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?"

Comments

ROI

[Ryvar]

(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

Re:Where is the fun?

[nschubach]

I don't mind multiplayer. In fact, I encourage it... but I don't do PVP. Most people equate multiplayer to competitive and that's where I think multiplayer gaming gains a big red "x" for some people. What we need to do is encourage developers to develop a storyline and allow jump-in cooperation from people you approve.

Personally I feel like MP games need to break a bit from the linearity of single player gaming (and I know people will disagree with me on this.) I'd love to be completing storyline missions in one town and let my friend go off and sell loot from our last mission or whatever they like (even if it's breaking form the party and exploring that cave over there.)

I spend most of my time investigating the cooperative aspects of games so that I can log in and play with friends and complete objectives.

I don't have nearly as much fun in games when it's just me.

Re:Where is the fun?

[vlm]

In the days before RS-232 we had current loop, which was basically the same idea, but used "current flow"/"no current flow" instead of RS-232 +15V/-15V to signal zeros and ones.

MIDI 1.0 is a current loop serial port that runs at a bizarre baud rate 31250 bps. Yet it uses a nice standard async protocol of 8N1 just like a serial port.

Depending on the peculiar non-standardness of your serial port, it might, with minimal hacking, be made to work MIDI.

Take a UART chip, add a RS-232 level shifter like a MAX-232 or those ancient 1489 1488 level shifters, add a DB-25 and you've got a RS-232 port. Take the same UART chip, add some optoisolators and resistors, wire to a 5 pin DIN jack, and you're got a MIDI port. Not as different as you'd think. The software is a bit different of course.

Or working the other way around, on the Atari ST, the MIDI ports could be connected in a "MIDI null modem"-ish cable, and you could play multiplayer games, although I never owned a ST.