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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
It is easy to provide examples of modern games that are too easy compared to older games, but let me provide an example otherwise. Take some first-person shooters for example: Wolfenstein 3D vs. Return to Castle Wolfenstein. People may argue that the newer game requires a bit more strategic thinking and better skill at aiming players. Granted, players nowadays have much better video games skill than players 10 years ago. The game itself may be harder, but the improved skill level of players more than compensate the relative difficulty of the game. (Super Mario Bros. vs Super Mario Bros 3, where SMB3 is so much harder)
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?
Modern games, Like mario bros can be beaten in only a few minutes of playing, back in my day we had simpler games that would take HOURS and HOURS and yu still woulnd't beat it. I mean, ET: The Extraterestrial for Atari 2600 only had 6 different screens, but I don't tihnk anyone has ever beaten it.
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Support Indy Music. Buy
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?
There's nothing more satisfying than boosting ahead of #1 racer at the end of the third lap of half-pipe in Emerald on Master (!), or nailing the turns and jumps on Serial Gaps. Unlocking racers, parts, even AX tracks (from the arcade machine) if you don't get arthritis first... It's even more fun tweaking your racer until the speed, weight, boost and accel are perfectly aligned with you and the universe.
Ah, crap... I was going to go to bed too :) Who needs sleep anyway?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
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.
both ways to get to work! In snow! With no shoes on! With a bag full of rocks on our backs! And we crawled over jagged broken bottles with our zippers open! And we liked it! =)
I'm just a little too young to remember Pitfall! and such, but I think simplying saying "yesterday's games were harder than today's game" is an insult to good designers. One of the author's complaints, that we can save every few seconds, is true in many games, but some games, Splinter Cell comes to mind, have preset save points. And it should, because the game is friggin' long. I doubt most people could finish Splinter Cell in one sitting, no matter how hard they tried.
Other's here on Slashdot have commented on joysticks and their bazillion buttons. They have those buttons because the real world has more control in it than one button can offer. For instance, Pole Position for Atari 2600 could get away with just the joystick because push forward you go accelerate, back to brake, left and right. And that was a fairly simplistic simulation. Project Gotham Racing 2 has accelerate, brake, hand-brake, upshift, downshift, horn, and view change, along with an analog stick for turning. Splinter Cell also uses both sticks well, one to control world coordinate motion, another so you can rotate Sam around, as well as crouch, open/use, turn thermal cam on, etc etc. They're not there to be useless.
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.
If there's one thing that makes a game seem much easier, it's the ability to save your progress frequently. For me, it was never the individual challenges presented in a game that made it thoroughly difficult. What presented the real challenge was playing a near-flawless game up until those challenges, and then passing them without a crash and burn scenario. It's a matter of mounting pressure and exhiliration - frustration and glee. Having the ability to save your game eliminates the need to repeatedly have the near-flawless run - once you've done it once, you can just reload from that point and carry on. It also takes all of the pressure off. If you feel like you're too far into it, you can set the game down, dry your palms and come back in a couple hours without losing any of your progress. I still thoroughly enjoy the old twitchy pulse-pounder style of game, but I've also learned to love the modern start and stop style. *shrug*
Of course this is just how I experienced those games. Other players may rate them completly differently.
A good example is perhaps the C&C series. Despite the fact that it is now in its 1 millionth release the games still follows the exact same structure. First mission 2 units. Second mission 3 units. Third mssion 4 units. And so on. Frustating for seasoned players who already know how to play the game but needed to not alienate new players. Some games use tutorials for this. C&C wastes the first few missions on this.
I recently played the platformer Prince of Persia. Well partially. Upto the second timed bit. 2 tries and then I gave up. To fucking hard I am not a 12 year old boy anymore. That game for me was totally wrongly balanced. To much work to little fun. However the owner of that game had no troubles with it. Faster reflexes the timed bits were easy for him.
I seen only a handfull of games that really had good difficulty settings. Good difficulty settings go further then just easy normal hard. They allow you to say disable certain aspects of the game that you may find annoying. Flightsims are usually very easy to setup. Don't like blacking out? Disable it. No rudder? Disable drift. The ancient System Shock allowed you to alter the amount of puzzles vs combat vs exploring. If only some designer had thought of allowing me to disable timed sequenzes from Prince of Persia. Had thought of making the first game started in UFO Aftermath not to be on the highest difficulty level or even better have presented the selection screen to the user. Deus EX 2 is probably beyond saving.
Games that are to hard are usually the fault of the designers being unable to fathom that gamers perhaps do not have the experience with the game that they do. Games that are to easy are either trying not to alienate new players or just lack good coding to have effective AI.
Oh well thank god for the PC and modding. UFO Aftermath has a lot of mods out that rebalance the game. Making your weapons just a tad more powerfull and the aliens weapons just a little bit less. If you played it then you should be able to appreciate slower alien rockets with less power while your guns generally do more damage. The offical patches also address the game balance but don't go far enough. Perhaps this is the future? Rather then get it right out of the box games will be balanced by playtesting by the gamers?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What I really liked about FFX was that the main game was pretty easy(had to be since it was like a movie!) and somewhat straightforward. This allows even the most casual gamer to get some enjoyment out of it.
However, there were a decent amount of very difficult mini games(chocobo taming?) and all sorts of extra aeons, ultimate weapons, etc that entertained the hardcore gamer. I never bothered with most of this, but I know people who have just insane amounts of this stuff and can beat those monsters in the arena. I think that the main game should be easy, but there should be enough optional, challenging(and of course rewarding!) side quests/mini-games etc to satisfy the more hardcore gamer like this author.
Kudos to Square.
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.
Another article about the topic (focusing on quicksave/load) here.
I used to play a *lot*.
back when I was in school I used to play 3 hours or more every day.
Now I havn't played properly on almost 3 years and was greatly looking forward to playing Prince of Persia after the glowing reviews it had received.
It was a walkthrough!
I don't mean to say that I never needed more than one attempt, but the jump sequences were ALL too easy. (I needed 6 attempts only once - the timed run with the collapsing floor outside the tower walls - for those who played it).
The riddles were not riddles but wastes of time... (who ever thought of having a character in the game tell you whenever you were gong wrong - like in the 'arming the palace' sequence).
I only needed ONE attemt for the last fight.
:-(
but I have not had so much fun playing a game for ages and I can't wait for a mission/add-on pack that is hopefully a bit harder.
cheers
AntiNeutrino
I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from - Bob Dylan
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.
Slightly off topic but I've noticed in two games which I've come across that certain puzzles will become simplified or even completed for the player if they're struggling.
For example in Broken Sword 3 I failed a small stealth puzzle (I've never been good at stealth) about 3 times so I got to see a cutscene of my character completing the puzzle without my assistance. And then in another game which involved memorising a sequence and then duplicating it, the sequence became increasingly simplified until it was virtually impossible to get wrong. Have any other slashdotters experienced this?
I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines.
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
When I was a kid, I got a Pitfall sew-on patch through the mail from Activision. You had to actually take a photo of your TV displaying your score -- I think it had to be over 100k, or maybe 200k points.
I don't see that as fun at all. When a game is so difficult that I want to smash things, I typically do. If I'm angry, then I'm not having fun.
Frustrating != fun
Impossibly hard != fun
however, if you do want impossibly hard, MOST games have Easy, Medium and Hard modes. Try changing them. Some games have a Nightmare/Insane mode. I think that's what you're after. Quoting one game as being too easy and using that to justify your statement of all modern games being too easy is just bullshit.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
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.