Slashdot Mirror
Are Games Getting Easier?
An anonymous reader writes "I can't help feeling that this generation of games for both consoles and PCs are getting increasingly dumbed down and easier to complete. There's no challenge in today's games, most of which can be completed on the day of purchase. Triple A titles such as Halo, Modern Warfare 2 are the worst of the lot. The whole reason for this article is Medal of Honor, this can be completed within hours of purchase. Where's the fun in that?"
Nothing is more lame than some game snob living in his parents basement who thinks he's hardcore because he's good at a video game.
In multiplayer.
. . . set the difficulty level to "I bruise like a banana." :P
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Who, other than the bored teens, has time to sit down and play a game all day and evening in one session, just to "beat" it (probably on the easy level)?
It's a business decision, pure and simple. The more people your game is accessible to, the more copies you sell. Why spend a lot of time developing a game 5% of the potential market will want when you can spend the same effort appealing to the other 95%?
Isn't enough that I ruined a pony, making a gift for you?
The people playing the games might be getting faster as well? Kids as young as 5 years old are using computers. I couldn't remember getting my hands on a computer till I was 15. Kids these days are faster, better, but not necessarily smarter? according to all the other articles on /.
... Halo, Modern Warfare 2 are the worst of the lot. The whole reason for this article is Medal of Honor ...
I can't speak for Halo but I'm pretty sure MW2 had difficulty settings and I know Medal of Honor has difficulty settings because I played that piece of shit game last night. Easy and Normal maybe but I think that Difficult would take more than a couple tries on most levels.
You're just mad because it doesn't mean anything to beat a game anymore. Sure, on XBox you can get gamer points or achievements for beating it on the hardest setting but it bothers you that others can experience the same rewarding progress dopamine that you get. Well, that's never going to change. By the very nature of how that is rewarding to you is the fact that you're a select few of maybe ~10% of the population that can beat the game.
So Craptivision can either shutout some of their content to the vast majority of players or introduce difficulty settings so the toddler across the street can mash the controller in order to beat the game in easy mode. That drives profits and the only thing they see as a sacrifice is the rare super gamer that feels a bit miffed he or she just forked over $60 in order to autopilot through a game.
You know I still played through all the levels of difficulty in Goldeneye on the N64 and didn't feel cheated. When I ran that train level on 00-Agent difficulty night after night after night I can still think back to those rare times when I would laser the engineer room hatch open with my watch and then drop down with Natalya only to have to run down the length of the train with people shooting at our backs. One bullet in either of our backs and we were basically dead. That goddamn bitch always died. Always. I swear to Christ when I eventually passed that level it was by sheer bug alone that she did not die. So after that cruel Sisyphean task that my friend and I worked together strategizing and getting through it, I was rewarded and will never forget some of those levels.
Games are getting easier but I ask you what does it matter? You will have your difficulty settings (usually) so play only on the hardest setting and enjoy your Contra III style impossibilities. The era of earning progress through a game has largely come to pass unless you look at the end game material of WoW at any one moment. Final Fantasy XIII was a travesty in this respect. And profit dictates it will stay that way.
My work here is dung.
Those games typically are not geared towards single player. Online play is where it is at.
Maybe the problem is that you're too good for such games. I suggest that you find an alternate form of entertainment.
This is why I don't play RTS or FPS.
It seems the way to make AI these days is to make it really stupid and easy for the player to beat, unless the player turns it on hard mode, in which case, they see you from 5 miles away and one-hit you before you were aware the map had finished loading.
Studios are under a lot of pressure to churn out games as fast as possible these days and AI is suffering. The solution to making games challenging is to make them either never miss and insta-kill the player or to just give them tons of health and attack power, but keep them stupid. Neither strategy is entertaining and it would be nice to have actual care put into building intelligent, challenging AI instead.
Somebody never played COD6 on Expert difficulty.
Just like planned obsolescence in other products, there's less money to be made in something that will keep a customer challenged and occupied for months. Better to let them finish it quickly and back to purchase another game (or some DLC to extend it).
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
It's a breath of fresh air compared to the current crop of watered down games on today's consoles. It ushers in the rage inducing difficulty level that many of us grew up with as kids. If you haven't played it yet, you're in for a real treat.
Before you even think about attempting this challenging game, remember, you have to burn the rope: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/432872
If you can finish it in a couple of hours, I salute you!
Halo is not easy. Try legendary on for size. I can't vouch for MW2 cause I don't play it but you need to think before you open your mouth and say such bullshit.
depends on your definition of "completed", especially with multiplayer games. If all you care about is blowing through the single player story as quickly as possible, then you need to either come to grips with the fact that this is how you play or lower your expectations. Personally, I "completed" WC3 when the SC2 came out, many years later. I still liked playing it and it did not get old for me.
Hey we're busy. We really don't necessarily all want to struggle with games. We want something fun, that's a little challenging that we can get through. 12 hours of content for 60 bucks? That's about even with a movie.
Personally, I gravitate to the games I can play over and over again, rather than big story games, but I get it.
And the games we do play a lot are usually more social these days. The author complains about a short story in Halo or Modern Warfare. Well duh. Most people are paying for the multiplayer experience which infinitely re playable. The single player parts are a sideline. Is a 5 hour single player worth the money there? No. But that's not what people are buying anyway. It's like complaining about hugely expensive veg and potatoes while ignoring the steak that came alongside.
I really enjoy games with interesting puzzles and goals, until I get to those damn boss battles at the end of a segment. Who finds that any fun after the second time around? Really, do I need to die 30 times before I manage to hang on long enough to get past it?
No matter how easy games get, none will come close to the ease of "winning" Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail...
http://www.amazon.com/Python-Mac-OSX-Classic-System-7-1/dp/B000067O93/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1288122104&sr=8-2
and what do you mean by easier?
The time to complete something it's a good indicator of whether or not a game is harder.
I played Might and magic and it took 100 hours to complete. Does spending 40 minutes killing 10000 skeletons by hitting the same two keys hard?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If games are getting easier, I think you need look no further for the reason than the rising average age of the gamer demographic. When I was in college, I could spend six hours a day for a week on games if I wanted to. Now I have a job and a family, and I might have an hour a day in which I could play games—but probably not. On those rare occasions I do play something, well, it wouldn't be very exciting to play for an hour and just make it through the tutorial.
Shorter games are better for busy people.
...I fired up Super Mario Brothers 3 for the first time in years last night, and I almost broke my TV from an angrily tossed controller. I only made it to level 2-3. And I had 20 lives.
Yes, absolutely games are getting easier. The only truly difficult game i've played lately is Halo 3 on Legendary mode; but that's BS because you have the option to complete the game at a much easier setting. Not true of SMB3 for sure! Kids these days have it easy.
now GTFOML!
No possibility, huh, that you might just be a better game player now than in the past? Can't give yourself a pat on the back there?
The problem is that if games continually get harder as time goes by, new players to computer games overall will never be able to complete them and quit buying them out of frustration.
If games are too easy then experienced players will quit buying them. Game makers will see the trend and increase the challenge.
Or you could just overclock your PS3..
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Um, on Legendary Halo Reach is MURDEROUS. With skulls on it can get even crazier. And I hear there is an unlockable difficulty above legendary. Don't come whining to me just becuase game developers have finally started to realize that continually frusteraiting your players by fickle jump puzzles is poor game design.
I have a hard time believing you finished Halo on Legendary within a few hours. And, if you did, and everyone else is doing it, than you should be playing on XBox Live to get the challenge that the game is lacking for you. Matchup against similar players and you're good to go.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I'm not sure - I haven't played a new game in years. Still working on Myst. I hope to have it completed by 2015, and then I'll move on to Riven. I may just finish this series before I die...
The main developers are making somewhat easier games (with difficulty settings) because that's the way the market works. If you make every game require the same level of memorization, reflexes, and skill as Battletoads, a large portion of people are going to stop buying your games pretty quickly. They're a business, they have to make money, so no surprise here that they try to cater to the larger demographic.
There are, however, independent developers who are still making difficult games. They don't have to answer to the bottom-line so much. Some of them even do it for fun. If you want a difficult challenge, go looking around for IWBTG and its ilk. Theyr'e not hard to find, and they won't cost you anything, except perhaps the keyboard you broke in half.
Then how do you explain those of us who own their oen homes, have families go to sports event for the kids and still kick ass at games?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When I was young, everything was better. Today, everything is worse.
Sincerely,
Every Generation Since the Dawn of Time.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Is it me or is there a story on here about how games are too easy or not long enough every couple of weeks or so?
Go back a few years and people were complaining of how difficult and frustration games were (to this day I haven't beaten Mega Man, the first one with the horrible box art).
This is a cycle, we're just in the "easy-peasy" part of it, the difficulty will come back, just like leggings... *shudder* Speaking of which, spandex is a privilege, not a right!
~Syberz
The games listed in the summary are multilayer games and are dick hard to get all the unlock-ables in them. The single player is just a little bonus and should not be heavily considered when talking about these games.
That is because some game company want to turn games in something similar to Hollywood. They only care to make spetacular-looking games, but without paying TOO much attention to the history behind it. And they turn this games into blockbusters. Medal of Honor sells for U$ 59.99 and you can complete in just a few hours. Sure, if you are planning on playing it online everyday, it is worth it. But must people I know, don't do this. And it gets worse when the game doesn't even have a multiplayer mode. Pay 60 bucks for some hours of entertainment? Sounds expensive.
Well the focus has shifted from single player to multiplayer quite a lot in the last decade or so. Single play has been getting easier and shorter for mainstream blockbuster titles, but they tend to focus on multiplayer. I did enjoyed the new Medal of Honor single player even with it being very short, they did screw up majorly on multiplayer though. Even games which are heavily focused on single player have been getting shorter, like the episodic releases of Half-Life 2. I'd give them a break but the reason they did episodic releases was shorter games, at quicker intervals. They got the first part down I suppose...
If you want something that's hard as nails then try I Wanna Be The Guy. It's not an FPS with amazing graphics or anything, but you'll be playing that for a long time. You can also try going back to some of the classic FPS single player games like System Shock 2. It's not like they have somehow gotten worse.
i take it the original poster hasn't played Demon's Souls yet
Well if you guys keep buying them, they'll keep making them!!
There is a war going on for your mind.
I imagine catering to a less skilled but broader audience translates into higher sales. It's all about numbers, you know.
Also, it seems that people are increasingly willing to buy watered down shit, ignoring quality and focusing on theme. I'm looking at you, sports games.
I played through Mass Effect 2 on normal, and felt like a badass by the end, because in Mass Effect 2, you play a badass. You go up against impossible odds and save the human race.
Some of my friends played through Mass Effect 2 on Insane difficulty, and felt like badasses by the end, because they had done something hard.
Neither of these things actually makes you a badass, though. One is just pretending in a story, and one is just developing proficiency at a game. The difference is, I don't have any illusions about how badass I actually am.
Just look at WOW.
Hunters used to need to take care of ammo counts and bags.
Everyone needed wood to light a fire.
You used to need to spend time going somewhere in order to play a BG.
You used to need to spend time going somewhere to get in a dungeon instance.
Some spells/abilities were only available at certain trainers.
They've just dumbed down the whole stats and talenting system, so there will be even fewer cookie-cutter character builds.
Slowly, but surely, it's turning into another InstaFrag game where the RP is pointless.
In oldschool games, you had gameplay, and nothing more. The gameplay and the challenge were the entire point.
Games today try to be a cinematic experience. You spend 10 minutes trekking through a stage to get to a boss, you dont want to die and then have to play through all that again. Why not? Because its boring as hell to play through again. It's like getting to a good point in a movie and then rewinding to watch some boring bit that you just watched 3 times already. As long as games are long, drawn out experiences, you just dont have that "one more try" feeling that oldschool games used to keep you playing over and over.
I'm not a gamer, and I know I'll get royally flamed for this, but my theory is that there are no new games -- there are a handful of unique games styles and everything else is a variant of those styles with different eye candy pasted on. Faster computers and better graphics cards just enable better eye candy (and maybe better game physics), not better games.
I've got my flame retardant suit donned, so flame on!
Yes. And if even a *little* difficulty is put into a game, such as Dragon Age (*), all the console kiddies will bitch that it's too hard (even though their console version was already dumbed down from the PC version!). Then, you have auto-aim on console FPSs, and other kinds of dumbing down.
(*) DA was easy compared to oldschool games, but harder than a lot of people were used to these days.
It also doesn't help that developers mistake "assload of health in enemies" for "difficulty". These are not the same thing.
"Games" are getting easier and the only examples he offers are 3 recent FPS games. FPS games have never offered much in the way of what I'd consider to be difficult, engaging gameplay.
No sig for you!!
(All opinions expressed herein may not reflect the views of my employer, and in fact we try to avoid falling into this trap but it's a pretty prevalent attitude in the industry right now):
I work as a game designer on big-budget shooters for a living, so here's my take:
Game companies are consciously making the decision to do this for two reasons:
1) Easier games have broader markets, by increasing the likelihood and rate at which the user receives validation we increase sales, and much more importantly:
2) It's unusual for more than 50% of the people who beat the first level of your game to beat the last level. Money spent on later levels is generally money wasted, and shortening the experience altogether is a function of the increasing development cost per hour of gameplay and ROI of even having more than 10 hours of content at all. If 95% of the people who bought the game complete the first level (as tracked by developers through achievement systems) but only, say, 35-40% finish the game, that necessarily influences how you invest your limited development funds.
--Ryv
Meh. These multiplayer shoot-em-ups don't do it for me anymore. They don't offer anything different. We might as well all still be playing Half Life - and frankly that'd probably be more fun anyway (Mods, Maps, etc). I'm hugely disappointed with what's available in the game market, especially on the console. Give me something different. Give me a story that grabs my attention. Give me something that makes me think. I mean, actually THINK. I think some developers think that's the same thing as having the patience to simply put up with the game....
Imagine if Tiger Woods just gave up the first time he swung a golf club because he didnt get a hole in one? What if Michael Jordan gave up because he couldnt dunk straight away? Both Golf and Basketball are games just like any other game, you play because its fun and in time you learn to play better and improve.
Well, if Tiger Woods had to play his first ever game of golf against Jack Nicklaus, he probably would have been so frustrated with the experience that he might have considered not bothering. That is how multiplayer (your favorite FPS here) is for many people. That is exactly why I only played the first Quake for about an hour - and the rest of the series not at all. People who are new to the games end up in multiplayer games against people who play it 16 hours a day and hence find themselves annihilated faster than they can even figure out which button opens a door and which button changes weapons.
People aren't giving up games quickly because they are hard - more often they are giving up because there is no point in trying to compete when there are no new players around. It would be as it there was no such thing as amateur boxing, everyone had to get started by fighting Mike Tyson; many people wouldn't even consider it out of fear of immediate death.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Games are certainly getting easier if you define it as "I can beat it."
Back in the early console days, I only ever beat maybe one in ten of the games, "beating" meaning that I got to the end credits. PC games were a different story because you could save the game state. With sheer endurance, you could make it to the end.
Older games didn't have much going for them but the play mechanics themselves and they could be fiendishly difficult and completely unforgiving. "Twitch gaming" is not a recent development.
So yeah, through sheer endurance, you can beat most games out these days. The question is whether you can maintain enough interest to bother.
The thing I've noticed as I've gotten older is that it takes a greater effort and more originality to pique my interest. I have no tolerance for annoying play mechanics, derivative designs, and rehashes of games I've already played.
I've been a fan of RTS games for a long time but nothing kills my interest in a game more than seeing something five or ten times shinier than the last RTS I played with AI and pathfinding every bit as awful as the last one.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Back in the day, companies had to make games hard in order to get any sort of play time out of them. Contra, for instance, is brutally hard, but once you get good at it, you can make it through the game in under a half hour. Nowadays, the focus is on the content itself - I'd much rather play even a very-short 5 hours of storyline and progress than 5 hours of dying repeatedly until I memorize the exact location of every enemy on a level.
Of course, all this is moot anyway because almost all of these games offer higher difficulty levels or multiplayer modes.
Remember all those pains involved in having such ignored and even ridiculed way of spending time? How "games were only for kids", and only weird and awkward ones at that? How, if only the masses would really try, they would understand and like it?
Well, it happened. So now many games are made for them, not you. Deal with the consequences of what we wanted (this is extremely easy, considering huge numbers of great "hard" games made also now; even if limiting oneself to what's available, more than can be played in a lifetime)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Then how do you explain those of us who own their oen homes, have families go to sports event for the kids and still kick ass at games?
Statistical outlier.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
The first paragraph complains about FPS that are easy to complete in "4 hours", but then the post goes on to compare that against games like Zelda Ocarina of Time, a RPG...
Let me break things down for those who have not grasped this concept:
FPS: First Person Shooters (ie: Halo, MoA, etc) have typically "short" single player campaigns because the games typically have a lot of replay value in that after you "finish" the game you spend the majority of your time going head to head with others online, or at home, or on different modes co-op.
RPG: Role Playing Games (ie: Zelda, DragonAge, etc) have typically 80-120 hours of game play story because typically once you beat them you never play them again. Granted, you may play the game again "later", like I played FF: Tactics when I was in high school and when it was released on the PSP I got a copy to play again.
Ave Molech Setting
Game developers used to ask players what they wanted, and players asked for more, harder, content. Then the internet was invented, and consoles got online games. And developers got to measure the gap between what players said they did, and what they actually did. And game developers found that the more, harder, content was mostly ignored, and actually the majority of players gave up on content longer than a few hours, and stuck to easy mode. Because thats where the fun is.
I am trying really hard....
So....its like buying an expensive car and complaining about the cheap steak?
Or was the car supposed to have been made of steak?
Oh wait, maybe this is it. The glovebox cooks steak, but the steak is just mediocre quality and doesn't include potatos, so you feel like you paid too much for the car.
Right?
Plants v Zombies, hardly an old game, has a survival mode that can potentially go on forever, getting more difficult with each turn.
That should appeal to your penchant for difficult gaming.
I thought everyone knew by now that paying $60 for a game is foolish. Very few games are so good that they are worth buying as soon as they come out. Most games are half that price after only a month or two, and a third that price after six months.
Sometimes the price drop is bizarre. I remember seeing unopened retail boxes of Bioshock for $5 in regular stores, only a year after Bioshock had come out! Yet, somehow, "gems" like Family Feud Home Edition continue to clog up the shelves for $20 each....
The Internet is full. Go away.
One point nobody's brought up yet is that most video games use fairly similar mechanics. If you're new to first-person shooters, you'll have to learn how to aim headshots with your mouse. If you've spent hundreds or thousands of hours playing first-person shooters, you'll be very very good at shooting things in the head from extreme distances. In other words, many of the skills you learned playing Halo are still useful in Medal of Honor -- this makes the game easier, because there's no learning curve involved for most of the basic gameplay. The same basic thing applies to platformers, RPGs, RTSs, MMOs, and most other games. I guarantee you that someone who's played 500+ matches of Starcraft is going to be better at Starcraft II than someone who's never touched a RTS before.
Yea, not really. But wasn't there an article here not too long ago about how the game companies that were collecting stats for their games were finding people would only play for a few hours before considering themselves done and move on to the next game? Why put $500,000,000 into creating an intricate game when 95% of the players don't even get to the 10th battle scene? Heck, it looks like most companies could just create the first 4 or 5 levels and claim anything they want.
"That's right, this has 150 levels of puzzles, boss matches, and awesome graphics that will really heat up your GPUs!!!"[1]
[1] Your game may not actually have 150 levels.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I'd do anything for a Plants vs Zombies game, but with real challenge and difficulty. That was a great but far too easy game. Can't they at least put extra difficult modes on like the old arcade games used to do? Sigh...
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
But do they have battletoads?
No seriously, ever play that game? It's rage inducing. Did i think it was a good game? Fuck no, it was a piece of shit.
To summarize, difficulty != Fun
Wanna do something hard? Do something outside of video games.
If you're putting out a blockbuster title, wouldn't you want it to be accessible to the masses. Like it or not, the hardcore gaming community is not the large focus of the game industry anymore now that the market has been expanded so much. FPS players are just now feeling the hit because FPSs are the current flavor of the week. RPG and platformer gamers have already gone through these expanded market growing pains.
The thing you have to remember is that you're not forgotten. It might seem like for every 10-20 games that come out, only one is challenging...but you also have to remember that we're pumping out 10x's as many games as we used to. You're basically getting the same amount of difficult/hardcore-oriented games, there's just a ton of mainstream friendly games to wade through now to find them.
I'm currently experiencing the opposite problem. It seems that a lot of the games I'm playing are just extremely hard. For example, I've played through all the 2D Castlevania games and beat them all. Some were easy, some were difficult. But none of them were brutal. I picked up the new Castlevania game that just came out for the Xbox/PS3 and it's killing me. I've found myself putting it on diaper baby mode multiple times just to get by mini boss type encounters. Shmups, fighting games, and side scrollers aren't getting any easier, either...probably due to the fact that these genre's are no longer "main stream" and appeal to hardcore gamers a lot more than your average or casual gamers.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Pick different games if you want a challenge then. The games you mentioned are AFAIK made solely for the multiplayer experience, so the single-player campaign isn't as long or as fun. If you want good, difficult single-player, play some better games. Or branch out from the FPS genre a bit. Seriously, there are a lot of good titles out there that have incredibly hard difficulty modes. Some of them are even Triple-A titles. Try Mass Effect 2 on Insanity mode. Try StarCraft II on Brutal. You could even try Halo Reach on Insanity. The point is that difficulty modes exist for a reason, and beating a game on its hardest difficulty still allows for a feeling of accomplishment.
It just takes too long time to create all the 3d stuff for games, that programmers have no time to create the actual gameplay or levels. In the 90's, you could see 2d games where there was 100 levels of varying difficulty available. With 3d graphics, that's just impossible recardless of what kind of team is creating the game.
...but different games.
Right now: Fallout: New Vegas on Very Hard with hardcore mode on.
People who are new to the games end up in multiplayer games against people who play it 16 hours a day and hence find themselves annihilated faster than they can even figure out which button opens a door and which button changes weapons.
That was really bad on Red Dead Redemption which did not rank the free roam at all. I log in the first time with my level 1 character and a cheap ass gun loadout, and some level 50 guy on a giant buffalo and golden gun keeps attacking me. Things were better when I got to level 30, but by then I online segment was played out for me. Getting to level 50 seemed like too much of a slog.
To you high level guys who go after low level characters: what's the point? It's like playing with a cheat code. This is why 90% of my online play is private co-op.
Could it be that creating content is simply much more labour intensive than it was years ago?
Creating a level in the old days was easy, because the required detail was pretty low. I recall building my own Quake levels (I replicated the office where I worked) in just a few hours. I have no idea how levels are created for the latest FPS games, but the stunning amount of detail has raised the bar very high. I am guessing the amount of effort involved is also very high. And since content takes longer to create, to get the game out in a reasonable time they have to cut the amount of content.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
They are also not as linear as they used to be.
You can beat the game in 7 to 14 hours for most titles today but in order to attain all the game has to offer, you have to play through more than once.
also since the focus has also moved to online game-play as opposed to single or god rest its soul split screen multiplayer, the game companies dont have to spend as much time on the complexity of the single player when the multi-player is where the game gets longevity in playability.
You are also no longer playing against the game, you are playing against other humans for the most part.
I argue the games have not gotten easier but have become more complex. Gaming has changed to much to still be able to compare apples to apples.
More to the point - although I too find GP poster's "get a life" assessment more than a little lacking in substance* - how does it explain people who are relatively new to games playing through them in just a day, too?
Perhaps it's the need for console games to 'help' the player a bit by simplifying things that also finds its way into PC gaming?
Perhaps it's simply the genre of games being released nowadays (a pretty much linear FPS can be played through in a few hours as long as you're familiar with FPS games in general.. shoot everything that moves, hope none of the victims were important (Half Life 1 - Can't shoot the scientists in Half Life 2.. how disappointing). Hunting down pixels in CountDown (Access Software) will still take you several days no matter how often you've played Monkey Island, LOOM, The Dig, etc.)
Perhaps it's the milking of games with downloadable content, 'episodes', and the focus on multiplayer, dimishing the single player experience.
Probably a combination of things.. but since the question doesn't ask for a cause, merely a yes/no answer, I'll go with: Yes.
* If you have a job, family, etc, then all that means is that instead of playing it through on the same day in 6 hours, you play it through over the course of two months in half hour stints. Guess what? That still means it was just 6 hours - where an older game might have been 12 hours.. whether that's 12 hours in 1 day or 12 hours over the course of 4 months doesn't change that it was 12 hours.
Many years ago, I worked for Funcoland. The day that "D" was released for the Playstation, we sold quite a few copies.
EVERY one of them was returned within hours to trade for a different game. Everyone was flying through the game and, yes, they all saw the "Best" ending.
I think what's happening is that devs have kept difficulty at a steady point, yet the gamers are just getting better.
Personally, I don't see the attraction of a lot of these modern games. They don't have the replay value of a game like, say, Robotron 2048 which, after nearly 30 years is still a tough game to play.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
I haven't played games regularly since SNES, but my kids are all over PS3 games.
My experience as a fuddy-duddy Dad who picks up a controller every now and then is I can't even get past the training levels...so there is a base level of
skill that needs to be there that I don't have (or have the patience to acquire). This is true on Assassins Creed, MW2, and a few others that go bang and splat.
I think the gameplay has to be easy enough that a 1st timer with a reasonable amount of patience could pick it up. If you have been playing for 10 years,
that will probably make it seem facile. I know my kids can get through a game in a weekend if I let them....but I'm sure I couldn't get through those same games
in 2 months (assuming I stay employed, married and otherwise continue as a productive member of society)
I don't know that the difficulty is that much lower, just the overall amount of gameplay. This due in large to the amount of detail and attention required to create the same amount of content today v/s previous years. Ignoring the game mechanics, a game like the Legend of Zelda would take very little time to string together graphically. Now, creating that same amount of real estate with today's graphical expectations would take a team of designers and graphicc artists a VERY long time. It's not enough that there be a two-dimensional tree, that same tree needs to have moving branches and leaves and wildlife with varying levels of detail depending on hardware. It needs to be destructable or at least show damage. Heck, most gamers would probably expect to be able to climb it too. All of these aspects take time, and money, and thus the amount of content, not the diffculty, suffers.
yes all gamers live in their moms basement, i just recently finished god of war 3 on the ps3, i dont own a ps3 i played it at a friends house over several saturdays when we both had time since its launch and that game was challenging and rewarding, passing the controller to friends when you die or checkpoint is the best way to play games. but i guess that never happens cause i live in my mother basement?
Seems pretty obvious to me.
When I was a kid and had my NES, games were TOUGH. Old Atari games were tough as well. Even into the Genesis and SNES games were often still hard.
Now, I'm older, and better at games, so that makes a difference. But I'd say that the average game now, even on 'normal', is easier than it was.
There are a couple of reasons. First is games aren't coin-ops now. When I was a kid, most games were either coin-op conversions, or designed by companies who were used to them. They were used to designing games to make you fail, so you had to stick in more quarters.
Second, hard games turn people off. Battletoads was fun, but I couldn't get past the elevator stage as a kid, even in two player. Contra is famously hard. Super Ghouls and Ghosts? Tough! There were some easier games, but that could be killer. Rent a game and it's too hard, you give it up. You don't buy the game. You don't buy the sequels. When it feels like you're being punished by the game, it's not fun.
Games are evolving. Super Mario Galaxy had some very tough moments (especially getting all the stars). But you could die until you game over and lose basically nothing. The lives are irrelevant. Today most FPSes have regenerative shields (thanks to Halo) so you don't get stuck somewhere with 1 health, unable to move.
Games have moved on. They can still be punishing. Some are designed that way (Ninja Gaiden for the XBox), some can just be set that way (various songs in Rock Band on expert). Are things like Ratchet & Clank easier than older platformers? I'm not sure.
I'm happy about this. I enjoyed FF X and XII, but I never finished them. They got too hard, and I had to grind and grind and grind just to get to the next area. It stopped being fun. Last summer I played The Legendary Starfy on the DS. The game was easy as heck, but it was quite enjoyable. I expect the same thing out of the new Kirby game. That isn't always a bad thing. A game can be easy and still a ton of fun. We've learned replay value doesn't just come from forcing you to replay the game over and over just to survive to a new area.
What I really hate is what other commenters have noted: online play. When Q3 did it they had a good reason: it was a FPS with no story and the bots weren't that great. But today, it's an excuse to make less content. It's an excuse to make a buggy game. It's an excuse to try to force me to buy an XBox Live subscription. I almost never care. The only times I've really enjoyed online games where when I ended up stumbling upon a server I could play on all the time, with people I knew who would take care of griefers and generally played the game.
On the whole, online play is usually tacked-on and not that great. When I see a preview for a game that's not dedicated online, and online is one of the first features they talk about, I know I'm not going to care much.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
When the "game" has 5 hours of content and is easy, you can beat it in one day and still have a life. We call those days "Saturday" and "Sunday".
Seriously, this "attack the poster" mentality is idiotic. Games today are unquestionably easier then games from 15 years ago. Making games that most people can't play is bad for business. WoW is a great example: if hard modes were the only modes for raids, most of the playerbase would never be able to raid and they'd lose all those customers. Catering to the top 10% of your players is a good way to get rid of the other 90%.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I have been playing the Grand Theft Auto series since the original came out. In the original games, and even going up through GTA III on the original PS, the mission timers were strict. There wasn't any room for error. You had to find the perfect path to complete the mission or you would run out of time and have to start all over again. It was frustrating but at the same time when you did figure out how to do it, there was a sense of accomplishment. It was like the game designers would not let you get by with mediocrity. You had to do it just right.
Fast forward to GTA IV and it is MUCH more simple. There seems to be a lot of leeway built into the game. Instead of making it nearly impossible to succeed, they have made it nearly impossible to fail. On missions where you have to chase after people, they will actually slow down if they get too far ahead. In the original, if they got too far ahead, that was it, game over.
I think the attention spans of children are getting shorter. They have too many entertainment options these days. When I was a kid, we had a system.... usually it was one or two kids in the neighborhood had one and everyone else went over to their house. First it was an Atari. Then a Nintendo. Piracy wasn't an option. Game designers had some leeway because choices were limited.
In this day and age, there are simply too many options. If a game is too difficult, your average kid will go do something else and might not ever come back.
Huh, I never really liked RPGs for the same reason quoted by subby... with enough grinding /anyone/ can W1N!
http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/awesome-by-proxy-addicted-to-fake.html
But yes, I do play the occasional RPG for the story. But mostly I stick to sims (flying / racing / construction puzzles / turret defense / maybe the occasional RTS / compelling FPS with compelling mechanics and/or non-twitch-based multiplayer dynamics).
Many people want to see video games called art, placed on the same pedestal that movies are placed at the very least.
One consequence of that want is that you want your game's superbly written story line with all its drama and emotion to be accessible. If critics (or the general populace, for that matter) can't get past level two, they're going to have a hard time saying how it's on par with last month's blockbuster.
'Nuff said
Angry Birds says no.
Though seriously, to me it's about value as well. For a small game like the mentioned for only a buck, I've gotten hours of gameplay out of it. Likewise a good online multiplayer you can get numerous hours of gameplay as well. What I don't like are the story games where you are done in just a few hours. Not the best entertainment for your dollar. Likely the reason is that single time through games are expensive to make and don't have as much volume in sales. HL2 may be an exception.
Most games that have a multiplayer mode (especially FPSs) derive their gameplay from said Multiplayer.
Single player story mode? Who the hell cares about that?
Dwarf Fortress. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
You will probably give up quickly because you are a lame n00b that gets ate by skeletal crocodiles or starve to death. You will most certainly not make it to the point where you make a !!magma!! cannon to shower your enemies with hot death from above.
Yea, you can camp spawns all day, but can you build a pressure plate activated super computer?
Half life 2, episode two on hard mode has one of the most incredible, challenging, virtuosic moments in gameplay... easily a summer project for the average gamer to beat without saving through
I enjoy playing games for both Single and Multiplayer -- which is why i'm drawn towards games like TF / TF2 and CoD etc... The only trouble i'm finding these days is the danged game hackers. Wall hacks, aimbots, modded lobbies all make life more frustrating when i'm just wanting a challenging experience playing someone else on a somewhat level field of play.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
Watch honest, cut-throat reviews by cut-throat reviewers like Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation reviews.
Consider less cut-throat reviews by sites like gametrailers.
If you're less scrupulous, try before you by (no, I'm not going to tell you how).
If the game doesn't seem like its your cup of tea, don't buy it.
If we stop paying for shitty games, eventually pouring $10 to $50 million into a bad title will become a losing venture, and large companies like EA will either change their tack, or die.
Simple.
I've noticed the same as well. One of my favourite examples was Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind vs Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Morrowind was a very detailed game with a huge world, wonderful story and a good deal of complexity to the world, controls and the parts you played in the main story. Oblivion was more advanced in terms of visuals, but the controls were simpler, there was a lot less flexibility in character-based spells and weapons customization, the quests were much, much easier (and used a computer-aided compass to point out precisely where they were), the world was smaller, and the story was weak. Your part in the story was even... well, kind of secondary in the end. Part of this dumbing down of games, in my opinion, comes from the game consoles. As most games today are made for the consoles as the primary market, it seems they focus on making the controls simpler. There is also greater pressure to get games pumped out quickly, and a larger market to throw into upheaval if a game is not to their liking. Working in a university campus, my impression of the youths that comprise the younger portion of today's gamers is that they seem to have a shorter attention span (which, given the massive media exposure they have is not surprising). Perhaps the dumbing-down of games is also an attempt to hold their interest?
Games ARE my life. I'm a game designer and programmer. Do you mean another life, like joining the Marines or something?
Obviously though, it's not that he's naturally too good, but that he's just playing the same effing game he's been playing for the last 10 years, with slightly better graphics and different maps. Does a championship runner complain that tracks are getting shorter? No, he's just getting better at the sport. You're right though. There's only so far that these games can go before the challenge runs out, and then it's time to find a new hobby. Games need a new evolutionary kick start. Nintendo recognised this, and look at the effects the Wii has had on the market. There are several good ideas out there that haven't yet been done to death. A decent remake of even something ancient like The Sentinel would keep most gamers occupied for days.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I wish I could remember the article but it talked about why games priced at $60 is fair. Basically, it said that with the number of hours of entertainment you get out of a game for the price is comparable to that of going to the movie theater where you pay $10 to watch a 2 hour movie. The article was around when you could spend upwards of 10 to 15 hours on average to finish the single player game. If this is the case should I only be paying $10 for Medal of Honor?
I think that the general population is getting dumber, and games are just being made that cater to them. Dumber games for dumber people.
My personal preference are games that require both thinking and quick hands, and stick it on the highest difficulty. Then throw a small dose of "dumb game" in there every once in a while for when I just want to blow stuff up... and because I found it on clearance for $5.
No, there is no "-1 I'LL NEVER ADMIT BEING WRONG!!!" mod.
I'm what should be called "hardcore casual gamer". Sounds weird? Not quite: I play lots of games; most of them on easiest difficulty setting. I'll tell you why in a second. :)
My philosophy is fairly simple: I buy a game, therefore I own it (albeit the EULA saying that it's only rented/licensed/leased to you, blah-blah). Bottom line is I can play it however I want. So... that's what I do.
I know my limits. Aged 31 and working 'till 2 AM every night, I know that my reflexes aren't that good; my patience runs short; and I want to have fun. For me, fun is when you cruise through a game without wasting an insane amount of energy and frustration to advance. So in order to obtain that fun, I set the difficulty level to the lowest possible. I also try to grab all games which offer a rich sandbox mode. Examples: Prototype, Just Cause 2, Assassin's Creed, GTA 3, 4, The Saboteur, etc.
Metagaming and immersion is a lot more important than mindlessly following the main storyline through corridors from A to Z. I usually ignore the main storyline whenever I can and only follow it when I want to change something. I had endless hours of fun in Just Cause 2 (played for almost 100 hours of game time so far) and it's still fun to do stuff in there. Same for GTA 4. Same for Prototype. I just wish there were more games like these out there on the market.
One sandbox-type game that I did NOT like is Spore, because you always are summoned to do this and that and have to go there and do it, otherwise bad things happen. Ugly and unrewarding. Another bad sandbox game is Mafia 2: nothing to do except roam around in a car. Boring.
As for Multiplayer: I enjoy co-op PvE games (such as Serious Sam), but I dislike PvP. My aggressiveness is around -7 on a scale from 1 to 10; combined with my bad gaming skills and my unwillingness to improve (call me lazy, I don't care) makes for a bad set of prerequisites for PvP.
MMOs: I play browser-based MMOs, which are fun; OGame was one of the more interesting ones, up to a point when everything sort of got stuck (some sort of "endgame" where the server had too few people to make anything a challenge). I also play EVE Online, but lately it became to aggressive on all levels to be enjoyable. Everybody seems to fight everybody else for no apparent reason.
One more thing about pretty much all MMOs I have played: the trolls, jerks and pubeless snoogans vastly outnumber all other types of players, thus poisoning the gamevironment. Yes, even EVE Online is invaded by such archetypes, polluting forums, chatrooms, etc. I had hoped the complexity of the game would drive them off; sadly, it's not the case.
Well, anyway, staying on topic: I have no problem with dumbed down games. What I have a problem with are:
- games which cheat. A good example would be racing games where everybody is 1 lap behind in the last lap, and all of a sudden you are ranked 6th.
- inconsistent game difficulty. An example is the bloody ninja rope trial in Worms: Reloaded. I cruised through most levels (with few exceptions) but got stuck on that stupid level for the last 2 months or so. Epic Fail from the producer. Not to mention the ninja rope's mechanics is completely different from all other Worms games.
- Bad ports from consoles. No further comment here...
All in all, so what if the main storyline ends in 3 hours? Good, now we can concentrate on having fun in the sandbox mode
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Wait a tic, Tribes was multiplayer? Here I thought it was a post apoc game, where everybody else in the world was dead... *sigh*
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I'm nowhere near a hard core gamer, but I have played Dragon Age: Origins and the sequels for months on end. I play it on Nightmare and have played nearly every race and class because the origin stories are different for each one. I really love this game because it just seems to have such deep content. /flame on gamer.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
Ninja Gaiden 3 or Battletoads for something to remember the good old days.
It is hard to imagine that any company would want to make products that are more accessible and cheaper to produce...
People equally complaining that games are too easy and too hard.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Gotta hold out hope for the next Stalker game, but they just announced it's coming to consoles, too. So maybe not.
[fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.jpg] in response
There are more games being manufactured today than our nostalgic times. Do you expect ALL of them to be great? Compare the number of gems there are today than there were back when SNES was a year old, or Playstation1, or whatever era you consider the 'Golden Days'.
If they're the same, then there's a constant to be had. If there are more, then the gems made have a strong correlation to the number of games being produced.
If there are less... then this article is actually warranted. . I blame it on the economy
Sorry Mark, meant to reply to your parent. HM
Story-driven games should be easy. Everyone who starts the story should be able to experience the whole adventure and find out how it ends. They can still challenge more serious gamers by providing sidequests, optional bosses, bonuses for 100% completion etc.
-Stephen
I agree that games are getting easier, but that's why a lot of them have different difficulty levels. Devs seems to have decided to lower the curve a bit is all.
Sometimes the programming on these sucks, but sometimes it's pretty great. Unless you are playing every new game you get on the hardest mode then don't complain they are too easy. Play it for a little while and if you are blazing through it, up start over and up the difficulty.
Oh, and play the new Fallout game on "Hardcore" mode if you want a challenge. They didn't just make the monsters tougher :)
Recent games are often linear stories, loaded with artistic media, pretending to be free-to-roam games. Given the linear game sequence, it _doesn't pay to make some parts really difficult_, because it would close off the remainder of the game, spoiling the satisfaction. I used to develop small games: usually procedural, without story, where the difficulty just keeps going up, no end! While my approach challenged every player, and offered replayability, it wouldn't result in the type of 'formula' game that gets published nowadays.
... to stop playing games, and starting designing and programming them.
Bet it takes you more than 1 day.
Most "gamers" today would be blown away by the difficulty of some NES games.
Especially players of those "Triple A" titles mentioned...
I was going to buy a new golf game that I could play on my PS3 - hoping to bring back the fun that we used to have in college playing PGA Tour Golf on the Sega Genesis. I downloaded the demo of the newest Tiger Woods golf on the PS3 and couldn't beleive how dumbed down the game was. Instead of having to use split second timing to make the perfect shot, you just simply move the controller lever back and then forward and you get the perfect swing every time. Talk about ruining a perfectly good video game. Around here (New England) we have a different kind of bowling - candlepin. At some point they invented 'bumpers' that make it so that young kids could play without constantly getting gutter balls. The problem is, now you watch teenagers play (who should be perfectly capable of throwing the ball straight) with the bumpers up simply because the game to them is to see how hard they can throw the ball. Kids don't really want a challenge these days - they want instant gratification and don't want to be challenged.
Want to know the reason games are getting easier? It's me, and people like me. I suck at games; I'm absolutely terrible. I'm the guy who didn't make it past the second screen in Pac Man, who couldn't time the barrel jumps right in Donkey Kong, and blew himself up with the rocket launcher or got lost playing CTF in DOOM. I don't have the time, ability or the desire to spend honing my skills on a game that I'd only spend a few hours of my life on even if I did learn to play correctly.
But you know what? I've started playing more games precisely because they're becoming easier. I'm the new target demographic because I'm untapped and have money to spend. I'm very sorry for your experience, but I'm actually beginning to enjoy myself. Hopefully in the near future they'll learn to balance game levels, we can peacefully coexist. I'll be hanging out in "casual" while you're mastering "epic" content, and we'll both be having fun.
Yes. I used to play Everquest and it was awesome because there was a real sense of risk vs reward (corpse runs in Po(A or S... was it Air or Sky... can't remember) come to mind). Also, as I played an enchanter, I felt there was actually an element of skill involved (a bad enchanter vs a good enchanter could ruin/make a group; same concept applied to clerics etc... - I realize playing a warrior was boring). Nowadays, with WOW, MMORPGS are ridiculously easy and most strategies are "learned" by looking up videos on YouTube. People don't want to play the game to figure out problems; they just want shiny epic items. I don't find that challenging and thus I don't find it fun.
These quest style games have definitely gotten easier over time. Oblivion is a good example of a more recent game that has a lot of content and a considerable amount of open-world exploring (compared to say any FF game, which is essentially a walkthrough by comparison). Oblivion (and other recent games) still have some major differences compared to games 10 or 20 years ago. Some of these are :
- Auto mapping - It becomes a lot easier navigating a dungeon if you know exactly where to go once you've been there already. You didn't get a map for any of the King's Quest games - you had to remember or draw it out yourself. In the Ultima Series, you got a crude world-map, but not much detail (no maps of dungeons either).
- Preset dialog / actions - (Mass Effect, Dragon Age etc..) You used to have to type out commands or use a pre-set combination of specific verbs and nouns to do stuff. Like in the monkey island games. It's a lot easier to just select some pre-determined choices rather than figure out how to solve the next puzzle.
- No internet for quick solutions - Even if these games were just as difficult, people don't have the patience to sit around and get stuck in one part for more than 15 minutes. It's pretty easy to just look up your next step in a walkthrough.
Not sure if I agree with "easier games" for other types of games - some are still pretty difficult. Mass Effect 2 didn't seem that difficult on the hardest level, but I still can't pass a game on Civ 4 or Civ 5 on the hardest level - so I wouldn't say that game is "too easy". For any games that have a multiplayer component, I think that's really their main focus. The campaign mode seems like more of an added bonus, and I don't really expect it to take more than 40 or 50 hours on the hardest level.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Difficulty and "dumbed down" are not the same thing. World of Warcraft is much more complicated than Mario Bros, but that doesn't mean it's harder to "do well" at it. It's also not always easy to define the boundary between "dumbed down" and "streamlined". Comparing modern D&D to 1st Edition AD&D, for instance, I find that many things are much, much, simpler -- I no longer have to look up multiple numbers in tables most of the time -- but that the game as a whole has a much, much, more diverse set of options and choices at any given time.
Furthermore, it's not entirely obvious that there's any intrinsic virtue to games being "hard". Take a game you like. Now, modify it as follows: Every five minutes, there is a 20% chance that you instantly lose the game, including any and all "lives" or "continues" or whatever that you might have had. Now, is this game better than the one you started with?
Games used to be "hard" because arcade games were built around a business model where you had to put in twenty five cents to play the game "once". They had to have a definite end, and the end had to be as close to inevitable as possible. We aren't using that model anymore, and it is no longer particularly relevant whether games are "hard" in that sense. Instead, we start thinking in terms of whether games are challenging, because that's part of what makes them fun to us.
In many cases, games that have been "dumbed down" or "made easy" have actually been moved to a higher level of abstraction or thought. Modern MMOs are, in many cases, much easier to survive in than they were five or ten years ago... But this doesn't mean that there's no room for skilled play, it just means that what you get from being skilled is different from what it used to be. On the whole, I find them a lot more interesting now. With upcoming changes to CoH to make life easier on pretty much all characters (we'll get some combination of more powers to use or more energy to use our powers with), I don't expect that suddenly the game will "stop being challenging". I expect that it will be less frustrating in some cases, and that I'll spend less time easily winning a fight and then waiting a minute with nothing interesting to do while my character regenerates.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
By eliminating the boring parts.
Remember the you-die-and-you-restart-the-level mechanic? The pixel-perfect-platform-jump?
Gone they are!
And the world is a better place.
Fallout New Vegas has been pretty challenging...[not because of the bugs, though that's definitely added to it]
I think they aim the game for the more general public. Games are getting more mainstream than ever so there is the line to stay on that keeps the casual gamer into your game and the hardcore gamer motivated. MW2 and Halo have done a good job with the multiplayer to keep the game fun along with adding the special ops part as something different but if a game wants to be big in the large public, its gotta have more of a store line and fun factor than complexity IMO.
Bryan
Even Magic: The Gathering has been dumbed down recently. At one point in the early nineties, it was on a list of games recommended by Mensa.
I'm surprised nobody here seems to realize that the current dependence on multiplayer is also largely an anti-piracy effort. Single player games can be cracked and pirated and the developer can't do much about it, but if their game is heavily MP reliant then that significantly increases the chances that people will purchase the game and take advantage of it rather than pirate it.
Even after years this is still a great thinking person's game, at least if logic puzzles are your cup of tea.
...by more complex, well-thought-out difficulty settings. A harder game is not just adding more, tougher enemies.
Anyone played Fallout New Vegas? There is a "hardcore mode" which changes the mechanics of the game to make it much more challenging. You have to eat, drink water, and sleep at regular human intervals (no word on going to the bathroom or... you know but I'm sure the modders are working on it).
Additionally, ammo and other misc. items count against the weight you carry (normally they don't). Healing yourself is harder, and requires more skill as a doctor. It's easier to be killed. Best of all, the game TELLS you with a pop-up box at the beginning that this mode is available (although it recommends against enabling it) so that you can play that way from the get-go even if you didn't look at the options panel before playing.
It is nice to see that they finally added this 'more realism' level of difficulty, since you had to add it via a 3rd party mod for Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3.
Side note: I know posting as AC will get this post +0 and my carefully crafted post will wither in obscurity, but hope springs eternal. Realistically though, the 'hardcore' gamers will continue to snort, smirk, and open another bag of Cheetos while complaining about the mass-marketing of video games and how the explosion of growth in the video game industry has never benefited them in the slightest. Now, back to Vegas...
Since Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 went HD and stuff the market has gone down hill. Everyone is moving to them and PC gaming is pretty much dead. The PC gaming went down hill as well as the games.....they all seem to be ported to the PC now. Everyone is an idiot, keep buying the consoles!! Thanks for ruining the PC gaming market!
I'm mostly a PC gamer, but I was given a PS3 as a gift recently, so I have been playing some of those games now too. The last console I had before this was a Dreamcast. lol Anyway, I recently discovered Demon's Souls and... damn! That game is hard! I love it! lol It is nice to see that some games are nice and tough still... it definitely gives a feeling of accomplishment when you finish a section. :-) More games need to do this! Do you hear me, Sony?! Make me happy! ;-)
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
My machine has limited internet access.
I do not want to play multiplayer as the quaalude kid that gets beaten to the punch every time.
I paid $$ for a game, not more to login to a game.
I have real toys to play with my real friends.
I think games are working to better become challenging in the right ways, and challenging in a more gradual sense (as in it gets harder as you go on). Many older games that were hard were hard simply by virtue of doing shitty things. They'd give you no guidance at all as to what to do, or they'd require you to do a section over and over perfecting the sequence of commands needed to be given at a high speed. Sure all that was "hard" in that it was difficult for many people to do, much less do well, but that doesn't mean it was good.
Also games don't have to be as hard these days to give a lot of play. Back in the NES days, what with the rather limited cartridge space, you had to bad out the gameplay. In the case of something like Final Fantasy, that meant a lot of grinding. In the case of most action/platformers, that meant a limited amount of lives after which you had to restart the whole damn thing. If you want to see just how short some of the games really are, go look up the NES speed runs. Here people use an emulator to effectively do a "fastest possible" kind of run. Often games last all of 10 minutes to see all the content. The reason they took longer was because you'd have to restart (whereas with the emulator they just rewind a bit, since it logs execution and can reverse it).
Difficulty for its own sake is not a good thing. Challenge is there to be fun, not just for its own sake. This whole thing smacks of more "Get off my lawn," bullshit. I think the author is being a dumbass for two reasons:
1) Being a tough guy. "Oh these kids these days don't know how rough we had it. Our games were hard, AND WE LIKED IT!" Oh shut up. There are still plenty of challenges out there. Many games offer challenges in doing optional things, or harder difficulty modes and so on. Others do it online. You want some real reflex challenges? Plan an online shooter. You'll find some damn good players out there to challenge you. Not for everyone for sure, but if twitch challenge is your thing, they are good stuff. Stop being a tough guy and pretending you had it so much harder. Games are fun, not a survival process.
2) Seeing the past through rose coloured glasses. Lots of people always says that the past was so much better, and they are always wrong. People remember things as being better than they were. However in this case, it is real easy to tell. Think old games were so great? Fire up an emulator and play them then. You can play old video games, in their original glory, today. However be prepared for them not to be as awesome as you remembered. Not saying there weren't good games, or old games I still enjoy playing, just that they aren't quite as good as your memory might tell you. I really liked Final Fantasy 4 (2 in the US) as a kid. Seemed like an amazing story, and really hard, my friends and I would get together to play it and strategize on bosses. Ya not so much. The story is actually fairly generic/shallow and the game is easy as can be. Still a fun game, but not the epic experience I remembered.
My favorite game was the first Mechassault on the XBox. Completion of the story mode took about a day or two; and sure, it was fun. But that wasn't where the value of the game really was. If anything, that was just practice.
Mechassault sported local player against local player, local player against computer, and local player against online player game modes. Several of them, in fact. Co-operative and otherwise. And it was in those modes that I spent - and continue to spend - hour after hour in the game. To this day, I have found nothing as satisfying as the dual-team (about six against six, IIRC) online mode - absolute mayhem. And I like mayhem. :) The graphics are now hugely dated, the game is more than just "familiar", and yet it never lost its playability... I just got cut off from the online modes when someone dropped the support ball in the transition from the old XBox Live to the new. We (my friends and I) still play it in local mode using my home theater, and it's still the best game I've ever played. If my XBox dies, I will immediately replace it simply on the strength of this one particular game.
Now, I recognize that Mechassault appeals to me, and certainly not to everyone, but there is a common thread here and that is those extra modes. No computer (yet) is going to be as wily, as clever, as unpredictable, as a human opponent. IMHO, games that correctly leverage this, and have that perfect mix of great control and a compelling theme will always trump those that don't, and they have the potential for high quality replayability as long as you can find an experienced partner or partners to have a game with.
So... I don't really care if a game's story mode, or whatever it's called these days, is relatively short. I have no, and I do mean zero, interest in cut scenes, those in-game movies... I want to play, and generally speaking, I want to play with other people. That'll probably remain the same until some real breakthroughs are made in AI, and I'm not holding my breath for that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In spite of being written for DOS, it is very human. I always compare it to the stories we heard when being 10 years old.
Technology is not exactly good for people, only for robots!-?
"Math is Hard" says Barbie.
And nowadays the average age of people playing these games online is 10-14.
Now stop twinking your characters with in-game spiffs and you won't find it so "easy".
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Completely agree with your statement that games are 'dumbed' down. You may say that the FPS games are the worst, but modern MMORPG's are just as bad. Try any of the recent MMO's to come out? All they are is a giant time sink. There's no thought involved into the leveling and there is absolutely no feel of achievement in the games either. I've put a lot of time into MMO style games and I never thought that World of Warcraft would be looked at as a difficult MMO years after its release. I miss the old RPG games that were more strategy and puzzle based than click and wait of the modern age.
I was thinking the same thing the other day. I know i never managed to finish either legend of zelda or jackal on NES. I downloaded the emulator the other day and still cant get past level 2 on jackal even with saves and reloads.
Back in my day, if we wanted to play games we had to build the hardware ourselves from radio tubes that would shock you if you fatally if you looked at them funny, and then painstakingly program the games with soggy punch cards, distinguish enemies on a screen with pixels the size of bricks, using a controller that could only go left and up.
Kids these days are spoiled. Spoiled I say!
Someone please mod parent up for that link.
Very interesting article on game design, philosophy - perserverance vs performance.
I remember lots of games that would take at least 40 hours of play to complete even if you used every mega god unlimited cheat there was. Now we get games that can be completed in 30 hours including all side missions. Often they have a hard mode that almost nobody on the planet can complete without cheats. It's not so much they are getting easier, it's that they are getting shorter.
I don't like the online to play garbage either, there are lots of time I want to play a game crafted around my game character, and not have to worry about some online douchebag out to wreck my day. I've also noted that if a games features gives a prominent mention of PVP, it usually means they have very little actual game content, they expect you to run around ganking other players and be so dumb that you mistake that for content. (There are a lot of essentially empty games out there.)
Apparently noone so far has answered the direct question... The answer is: no.
In a few more words, games used to have to be played from start to end in a single session. Especially on the original gameboy, games were quite easy. I remember my record at beating Kung Fu master was 4 minutes + something. Same applies to games like Super Mario. They're not more simple now than they were before, quite possibly the other way around.
Some games have gotten more easy... Final Fantasy comes to mind. But usually it's due to the developers getting less evil.
Disclaimer: The article seems to talk mostly about first person games, which I don't play.
long gone are the days of us gamers pitching are controllers in anger being we cant pass a certen part of a game after trying half the day. and games that took weeks to beat. even tho i did hear halo reach is dammed hard in single player. i think nes to psx/n64 where the golden days of gaming. they made hard or very long games. now you see very few games that are like that gta being one of them where its full of single player content and very low multiplayer focus. even the final fantasy serise took a nosedive. 13 is a friggen interactive movie no towns or free roam witch every ff game sense nes had. . and 14 is a moo riddled with bugs and lacking content.
I never used to like hard games you die a lot when I was little. Now I love them. My first Megaman games were 7 and 9. Here is one of the things about harder games:
They are more memorable and you get more satisfaction when you finally win.
My friend hates dieing. He played the games in the Megaman Anniversary collection in easy mode. I noticed when I did the same thing, none of the older classics were as memerable as 7 when I originally went through it and 9.
Easy modes in games are shit and destroy the game. After all, if you beat the game in easy mode and there is nothing extra to see in normal and hard, what is the point of going back?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
In supaplex, I got to level 104. :(
But none believed me
I gave up playing commercial games long time ago. I love doujin and indie games from bottom of my heart, especially Touhou.
...then often people feel cheated out of your money. There is a Youtube video of a UK comic complaining about games that "hide" their content (either through difficulty or longevity tactics).
People like to complain abouth difficulty but....
I played the original Contra. When I lost all my lives, I would just put off trying it again until the next day. It only took me about a week to get through the game. It was not frustrating at all, as when I died and lost my continues it was about my stop point anyway.
There are bad games that force you to die too often, but games like Contra and Megaman did dieing right. They were not too hard, but they were definitely not a push over either. There is something about games where when you first approach them they are hard as hell, but when you figure out the secret they are a walk in a park that are extremely enjoyable.
I believe Mario Galaxy is another good example of challege. The old lord of the rings games were a bad example where switching the difficulty was a bit too easy to do.
When games are too easy to blow by they become unmemorable.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Look I can beat the original Mario in 4 hours and it's taken me over 80 days of Play time in World of Warcraft just to get through the Majority of the end-game content (that's like 15% of the total content), easier is in your state of mind. For the most part games are getting harder and longer and for anyone who ever played games on the NES or Genesis or earlier when there was no "save" this should be obvious. The games you mention are supposed to be easy to "beat" (Compared to some other modern games) because the point of them isn't to win the story but to compete against other players.
-- Adam McCormick
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "Way to go, sport!" (you started a new game!)
I felt the exact same way until I stumbled across Project Reality, a Battlefield 2 mod. If you can get past the 2005 graphics (I don't find them bad at all, actually), you're in for surprise:
.50 CAL emplacements without two supply crates.
Honor system: you can't spawn rape. Kick/ban in effect; noobs can't fly aircraft or vehicles if they don't know what they're doing; there are training servers for that, kick/ban in effect.
Teamwork: No really, you can't win the game by yourself. The scoresheet rewards those who provide team assistance; a good medic or squad leader can easily have the top score. on that note, you have to join a squad; almost all require you to use VoIP. All heavy assets below to squads, first come first serve, so some noob can't take a chopper and crash it into the ocean every time it respawns; you need the heavy and logistics squads to run troop transport and drop supply crates -- you can't build a Forward Observation Base (FOB) where you can respawn without crates; you can't deploy TOW or
Moderation: at least in the servers I play in, there's always at least one player/admin in the server at any one time enforcing everything I just mentioned. And no, they're not assholes, they do a great job keeping the game going.
I've played entire maps, completely engrossed and satisfied in the game (even when your side loses a round), without having fired a shot -- it's actually frightening moving up some dark streets with your squad trying to take an objective when you hear the "clankety clank" of a tracked vehicle and the Cobra attack chopper squad just got shot down.
body massage!
The same way you build muscle by lifting weights until exhaustion.
But you don't start with a weight that you can't lift for even one repetition.
..some classic games like Shadow of the Beast.. which many people never completed. Yet they still went out and bought the next Psygnosis game, regardless.
Or Virus by David Braben, which only a handful of people ever gained partial mastery of, let's say, to get to level 8 or 9... but they still say it's one of the best, even after 20 years.
I'm playing LOTRO now, and it's really fscking anoying that I CAN'T DIE. "You have succumbed to your wounds." Woohoo. Any self respecting orc would eat my intestines on the spot, not run away allowing me to revive and kill him a few minutes later.
The problem is that the more "realistic" a game is, the longer it takes for people with no imagination to "imagine" their character with all the trappings of race, rank, etc., i.e., tell the game what they are, look like, are carrying, etc. And who wants to go through all that crap again, picking out noses, hair color, clothing, etc.
Nethack was a blast and it just used ANSI codes, for dog's sake.
[captcha "fosters", which incidentally, I just drank..]
How do you earn the right to criticize a game without playing it?
I don't know exactly, but I'd bet it looks a lot like meta-analysis: take the consensus among reviewers who have played the game. Or it could involve criticism of elements as they are described in the game's documentation. For example, CronoCloud might negatively criticize a game just for having been made for PC instead of a console.
I often feel this way about modern RPGs like Oblivion, Dragon Age, and that whole crowed. Mission logs/quest objectives that tell you exactly where to go/what to do. No real consequences to any actions outside of the sandbox reputation and storyline elements. I miss the days of Baldur's Gate where you could fucking lose a character for stepping on a flesh to stone trap and failing save or solving actually difficult puzzles and teasing out quests more for one's self. I understand why things have gotten the way they have, and I applaud games like New Vegas that offer "hardcore" modes, but at the same time the tougher difficultly levels always feel very cookie cutter. Triple the mobs xp and good game.
Besides, Assasin's Creed FINALLY figured out how to use autosave, and not that BULLSHIT Rockstar is still pulling, the stupid "save point".
Would you prefer that all games autosave like NetHack, which has no quickloads? If your character dies, your character's death is saved.
Games are marketed to the general population, casual gamers. Sure there will be a few hardcore games out there but for the most part, the money making section is the people who only play a couple times a week or families with children.
Go play doom on nightmare setting... respawning bad guys totally changes how you play the levels since you'll quickly run out of ammo. it becomes a mad dash for keys to gtfo of there.
Wow, are cantankerous old people now really complaining about easy video games? My grandparents immigrated, worked in coal mines and steel mills as children, and circled the globe to fight WWII. My parents lived through Vietnam and the Cold War. Now my generation comes along bitching about how Super Mario Brothers was more difficult than Halo?! Please tell me this author is Gen Y, otherwise I'm handing my Gen X membership card back.
Starcraft 1 took me weeks to finish.
Broodwar took another couple of weeks.
Starcraft 2 took me 4 days.
If a game is too easy, you need to play it on the harder settings. Unless you're Very Good at these games, the harder settings will likely be hard enough.
I also don't think that the games are substantially easier. Having played from Doom through COD4, all of the games have parts that are just trash-clearing, and other sequences that end up as tedious quick-load marathons for me. And yet, I'm a better player than I once was, because I have fifteenish years of FPS experiences. I no longer have to think about the process of the shooting or moving. (Now, if only I were more aware or had better reflexes or could aim better.)
In terms of multiplayer, I recall COD4 as a somewhat harsh experience as a newbie: most encounters, I'm on the floor, because hardcore means you die when you get shot. In balance, though, the games tend to be well-balanced (barring bugs and cheaters) and most guns are similarly effective. It's not like Quake where you were fodder if you didn't have a railgun or rockets, for example. In terms of single player, the AI still cheats, and there are still sections stacked against you.
I should revise what I said before. Games are easier now, in that NOW they usually have a difficulty modifier. Default difficulty seems similar, but often there's an easier option available than there used to be, because many players want to play for the maps and story, rather than for the challenge. In return, the hard modes can be VERY hard. (There's a noticeable difference between the hardest and next-hardest difficulty in many games, from DOOM's nightmare mode to AvP's hard modes to COD's harder modes.)
No mention of Borderlands? I know the hacked weapons kind of ruined it for mixed groups, and the money system was a little silly, but playing that game with friends in multi-player co-op was a hoot and I got a lot of mileage out of it. I'm actually bummed there's no more content now that the Robolution has been defeated. MechWarrior 2 on Mplayer - still my all time favorite.
Ikaruga, Dwarf Fortress, Liberal Crime Squad, Spelunky.
Some of the latest ones I've played. There still are challenging games out there. You don't have to play the mundane ones.
starcraft 2?
There are plenty of games that I had trouble finishing in my youth. I crack them open now and often finish them in very little time at all. Author wants to recapture the nostalgia of youth. Instead he's coming across as grandpa "back in my day [insert nostalgia topic here], and we liked it!".
Sounds like there is a business opportunity in the vein of 3rd call-centers for training servers
The money would be better spent on better matchmaking that gives a player a provisional rating after an hour of play and then puts players with similar ratings together. Chess uses the Elo system, and it works. Nintendo tried a vaguely Elo-style rating system with Tetris DS, and it worked (except for problems associated with using the same rating system for three different game variants).
Go outside and get some real life experience. Maybe get yourself laid too.
I'm kind of surprised that they are even including a single player mode at all in many of the games since that is clearly not where most people are spending their time.
Not everybody has an always-on Internet connection. Look at Assassin's Creed 2 and the complaints about its DRM requiring a continuous Internet connection during the single-player campaign. And consider handheld systems: a child might wind up with a DSi, PSP, or iPod touch because mom can't afford $70 per month for a smartphone with a voice and data plan.
And not all game genres lend themselves to balance for player vs. player. For example, Mario is vastly more agile than the enemies in his games; the same is true in any shmup.
And if you complained about the tetanus (from the barbed wire) you know what your parents would say? "Walk it off, pussy!"
When I complained about the tetris, and all the new "infinite spin" and "T-spin triple" crap that Mr. Rogers was putting into the tetris, I did something about it: I made Lockjaw.
Yes, games are getting easier and I blame the Wii. Hardcore gamers want hardmode games with white knuckle bullet sweating action, high learning curves, and brutal penelties for lack of skill. Casual gamers want easymode happy time games they can feel good with goofing around while they chat with their facebook friends...
Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
If you think MW2 was easy, LP2 is doable blindfolded using whatever appendage of your choosing. Easiest game ever.
As an experienced gamer who has been playing games over the past 30 years, I always set new games to the hardest difficulty. Anyone who would say that MW2 or Halo Reach on the hardest difficulty is a walkthrough is seriously deluded or amazingly skilled. Either way, you're a fringe case and don't matter that much.
These newer games also have an online component which pits you against other humans, the most difficult opponent of all. Combined with distractions like achievements and commendations, these games provide more than enough value for money.
Many older games which are put on a pedestal can be speed run in minutes; I can finish Quake on Nightmare in under 30 minutes with the fastest I've seen at 12 minutes or so. SMB series is infamous for it's level skipping secrets and many other older games have speedrun communities.
In the early years of game design difficulty was a way to make a game more appealing when the mechanics themself arent that much fun. Today if a game needs to be difficult to be interesting then the core mechanic wasnt good enough to begin with.
A novel that increasingly gets harder to read as you progress will give a sense of accomplishment its unncessary and annoying when the novel itself is interesting to read.
Hard core gamers at Uni or in part time work or with limited social lives or no family can spend hudnreds of hours of there lives gaming. But for those with work, life and family commitments have very little free time.
Gaming is not just for the young, unemployed stoners of the world. Its an entire medium. Portal was a great experience because it was two to three hours long, amazingly tight game play, not that challenging and was sold at the price of a DVD stand alone.
The majority of the potential market would love to buy, games the price of films, that last roughly the same length of time, that just focus on tight experiences and not 50 hours of padding around a single good idea. But the vocal minority of gamers keep complaining! But you see we can both win! You can have your $100 games that last 150 hours and we can have our $30 games that last four hours.
Its like Cinema Vs TV. Both can be accomodated for.
You know, there were a hell of a lot of easy NES games too. You can beat Kung Fu in like 12 minutes! I think I finished Kirby's Dream Land on Gameboy in about 20. There are plenty of challenging games and harder difficulty levels today, too-- if anything, games all take a hell of a lot Longer to beat.
I still remember the high fives when my buddy and I beat an 8 bit Nintendo Ikari Warriors clone (I don't even remenber the title) in 22 minutes.
Epic! Those were the days.
The single-player storyline is becoming obsolete. It's the on-line multiplayer that,just a few years ago an add-on, that is now driving gameplay. The success of Wolfenstein-ET was the harbinger of this trend.
I think that is what people want. Easy accessible gaming, a few hours a week maybe. No time for more for most.
I think there are hard games that took days/weeks to beat, but it really depends on what you want. I almost only play FPS and except a few that had good single player, I only play online.
A game that I remember playing for LONG, and left a good impression was the last MGS ... took forever to beat, and I was lucky enough and had time to play it.
Also look at Japanese titles. The guys over there must like challenge, and some of the games are just unplayably hard. Then again, this is from 6 years ago when I had the chance to try a bunch of import games. BTW MGS is a Japanese title .... that explains the full DL-Blue Ray disk and the length of the game.
... we've just got to get that "Mission Accomplished" banner hung up.
Have gnu, will travel.
Much like women - you don't complain ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Are there still videogames? I hadn't noticed since, well, 2008.I kinda wish I had $60.00 to spend on one. Is anyone hiring a Java developer?
Try using the difficult settings. Play on Hardcore or its equivalent and you most likely will have to load your last save more than once ;)
If you set the difficulty right, you will have a difficult game.
I have seen a game (some fps, don't remember which) that had a difficulty setting called "Content Tourist". If you want to use the game as a story and finish it in 6 hours, use that. If you are a person who wants to be challenged, use the hardest mode available. There is enough middle ground for people who like to memorize 543 button combos and people who just want to see nice graphics.
If you want a game that is free from these issues, play Minecraft w/o monsters
no sig
If you try hard enough, you'll get to World -1.
*sits down waiting for Troll moderation*
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
I have often wondered when exactly video games lost their challenge to me. To figure it out, it took remembering the classic games that I played years ago, decades even. Games that not only took hours to beat, but took hours to beat the 3rd level. Old NES games like Super Mario Bros, Contra, Spy Hunter, Legendary Wings, Teenage Ninja Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mega Man. The time it took to beat these games was not measured in hours, or even days; it was measured in lives lost, and the count of empty soda cans lining the only clean spot on the carpet that marked where you sat while playing these video games. If you beat Super Mario Bros then it wasn't because you put up with the game long enough to inch your way to the end, with your hand held the entire way. You beat Super Mario Bros because in order to get to the last level it took playing the first level 50 times, the second level 48 times, the third level 46 times... A game might only have a total of 24 levels, but you beat 471 levels to get to the last level.
What has changed since then? What is so different about today's games? How can you beat an entire game with only having played the first level once? It was a slow and gradual change, one that started with codes. Not the kind of code that gave you twenty lives, but codes that marked your progress and allowed you to skip a portion of the game in order to start somewhere near where you last left off. Not a lot of games had these codes in the beginning, but something happened that caused nearly every game to have codes. Game Genie happened. Games endings that were previously out of your reach were now a trip to the store away. With this little device everyone could enjoy the thrill of beating a game, even if they didn't earn it. People became accustomed to being able to win, and started to hunger for it, and soon learned to demand it. The solution for the hungering masses was not more codes though, it would turn out to be easier than that. It turned out to be memory cards.
With the advent of the memory card the game could save your exact progress, not an estimate of how far you got, and it would do it automatically for you with an auto-save function. It no longer took writing down a save code, or a Game Genie with level skipping codes, it no longer took the will of the player to bypass entire segments of a game that you may have only just squeezed by. With auto-save you only had to beat the first level once. Eventually that wasn't enough though. At some point someone decided that having to play an entire level over again, or an entire checkpoint over again, was asking too much. They solved this with quicksave. No longer did you have to complete an entire level to earn a saved game, or reach a checkpoint a quarter or halfway through a level. You could now save the game any time you wanted. Have a hard time beating a portion of the level? Just save the game after every guy you kill. Save the game every 30 seconds, so that you'll never have to play that 30 seconds again. Saved games was not the end of an era of tough video games though, it was only the beginning of what would turn out to be a pitfall of easy-mode.
Somewhere along the line saved games wasn't enough for the average game player to win. Even if you beat the first level, or the fifth, you could still just barely scrape by those levels, enough to the point where you would run out of in-game resources and not have enough to beat the next levels. In-game resources such as lives, ammo, and health would make it so that although you beat level 5, you only had one life left to beat the next three levels, or not enough ammo to kill the 8 guys between you and the next cache of resources. At some point the notion of lives being a limited resource vanished out the window. You now had no fear of dying. If you died then you would just restart at the last save point, and you could continue on willy nilly. You could die 30 times on the first level, and then 40 times on the second. No longer did you have to be good to beat a level, you just had to end
Yes games are getting easier, and have been for some time. This is only true for console releases however and pc releases that came out on both. Hard new games are dwarf fortress, men of war (try playing the US campaign or red tide on the hardest setting. Oh and by the way in the original russian red tide is actually called 'black coat'), all roguelikes, total war series (the battles are still easy but the campaigns on the hardest setting are pretty stiff in empire), civilisation still has very hard settings... in fact, like I said before console games are easy. Perhaps this is because of the well known facts that console players have no attention span or wish to challenge themselves, and it is near impossible to be good at most games without a mouse. There are exceptions of course, for example realism racing sims for console are often pretty hard. Still, when I was a lad completing a game was a fantasy like enlightenment that one strove for but never really expected to attain.
Since 2005 this is the only game I play, period. There was BF 1942 and BF Nam (with the cool mod), but since 2005 nothing but BF2, and since 2009 BF2/AIX2. I tried others like the IL series (realism? apparently no fun) but only ever play BF2. That's for 5 YEARS! I didn't know there WAS an end.
BTW, my current "new" discovery is the AS50 snipe-ass canon rifle. Takes out a tank in as little as 5 shots at 1000 yars. So far the most fun is from the Mec side in ... the map starts with an E. Evergreen, Everest, whatever (the map is from 1942). I like flying the MiG-19 when I do, but that means dragging out the HOTAS (Seitek 52 or whatever).
Ports. Most of the AA titles today, especially the ones covered by major media and with big sales numbers are developed for consoles first and then ported to PC. As a result, most of these titles do not gain any depth from the conversion to PC... even the controls stay dumbed-down in many titles to match their console origins. Although I have somewhat enjoyed a few recent titles that were ported from consoles, they desperately lack the depth and controls of a PC-only title.
In fact, I immediately lower my expectations when I see a game launched simultaneously on console and PC because it's very likely ported from a console and I've yet to see any ported game that 100% maintained the depth and complexity of earlier PC-only titles.
But you phrase it in a self-defeating way. Apparently the value of the game, for you, is that other people can't win.
I don't think that's what you really mean.
-josh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze
Up to 16 computers could be networked in a "MIDI Ring" by connecting one computer's MIDI-OUT port to the next computer's MIDI-IN port. Unless the computers were looped correctly, more than 4 players tended to slow down the game to a crawl and make it unstable.
Some people just don't have time to play for six hours a day, everyday. In a way it makes us LESS lazy! We have to go out and do something else. Or put in a new game! We also don't have the time to wait for games to be developed in a five-year period!
This is something I've been asking for again and again for online games:
- Get us age segregated servers where only people above a certain age can join.
Dealing with hormone-pumped teenagers empowered by a cover of anonimity is not fun and often ruins the game.
If I wanted to be randomly insulted I could to it myself in front of a mirror and it would be a lot more varied and imaginative than what your average teenager can come up with.
I work all day and when I come home tired at the end of the day I just want to be entertained, not to have to deal with feeble attempts at humiliating me.
In fact, I might even be willing to pay a little extra for it.
I played UFO: Enemy Unknown quite a bit when I was a young lad. I remembered the game as being pretty hard.
So, I got the chance to play it again. I laughed a bit at remembering it being "hard", and figured it would be piss easy now.
If it was hard when I was 12 years old and had no clue what I was doing, it should be easy when I'm 25 and have gamed quite a lost these last 10 years..
Ok, so I load it up, getting filled by nostalgia, shoot down my first UFO, and go out to pick up the remains. Ship land, first turn. This time, the bastards won't know what hit'em :)
Send first man out, first step outside the ship, a shot comes from nowhere, dead man. Next man out, same. After third man, the invisible shooter is out of time / ammo (yay), so I run down with man 4.
He sees an alien with the back to me. A-ha! Revenge time! I order my man to open fire, three shot burst. First miss by a country mile, second hit within the same screen at least, third hits the alien. I cheer! Alien, unhurt, turns around and guns my man down with one shot.
I managed to clean it up (was only 2 aliens), but with massive losses. Second mission goes better, but cost of replacing soldiers and equipment have me at almost-broke already. Third mission. First round, my first team member carefully poke his head outside. Right outside stands a little grey dude with a rocket launcher. He fires. All but 2 of my team is dead instantly.
Yes, that game IS hard. For those that say earlier games only seemed harder because we were younger then, go play some of them. Some of those you had to fight nail and teeth for every step! The developers took pride in giving you a challenge (sometimes to the extreme), and winning actually meant something. And that was why they were so damn fun, too.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Have you tried megaman recently? I got my ass whooped in levels I aced as a 12 years old!
By OP's logic final fantasy games are the most 'challenging' out there.
Sure they have settings to make it impossible to play but where's the fun in that?
No sig today...
I hate how people claim that games are too easy, yet they refuse to really dig into the internet and see what mods are popular that might enhance their experience of any number of games. There are great mods out for many major titles and since they're developed by gamers instead of large companies, you get more of the things you want and fewer of the things you're made to think you want. I can name dozens of mods that have more enriching, engrossing multiplayer than their host games to the point where I don't even buy new games anymore.
I haven't bought a new game in a year yet I'm constantly playing new and more enthralling stuff. I recommend taking a few hours and looking at MODdb.com to see what's out there for you, unless you're a console gamer... in which case, there is no hope.
Most certainly easier nowadays. I have completed WOW about 5 times in the last few years. I have been playing http://www.nethack.org/v343/nethack for more than half of my life, (I am over 50) and I still haven't won!
I played the original Grand Theft Auto (no1) for 9 months straight.
Allright, heard enough of these kind of responses. Here's mine:
If you really are someone with rw friends, and you're a geek with a job and cannot play 24x7 (i.e. you're like me), then you probably have some friends who like multiplayer games too. So:
Set up your own server, password protect it and tell your friends when you're online. That way it's more fun because you all suck, no-one is calling anyone any names and you get genuine practice. I've been doing it for years and I can now get around on most public servers without dying every 3 seconds.
This is exactly why you should avoid buying games that do not support private servers (you know, the kind that have a lobby where you cannot influence which server you get thrown to).
- Bertus
Simply vote with you're wallet. When we refuse to buy that repackaged sequel goo the companies will respond by giving in to our demands or see their precious green evaporate in their quarterly earnings statement. But I fear there are too many who will blindly bite on the company hype line...but wait there's more! What would it hurt to not purchase say Halo x?
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/15/
I remember this with Halo 2. Competing against racist seemingly tourette syndrome 14 year olds that must play 26 hours a day to perfect their 'leet skillz', when I just want to play a game and have some fun.
Nowadays games are too easy because they're made for money in most cases, so old games are better...
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
I agree. The recent hentai games from Illusion are also far easier than before. Previously, there was the challenge of trying to follow the target without them knowing it, so you can reach the rape scene. Now-a-days, all you have to do is choose the location and equipment! What is up with that?!
"A lot of people will argue that with all the games mentioned above; that they have excellent multiplayer modes, which keep you gaming long after the single player is over and done with. That would be a very fair point, but what if you don’t like multiplayer, and you buy the game just for the story mode!?"
To this, I say: well, you're out of luck - the multiplayer is where the game is at for most FPSs and the single player section is an added bonus. NOT the other way around. If you want to buy it for the single player experience only, then wait until it is cheaper. Der.
Also, you have to keep in mind that there's usually this thing called difficulty. On games like MW2 you can change it. And believe me, you will spend more than 4-5 hours playing MW2 on Veteran.
It seems more and more game designers are activly trying not to ever cause the player to become fustrated. It is not just about the difficulty of any one area or boss but the cumulative effects of endless array of check points and do overs that prevent the player from having to redo entire levels to move ahead or really put any effort into improving their skills as a player.
I remember playing many games where when your life(s) were gone you started at the very beginning. Not at the start of a stage or level. This simply does not exist in any modern game I know of today.
So you'd like 7th saga, then?
Just like Final Fantasy has become about 90% eye candy and 5% satisfaction with 5% cruft, even the great old franchises suffer under lack of vision and bad team-building. Especially Japanese stuff, where a good game (FF7) that exceeds market expectations suddenly becomes a template for every game that follows, and all we get thereafter is pale but reverent reflections of the original (FF13), while anything that accidentally succeeds despite ignoring the old formula (FF12) is expunged from the corporate ken.
Oh, wait...that's Hollywood.
Seriously, the good stuff is unreal - impossible, almost - and everything else is done by committee because in the absence of vision, that's what big studios do. Like Mafia Music just before the Beatles arrived.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
For me, it seems like the problem isn't easy vs hard. It is the lack of control that modern games give the player. They play more and more like Interactive Movies, that constantly interrupt you, and guide you down narrow paths to tell a story. I blogged about a couple purchases a while back. I haven't bought any games since then.
My Older Blog Post:
I haven’t been playing many games in the last 6 months. This weekend I got the urge to play a RTS, so I read up on reviews, and choose Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2, Warhammer 40,000.
Both of them suck. At least, if you were expecting to play an RTS in the C&C, Age of Empires, Warcraft sense.
First off, you have zero control. Each game constantly interrupts gameplay by telling you to move to a marker, to engage the target at a second marker, to send artillery to this smoke. You have no control. Each game just tells exactly what to do. Plus, their is no way to "overkill defense" just for the fun of it. I really enjoyed building solid walls of towers in Age of Empires, just for fun:)
Company of Heroes is the by far the worse. Options to build artillery, barracks, etc.. were all greyed out. You’d literally wait, the screen would shift to a building, a voice would come on and say “click this building, click this button”. Once you did that, the screen would shift again to a location maker, and a voice would say “click here to deploy that other thing I had you click”.
What is the point of playing a Real Time Strategy game, if the game decides exactly what you should do?
And lets talk about how the game chooses to direct you: by taking control of the screen every other minute. That has got to be the most annoying game play “experience” I have ever encountered. Not only are you not allowed to actually make a decision, but literally ever minute the game takes control away from your mouse and keyboard, and moves the screen. It completely breaks any remaining sense of control or immersion.
I suppose that multiplayer is the only true reason those games are popular. I would assume (hope) that a multiplayer match actually allows you to make decisions, place defenses where you want them, and doesn’t interrupt your gameplay every other minute by telling you what to do and taking control of all the keys.
Meh, I mostly play for entertainment value. For example, I just about never ragequit... I enjoy just hanging on for the amusement of others. Even griefers :P
But esp. with the flight sims and maybe even the open world games like GTA, there are not really always solid goals or "win" conditions... you're just poking around exploring the environment.
Anyway, I appreciate the games that you can accumulate innate skills in, and not fake "stat skillz", so you can pick it up later sometime and immediately start pwning in it without grinding up a character.
try Dwarf Fortress (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/). This is a game as tough as dwarves.
No fancy 3D graphics, all ASCII, but it is the most difficult computer game I've found in thirty years.
It is free (but not open source, probably because that would give away too many spoilers), available for Windwos, Mac and Linux, and the forum support is absolutely stunning good.
The sad truth is that, as in real life, fun is about the other people "around" you and you interacting with them. An observation can be made: Playing FPS in a Clan or Team with average age of about 30, is much more rewarding than the average CoD ~14years. And these "fun" clans/players seem to be easier to find on PS3 than XBox multiplayer FPS's.
I like games with good replay ability. I find games that make you tunnel through their single path through storyline a pain-in-the-you-know-where, and quickly dump them with rapidity of poison. And goes for a lot of games.
For me, If I wanted to do something difficult, I'd just stay at work. And I'm not there to do that, I want to play and fun. And thats means do whatever the heck I want without having to deal with stupid annoying constraints - like puzzles, linear storylines if you don't do X right now your screwed or any such silliness.
Now, as for why the games seem to be getting easier?
1) Well, Maybe it's that your getting Jaded, and have the been there done that syndrome of game play. Meaning the developers are introducing anything new to the game, and you've got into the reflexive A happens, do B without thinking.
2) Perhaps companies push to get games out the door quickly is leading to less due diligence in writing good games. We've got box stores, box house, box-like clothing, why not games that cheaply regraphiced copies of cheap old code? (Oh wait a minute, We've already got that, it's Madden football.)
or my personal favorite reason ~
3) Maybe it's always been a crummy game and it's taken you this long to notice it!
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]