and most of the levels are so obscenely linear you're never in any doubt about where you're supposed to go. Basically, it feels like Call of Duty with training wheels.

When playing games like that, I just can't help feeling that most of the developers' playtesters were inattentive idiots who couldn't find a fly in a garbage dump, and the developers, seeing their hopeless test subjects getting lost time and time again, end up oversimplifying their games.

Call of Duty 4's hardcore mode in multiplayer is a step in the right direction. It turns a mainstream shooter into a semi-tactical shooter and does a pretty good job at pleasing two distinct groups of FPS gamers.
 
Bioshock was another game that got overly easy towards the end. It started off tense and eery and a Big Daddy was a pretty fearsome foe. Cue a few hours later and you're nigh on invincible. Look Mr. B, it's a one man army! It got a bit dull for me then.
 
Warbie said:
Bioshock was another game that got overly easy towards the end. It started off tense and eery and a Big Daddy was a pretty fearsome foe. Cue a few hours later and you're nigh on invincible. Look Mr. B, it's a one man army! It got a bit dull for me then.
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Bioshock ignored roughly half of the elements that made System Shock 2 awesome, and systematically nerfed the other elements. It still angers me when I see such a good game let down by it's weak gameplay.
 
99.vikram said:
Bioshock ignored roughly half of the elements that made System Shock 2 awesome, and systematically nerfed the other elements. It still angers me when I see such a good game let down by it's weak gameplay.
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What does SS2 have to do with it's difficulty? I found SS2 easy as hell - what of it?

Don't try and bring the whole Bioshock and SS2 comparisons argument into this thread - stick to the topic at hand.
 
TheAntipop said:
Don't try and bring the whole Bioshock and SS2 comparisons argument into this thread - stick to the topic at hand.
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The "topic at hand" is a rhetorical question. we all know the answer. :rolleyes:

Besides, Bioshock vs. System Shock 2 is a perfect example of how today's games are being made easier. They were both made by the same team and are very similar in their premise. But where Bioshock is an atmospheric romp through Rapture, System Shock 2 is an agonizing crawl through the Von Braun. SS2 wasn't difficult combat-wise, but it forced me to value every bullet and skill point (something Bioshock never did). I'll probably play both games years from now, but guess which one will feel fresher then?
 
No, we don't all know the ''answer''. Some people find this easy, some people find that easy, whilst some find something else frustrating difficult, and others breeze through that same segment with no problems at all. There is no ''answer'' to whether or not something is this, that or the other.

And on the matter, I found Bioshock rather difficult as I was playing through on Hard, and for 3/4 of the game I was scavaging for medkits and tommy gun rounds for the life of me, whereas in SS2... well, I can't think of anything memorable about it really, I thought it was pretty simple, straightforward and non-appealing to me.

But hey, horses for courses.
 
Many people confuse accessibility and difficulty (Samon included, unfortunately). An accessible game doesn't mean a game should be pathetically easy (like Bioshock), it means that the game should be available for anyone to play.

A fine example is C&C3, which is quite accessible and ranges from a casual game for retards and casual gamers, a challenging game for regular players and hard for hardcore masochists (me included).

Overall, though, games are getting easier and easier. Soon we'll have games dumbed down so that even dogs can play them by munching on the controller/keyboard (Bioshock 2?).
 
Mikael Grizzly said:
Many people confuse accessibility and difficulty (Samon included, unfortunately).
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I think Samon is right. The old Nintendo style difficulty (making the gamer try the same thing again and again) is completely out of place in today's game. I see games branching out in 2 different directions today. Games like Half-life 2 and Bioshock which focus on experiences and emotions, and games which involve conceptual challenges - forcing the gamer to think differently or solve puzzles. These two sides can learn from each other to create even more complex games in future.
 
Some people used to post in the Bioshock forum about how ridiculously tough it was on Hard, some people now post about how ridiculously easy it was... That makes me suspect its difficulty was spot on.

So it gave the player respawn points everywhere, so what... What's the alternative, a game over screen? Right, that's really rewarding. Platform games et al have been doing the 'checkpoints' thing for a while now; Bioshock's Vita Chamber system was a half-innovative/half-clumsy way of putting it into an FPS. I challenge people to think of a better way of doing it though.
 
Games are getting easier, but it's for the most part a good thing because it really isn't any fun getting to a level that you just can't beat, forcing you to quit playing the game.
 
Mikael Grizzly said:
Many people confuse accessibility and difficulty (Samon included, unfortunately). An accessible game doesn't mean a game should be pathetically easy (like Bioshock), it means that the game should be available for anyone to play.
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Just because YOU found it easy doesn't mean you can state it's difficulty as a fact. As Laivasse said, some people found it hard, some people found it just right, and some people probably found it a bit of a cakewalk. There is no way to define the accessibility or difficulty of a game because everyones levels of playing skill are completly different.

I can understand your opinion of the difficulty of Bioshock, but whilst you found it easy and I found it quite challenging in places, that pretty much debunks any way of stating it as a fact.
 
Warbie said:
Bioshock was another game that got overly easy towards the end. It started off tense and eery and a Big Daddy was a pretty fearsome foe. Cue a few hours later and you're nigh on invincible. Look Mr. B, it's a one man army! It got a bit dull for me then.
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Bioshock had pretty repetitive and boring gameplay from the start.

Mikael Grizzly said:
Many people confuse accessibility and difficulty (Samon included, unfortunately). An accessible game doesn't mean a game should be pathetically easy (like Bioshock), it means that the game should be available for anyone to play.
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Where did I say games should be "pathetically easy"? And you know, just because you found Bioshock "pathetically easy" doesn't mean everyone else did - far from it.
 
Samon said:
Bioshock had pretty repetitive and boring gameplay from the start.
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I thought it was awesome at the start. Scripted sequences were excellent and the detail and art direction was second to none. Then the bad guys became generic wandering monsters, the locations lost something, and it became too easy.
 
Where did I say games should be "pathetically easy"? And you know, just because you found Bioshock "pathetically easy" doesn't mean everyone else did - far from it.
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Bioshock is made pathetically easy (universally) by the fack that you simply can not die permanently. No matter how hard you try.

It doesn't matter if the Daddy/Splicer is difficult to defeat or not, since death is nothing permanent and the player isn't punished for his clumsiness. And the monsters don't heal during your revival.

Where did I say games should be "pathetically easy"?
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At every conceiveable point you make the point that games should be more accessible, using it as an excuse to tone down the difficulty, to make it "moderately easy" instead of "moderately difficult".
 
Loke said:
Are you FREAKIN' kidding!? Jak 2 was a ****ing nightmare.
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A nightmare basked in easyness you mean? :|


Loke said:
You haven't by any chance played Jak 3? Most people who found Jak 2 easy thought Jak 3 was hard as hell - the opposite for me. :|
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I've had Jak3 for nearly a year now, and believe it or not, I still haven't plyed it. I'll get to it eventually someday. :p

99.vikram said:
I think Samon is right. The old Nintendo style difficulty (making the gamer try the same thing again and again) is completely out of place in today's game. I see games branching out in 2 different directions today. Games like Half-life 2 and Bioshock which focus on experiences and emotions, and games which involve conceptual challenges - forcing the gamer to think differently or solve puzzles. These two sides can learn from each other to create even more complex games in future.
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If I wanted an emotional experience, I'd watch a movie (or a mini-series such as firefly). If I wanted a puzzle, I'd play chess. If I want a fun, unique challenge, I'd play a video game.

It was nice to see video games take a new direction with deeper stories and such starting back in the SNES days with Final Fantasy 3 and Chrono Trigger, but today, developers are just too obsessed with production values and accessibility for my tastes.

I won't be getting a next-gen console even if I had the money. :p I can't help but have the feeling of, "been there, done that" in all of today's games I've played so far. Gameplay innovation and challenge has been thrown to the wayside for story, character devlopement and other shit. EDIT > Spore might be an exception in the innovation department.

A few FPSs like FEAR and HL2 had plenty if action and challenge for me, but I miss the days when games weren't so overcomplicated with BS like "story" and "episodic content" and all they meant to me was mass destruction, thousands of enemies onscreen, and only three lives. :|

That reminds me... (Leaves to play MetalSlug Anthology) :)

EDIT > Oh BTW, yes many games do have a difficulty setting to choose from, but many times it's something lame like decreased player health, increased enemy health, med-kits restore less health etc. This is what pisses me off about today's games. :hmph:

I'd rather the harder difficulty settings bring about more enemies onscreen (Like the old Doom games, I'm pretty sure my PC can handle anything you devs throw at it), or improved enemy A.I.

I want games to choke slam me and make me cry uncle, or they're not games imo. :|
 
Wait... System Shock 2 is 'easy'? Please all play on 'Impossible' difficulty as a PSI-OP and report back with your findings.
 
kupoartist said:
Wait... System Shock 2 is 'easy'? Please all play on 'Impossible' difficulty as a PSI-OP and report back with your findings.
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Anyone claiming it's easy should be strangled for being a pathological liar.

Oh BTW, yes many games do have a difficulty setting to choose from, but many times it's something lame like decreased player health, increased enemy health, med-kits restore less health etc. This is what pisses me off about today's games.
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I hear ye. Thief was fantastic in this regard - the harder the difficulty, the more objectives, loot and area to explore was made available to the player.

I <3 Thief.
 
games are much easier than they used to be, either that or i'm just way better at them now
 
Saturos said:
A nightmare basked in easyness you mean? :|
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Yeah yeah, enough with your badass attitude. :p

Saturos said:
I've had Jak3 for nearly a year now, and believe it or not, I still haven't plyed it. I'll get to it eventually someday. :p
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Get to it, it's great. Much less frustrating cramped vehicle parts and more open-ended gameplay.

Having just completed Cryptic Passage for Blood I got to say it's one of the most challenging first-person shooter of the 90's.
 
I'm gonna say no, they are getting more difficult.

I sucked at NES games because I was young and inexperienced, not because they were difficult.

Even frickin Wii Sports is giving me a case of frusteration (and tennis elbow).

Maybe the means with which to keep yourself alive are more plentiful, but enemy AI and level design are only getting more complex.

--
That said, nothing is more difficult than side/up scrolling shooters, and they don't really make those anymore. So in a way, yeah difficulty to newness ratio is taking a big hit.
 
unfortunately,I kinda wish that they would put as much time into making a game difficult and engaging now, as they did back in the NES-SNES era. But all that aside, Ninja Gaiden was hard as F***ing hell.
 
It is understandable that games whose singleplayer experiences constitute the meat of the game cannot afford to be in any way off-puttingly hard, especially in this day and age, but devs must include some sort of way to allow for a hard-core experience, either by introducing a new difficulty once you have beaten the game, or providing ways to tweak the cfg to make up a difficulty of your own.
 
Hm, no. I think for every easy game you find today I could name one from 15 years ago.
Multiplayer itself contradicts the games getting easier theory. Human opponents are the toughest out there. Sure, they may be easy for me because I kick so much ass, but for every "me" out there, there is 30-40 people who just aren't good.
I really cannot believe developers focus on making their games easily defeatable.

Looking at my entire (GC, PC, Wii) collection, I'd say all my games are difficult, though most of the challenge is scaled to increase as the games progress.
The only exceptions or "easy games" I have are Shadow the Hedgehog (bleh) and Burnout 2 (arcade style fun).
N64 and pre-N64 era games seem to get easier the farther back I go, and I attribute this to design and hardware limitiations.
There is just so much more to keep track of and the variety of strategies to implement allows multi-talented players to really shine, so I'm sure things seem easier to them.
 
sea said:
unless the game is designed to evoke memories of "retro days" by being inhumanly tough even on easy difficulty levels, like Devil May Cry or Contra IV.
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Devil May Cry was easy as pie for me. Even on the more difficult settings. That game was hardly "retro" at all. :p

Contra:Shattered Soldier on the other hand. :/

I managed to get %100 percent on the hardest setting on every level all the way up to final stages where the level percentage score didn't matter anymore. I never completed that game btw.

I got to the second to final stage before that shapeshifter boss done me in. :|

Viewtiful Joe 1 & 2 I consider to be new-age, tough-as-balls retro games too, but even this series is a little forgiving, with it's continues, four lives and a health bar and all. :/
 
sea said:
Obviously, players appreciate a challenge, but they also don't want to have to play the same sequence over and over and over just to win. A loss here or there is good because it makes players feel like they can improve and learn from their mistakes; constant deaths just makes them give up in frustration. It's all about striking a balance between difficulty and entertainment value, and people like to win. To surmount a challenge gives a feeling of satisfaction and demands a reward (plot advancement, new level, etc.), i.e. entertainment; difficulty is only good in so far as the player's victory is not put into jeopardy, but only stayed momentarily to increase the satisfaction of the victory.
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For the most part, yeah, but I know more than a few people who will only ever play on easy because they know they can win, and they're far from newbies. They just aren't concerned with the challenge at all. Personally I can't understand why you'd even bother playing through a game if you're just coasting along with no sense of achievement, but I guess that just doesn't factor into it for them.

Actually, maybe it isn't as simple as that. One thing I think alot of older gamers forget is that games can be scary for newcomers. And I'm not just talking horror. I remember playing Tomb Raider and being afraid of venturing into certain rooms just because I knew I'd probably die again. There was an aversion to it beyond just frustration. I wouldn't go so far as to call it fear, maybe I just didn't want to face the disappointment of failure or something.

I think that for many newcomers there's something to gaming that doesn't click straight away - it's the trial and error method we've become so accustomed to. Think about it, in most other games (board games for example) you play through to the end, and then you either win or lose. Gaming is different. It's a process of losing so many times in order to ultimately win, and it can be a trying one. For me I think it took a good amount of failure before I got used to the premise. It still frustrated me on occasion (and still does), but I lost the aversion to it I had starting out. I guess you could say I became desensitised in a sense.

Anyway, where I'm going with this is that newbie gamers hate to lose even more than the rest of us, and not just because they suck. When you first pick up a controller (or keyboard/mouse) there's still that newness and intensity that makes it so easy to become immersed in even the most simple game, which is cool and all, but it can also cause you to be more cautious and take less risks, and for some less patient people just give up entirely. Game developers don't want that. They want any average joe to be able to pick up a pad and become completely absorbed in their world, but for us jaded types that often isn't enough. We need a challenge to keep us interested because it makes us focus, helps us become more immersed in the game worlds we've become so accustomed to. Not that we don't still hate to lose, because we do. :p

As for whether or not games are getting easier, I'm not so sure. I think as gaming becomes more and more mainstream developers are trying to strike a compromise between casual and hardcore. The most common (and arguably easiest) way to accomplish this is with different difficulty levels or something like that, but that's often criticized as a quick fix, and it doesn't really deal with the root of the problem. What a lot of older gamers seem to be really concerned with is that games are becoming more simple, for example the infamous health meter disappearance. That's where compromising becomes not-so-easy, although several developers have started touting their games as "accessible but deep" (ie - Bioshock... well, it is deep ;)). I think this is going to be where gaming goes next. Everyone knows studios always want to push their game to the largest possible audience, so why not try to reel in both hardcore and casual alike? If you can please them both, there's nothing you can't do.

Edit - tl;dr edition: Newbies r dumb, also games r dumb, lol.
 
Play a game on the hardest setting the first time through, there you go.
 
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