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?"
In multiplayer.
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?
... 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.
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.
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
I don't know. This Slashdot game is pretty hard. I still haven't made it past level 1 where I get dogpiled by FP trolls. And I've been playing since 2001.
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?
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'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.
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.
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.
Then play it in Lawrence of Arabia mode.
"The trick is not minding that it hurts."
The presentation was a bit trolly, but I agree with the sentiment 100%. The reason the guy can complete games so fast is because he's played so many of them. If you want more of a challenge and change, don't play the same type of over and over.
(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
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
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
Obviously, you've never beaten Desert Bus. Now *there* is an accomplishment!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
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)
What I wouldn't have given to only have to walk up hills. Everything was mountains in my day. And the 'game' was called Getting Poked In the Eye With a Stick. And we were grateful.
Luxury, Shilling. We used to have to pay 20 pence for our games which were nothing more than jumping from cowpie to cowpie just to keep warm in the snow. And when we got home my father would thrash us to sleep with an Atari 2600 controller.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
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There's a cheat code:
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Instant +5, Insightful and positive Karma.
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.
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."