Slashdot Mirror
Are Modern Games Too Easy?
bippy writes "Game critic Brian Crecente's weblog Red-Assed Baboon asks if modern video games are too easy. He argues, after playing the new Pitfall game, that what made the games from the '70s and '80s such as the original Pitfall! so much fun to play was 'because the game is so hard - brutally, temper-tamper inducing hard' - Crecente goes on to conclude: 'I'm not saying we should go back to the days of Donkey Kong and [the original] Pitfall!, but maybe developers need to worry a little more about challenging a gamer, instead of plopping them into something that is little more than an interactive movie'."
I STRONGLY suggest buying or Renting a copy of 'Wallace and Gromit - Project Zoo' and let me know how you do. This game, available on most consoles, is one of the hardest and most intense games ever made.
Dolemite
___________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
Brutal games are being made today, but the serve a niche, not the mainstream. Mainstream gamers want to *have fun* playing a game, not necessary throw their controllers around in fits of rage.
I used to have the time and focus to play games like Shadow of the Beast of the Amiga for hours, perfecting my timing. Today, I prefer something a bit less demanding. Prince of Persia was a hit with me due to the magic of the rewind feature: sure, you failed that jump, but you just pressed a button and rewound until *before* the failure, and tried again. Nearly instant "load game", without all the loading fuss.
Meanwhile, Ikaruga (or however it is spelled) is a great shooter, but I don't think I will be imitating the demo play with perfect *MAX CHAINS* through the level. (I'm in awe of the recorded demos... freaking amazing talent displayed). Still, I can have a blast in two player mode, just trying to *survive* a few levels...
Really, the reason the old games simply ramped difficulty up to the point of impossibility was they had *nothing else to offer*. With in game movies with semi-coherent plots, lots of variety in gameplay, cool levels and a bit of humor, why would I want to beat my head against the same level for hours on end? Games have moved on from challenge to entertainment, excepting the few titles (Contra for PS2 anyone) that specifically were designed for the hardcore "lets try that a hundred times" gamer.
Sig under construction since 1998.
But how do you justify that kazillion dollar cutscene at the end if you don't expect anyone to ever finish the game?
We've got to have something flashy there to keep the average consumer with a five minute attention span playing for a while!
Yes, they're getting easier.
Easier games sell faster cause you have people reccomending games they beat.
Back in the old days, there wasnt 128MB gfx cache or 2GHz cpu's. You made the games tough as nails.
There are different kinds of hard, though. Many of the older games seemed to eventually come down to pure reflexes and sense of timing. It didn't challenge your mind so much as your hand-eye coordination. So maybe this guy just prefers that sort of game over some of the more modern games with puzzles and mystery.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
In the 70s and 80s a good chunk of the money was made from video games in arcades, etc. or video game rentals - developers had an incentive to keep people playing as long as possible to pull in the quarters/late fees. Now with the advent of the $9.99 CD rack at CompUSA, programmers have a financial incentive to make games easy-keep the user coming back for more games after s/he is bored with the old ones
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
Perfect Dark.
Especially Challenges 25-30 in the "Combat Simulator".
Beating challenge 30 may be the most fun I've ever had playing a video game (or close to it).
Have you tried Linux yet?
People still play all the old games that provided so much of a challenge way back in the 80's. The fact that we like to keep challenging ourselves with these old games is BAD news for publishers.
Why?
Because a publisher wants you to buy the game, finish it within 3 months and then be buying a new game or (even better) the expansion pack. A publisher doesnt really care if you are challenged or not. They attempt to strike the perfect balance between "value for money" and "quick to complete". It works the same as Poker machines. You want people to shell out their money as quickly as possible, whilst still feeling like they are getting reasonable value for money.
A game which you play for 12 months before you complete is good value for you, but not for the publisher.
I refuse to have a sig... dammit!
Yes, I do think that games, in general, have gotten easier since the old arcade and Atari days. But, well, remember that many arcade games didn't even have an end. They simply got harder and harder until they expected people to lose.
:-)
:-)
Also, there are still lots of hard games around...I think some of the Myst-type games are tough, but maybe that's because I'm stupid
All in all though, I think it's just the price hardcore gamers must pay for having the gaming market "mainstream" (which is a very good thing for games, in the long run). Maybe the industry should adopt some sort of "difficulty rating" so people could see how hard a game was. Some major Japanese releases, such as Final Fantasy IV, were released in "Easy" and "Hard" Types. Perhaps that, too, could be a possible solution...but, really, I think (IMO) that it's a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist...it's not like I just breeze through all the games I buy. But then, I kinda suck at gaming, too
There is a difference between a challenging game and a flawed game designed to infuriate the player. Honestly I've played MORE of the latter. Controls seem to be the biggest problem. Another reason older games were harder were because of the save system.
I recently played Contra: Shattered Soldier on the ps2 which is supposed to be an old school 'hard' game. I rather a fun experience than a game that requires me the practice in order to have fun. I have stopped playing games simply because of the stress some games create. Aren't games suppose to be a relaxing fun experience?
Modern games are not too easy.
Modern games are made more with the non-hardcore gamer in mind nowadays.
Modern games have much more complex controls thus requiring the game designers to focus more on a learning curve than brute challenges to keep the gamer occupied.
Modern games have much much more content than 128Kb cartidges thus they don't have to rely on insane challenges to extend a game's length.
Modern games have much more customizability to fit a gamer's skill level
Modern games have branched out to different genres that have different challenges. Challenges that don't rely solely on dying over and over to figure out some pattern.
And that's about all I have to say. If you still don't believe me try playing the original Devil May Cry on Dante Must Die mode then tell me that modern games aren't hard. Games with die-retry-die-retry challenges are still out there but they're shadowed by a ton of different options/genres/whatever. If you want to complaint about how new games are tough enough either change the difficulty or play a different game. I however enjoy the wide variety of games that are out there nowadays.
-Shawn "If the Name Don't Rhyme It Ain't Mine" Conn
Those of us that have been playing games for 10+ years have for the most part become very adept at playing the games we play. However the newcomers don't have our vast vaults of knowledge with which to rely on and find them very difficult. Case in point: both my little brother and my father are fairly new to the gaming scene and they have a great deal of trouble playing many games to completion because they find them too difficult... however I can play through the whole game in a matter of minutes. If developers constantly made games more and more challenging on par to the existing players, they'd never really latch onto newer players in any significant way. They would basically limit their market to one generation of gamers... and then die out because after a while no one is left that can even approach succeeding at any game that is put out. If the company wants to stay in business they have to create games at a fairly predictable level of difficulty and occasionally include an uber hard difficulty that assuages even the most 1337 gamers out there.
In contrast, back when I was playing "Infocom" games. I remember getting stuck in "hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" and having to go out to the public library to look in a computer-game-hint-compilation book to get past a point in the game. If the internet was available back then as a resource, it would have been a trivial solution.
Nowadays the causal gamer audience isn't the only thing driving the difficulty lower in mainstream titles.
This is just personal observation, and your perspective may differ, but I think the loading times in games are what make difficult titles more unbearable.
A decade ago you would run off a cliff and the longest you would have to wait was for the screen telling you how many lives you had remaining to fade away. Instant death was around every corner back then. Today most designers caution against any pitfalls in a game that are unexpected to the player, and don't offer a way out. This is reasonable for easing the amount of frustration, but the frustrating element here isn't the difficulty of the game, as much as the duration of time it takes to get back on ones feet after death.
After looking over so many modern games this way, I really think we could get away with todays games having a much higher difficulty if we were able to load back into the level only a few seconds after dying and try again. I'd say that todays easier games are just a way to offset the frustration of the waiting.
That's the term I use as the superlative of gaming difficulty, simply because many of the games for the NES were exactly that. Some of them would make much better examples of difficulty than Pitfall does. Remember Ghosts 'n' Goblins?
As for the difficulty of today's games, it's pretty obvious that it's lower in general. I don't think that necessarily makes modern games "too easy," though.
Rob
Due to limited code space and a small market of extreme gamers these may have been the only type of games out there.
;)
:)
This does not mean they do not exist, just that modern games must cater for all types of players, and thus they are made scalable.
Has this person tried playing a multiplayer Warcraft III game against a single insane AI computer opponent? How about tried to beat all the Quake 3 Arena levels on Nightmare? There's hours of trying right there!
Most games have a Hard/Nightmare/Insane setting which is meant for pitfall/rick dangerous/aztec challenge -like games.
Also, does pitfall have a PvP setting? No! So once pitfall becomes too easy, where's the challenge? It's boring! I've had the remarkable pleasure of losing countless Quake games to awsome world-ranking players... wanna learn real anguish?
Anyhow enough ranting... I'm tired of people trying to cling on games "that they just don't make anymore" or "It's not fun" or "It has no story" or "Blah blah blah". Rubbish! Modern games are as good and in MOST cases better!
Sure I enjoyed finishing Mercenary, Druid, Bard's Tale 1-3, Elite and many more on my Vic20/C64/ZX Spectrum/Spectravideo/Acorn/BBC A/B/Amiga/Atari ST. But I'm happy those days are past and I could play competitive games like Quake/Counterstrike/Starcraft/Warcraft III/Ghost Recon/ etc etc.
Anyway... enough raving...
Those older games were hard so that you couldn't complete them in half an hour. As result you had to continually play parts of it over and over again until you could complete them. Nowadays as games have much more content they can allow the player to progress faster as there is more game to get through.
In my opinion this is a Good Thing, I certainly don't believe that Harder == More Fun. This is why I like different difficulty levels - you can tailor the game to the way you like to play. Those with lots of time and few responsibilities are welcome to spend five hours every night on 'Bastard Hard' - however, with a wife and three kids I just don't have that kind of time to play levels over and over again until I can do them. If I play at 'Normal' or 'Easy' I can still progress in the game with only a few hours per week.
Yes, there was a time when arcade players loved being able to play forever on a single quarter. How many levels could you go on Donkey Kong? Could you get the high score on Galaga? Did SpyHunter ever end? Sure the levels became repetitive and often insane, but you could play as long as you could survive.
Games today have morphed into ones with 20 different "missions" or time runs with limited long-play appeal. Granted, there are specific games where this makes some sense because of the nature of the game (you reached the bottom of the mountain) but there's no reason why all games have had to go that route. Don't you love going to Jillians/D&B and blowing $0.75 for 1 minute of entertainment, as is the case with practically all arcade games these days? It's a shame that kids today don't appreciate pinball (what few pinball machines there are anyway), where skilled play usually awards players with a replay.
Of course home consoles with the ability to save your location have changed games considerably, but (as an example) SSX3 did an admirable job of taking the "race to the bottom of the mountain" concept and throw it on its ear. Lots of variety and ease of going back to the top to rerace as part of the game (instead of having to start over from the main menu) make it seem as if you're continuing one run.
Publishers need to take into consideration that there are some gamers who don't want games that end. Mission-based games, side-scrollers, and the like are only a subset. The Sims (and various Tycoon/sim games) is popular on the PC because the game is continually changing and infinitely replayable.
The original MYST was a huge seller for various reasons, one of which was that it took so long to figure out exactly what/how to do *anything*. With the Internet now and all the cracks/cheats/walkthroughs, MYST probably wouldn't have the same sales rate now as it did 6 years ago.
Should games have difficulty levels to make games harder for more skilled players? Sure. But GOOD games shouldn't need skill levels, cracks, cheats to make the games interesting to all players.
Oldies but goodies...
Thief is extremely rewarding when you finish it on expert.
Rogue Spear - single player custom mission with 50 terrorists. Yeah the AI have sniper abilities with pistols, but it's also a lot of fun.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. In the late seventies and well into the eighties, the place to play games was the arcade. Sure there were (wildly popular) home systems, but many of the most popular games tried to be faithful copies of the arcade version. When you make your money from a machine you put quarters in, you want to make the game hard hard hard. You want to keep people losing and keep them putting quarters in.
When you are selling games that are to be played on the PC or console, you want people to play them, enjoy them, and then buy your next game. You don't make another dime if takes them 4 times as long to beat the game.
spreer
Go to any GameFAQs message board, and half of them will be about codes and GameShark codes and whatever.
Most games have selectable difficulty levels - and for whatever stupid reason idiots like to pick the easiest one, cheat their way through it, and then cry about how much the game sucked because it was too easy.
As with most things in life, the problem is people are idiots.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.