Have Gamers Gone Soft?

[Captain Fabio]

Do Gamers Not Like A Challenge Anymore?
Misleading title is misleading

I saw an article on this and I was interested to get your opinions.

Games now-a-days, aren't really that hard. You have some exceptions with Dark Souls and if you put the game on the hardest setting possible, but sometimes you have to unlock that mode.
But Dark Souls is a great example of my point, so many people have said that the game is really hard, but isn't that a good thing? Ok, if you can't get past one point then it is a pain, but that is a good challenge, I would rather be stuck at one point for a while than cruse through the game.

So what do you think? Do you think games are too easy/hard? Have peoples attitudes changed in if they can't complete it then they say it is too hard?
Input your opinion.
​

 

[shengar]

Play a dose of Dark Souls and/or Demon's Souls if you got yourself a PS3 for real challenge
wait Those game are already mentioned:P

Yes, although I'm from generation whose born in 1990's, I could say that gaming become more easier each passing year. The developer try to make newcomer become easier to adapt with their series. They don't know that they actually making the game easier. Sadly, many people call this 'convenience' as improvement somehow. Now if you went to game website like GS many people gives bad scores to a game because its too hard or they suck enough and rage rating it.

Japanese games who known for having steep difficulty also following these trend. thankfully the developer Atlus didn't. Their game are still hard as hell and I hope they continued to do so. The harder the callenge, the more satisfying you accomplishment be. Believe its more satisfying for me when I'm put Old Beast back to slumber rather than when I'm save Ferelden from incoming Blight although from objective point of view, Dragon Age have better story.

 

[Harebrained]

I remember a lot of laughably easy games from my childhood in the 90's. I think that whether we're talking about difficulty or quality - both subjects of complaint - you just have to look a little harder. Both are still there, but the market is saturated due to how popular gaming has become and how widespread the tastes. Companies are trying to cater to everyone, and that means making it more accessible.

I still stick to RTS/MOBA and the occasional RPG or indie horror title, and I haven't noticed much of a difference myself. I think things have become less obtuse, at least.

 

[Rogue planet]

I think the idea that games are generally getting easier/harder is just a misconception. There have always been easy and hard games, it's just when we're younger we tend to go towards the easier ones. There are always plenty of options for you, whether you want a challenge or an easier experience.

PERSONALLY, I don't like games to be too hard. I play games for the story, visuals and enjoyment primarily. If I have to repeat the same section over and over and over just because they made it ridiculously difficult to the point where it becomes nothing more than trial and error, then I will be annoyed. I don't want my games to be piss easy, but I do want them to be achievable after just a few attempts, rather than spending about an hour on the same little section. There should just be a middle ground.

That said, I am generally referring to combat. Having to fight a stupidly difficult boss for hours is just irritating. If it's a puzzle (my favourite kind of game) then I like them to be challenging, I don't mind spending a lot of time on that because it's actually a challenge for the mind rather than seeing who can button mash the fastest.

If you want challenging gameplay, then you should take it online. Online play is where the real challenge is, it's a measurement of skill against other human beings, rather than a trial error test against a flawless AI opponent.

 

[Dawn]

If you were to run a study on this, you'd find that there's a correlation between the age of the gamer and how long they've been gaming with whether or not they think games have gotten too easy.

That is to say, the older they get and the longer they've been playing video games the more likely they are to adopt this mindset.



What do I think about that? I think that this mindset in general is just a catastrophic failure to be objective when judging the difficulty of video games. I think that perhaps we expect video games to grow up with us for some unknown reason, even though they've been around longer than we've been alive and will probably be around forever. (This is also why people are so prone to saying "THE SEQUEL IS WORSE. FIRST IS BEST. X IS UNORIGINAL/STALE/MAINSTREAM".)

Our culture as a whole struggles with this phenomenon where we set continuously higher bars on our entertainment until the industry just can't meet it anymore. The problem? /We don't understand why it happens/.

I bet you most people these days would have difficulty telling you the exact difference between originality and creativity. (It's kind of a big deal. If you don't know, originality is objective and creativity is subjective. That's the difference in a nutshell.) This also applies to the difficulty of games. We hone our skills, we get better. We master ideas and concepts, and suddenly we act as if we expect the gaming industry to suddenly start growing up with us and inventing new and harder things for us to master.

Now why doesn't that work? You can probably answer this question yourself at this point. It doesn't work because the gaming industry is not personalized specifically for us. It's personalized for "the masses" so to speak. The majority. Who is the majority? The people that haven't turned cynical. Why are they the majority? Because the majority of the younger gamers are on their side.

Like, for difficulty. Games can't just get more difficult forever. At some point, it's going to become impossible to get any harder and it could theoretically happen within our life times if the gaming industry as a whole actually focused on that.



Basically? This is why they say games are for kids. Now, that's not necessarily true. It is possible to adopt a mindset that prevents you from becoming cynical. However, to do that someone has to learn to be more objective. There's no other way around it.

 

[The 100 Mega Shock]

The increasing mainstream appeal of video games basically directly contradicts how older video games, especially those from the late 1980s and early 1990s console / computer systems tended to be more "difficult" down to reasons that mostly bordered on the asinine, nonsensical and actively withholding useful information from the player.

 

[Alley Cat]

I think the reason is that they are making video-games to appeal to younger fan-bases. They)(read: mots of them) need an easier game, otherwise they get frustrated don't play/buy any more games. They are trying to appeal to the majority of people they know that play the games. Also, maybe the games didn't get easier, you just got better. You're older now, smarter, and you probably understand the games more. That's my thoughts on why games are getting easier, anyway.

I like a challenge in games, that is what makes a lot of them fun. But it has to come in tow with good graphics, characters, and game mechanics. I also want them to be HARD, but not nearly impossible. I don't like the challenges that will leave me sitting in the same spot for hours trying to figure out to get passed that spot in the game. THAT is just irritating. Nothing is more annoying than being stuck on the same spot every time you want to play the game. This is usually OP bosses/bad respawn points/enemy-filled areas etc. It doesn't so much happen on the "Easy" difficulty, more so when I start going towards the harder end, whatever they choose to label that. My friends are still pretty much the same in nature, they play the game, and they try to do the challenging bits. If they can't, they come back to it later.

 

[Melody]

There's a reason I stick to tried and true games like LoZ and Pokemon. Not only is it because of nostalgia, but other reasons as well.

The main reason is simple, I do not like a game that is hard to complete the first credits roll. I believe the game should be "completable" multiple times, only getting harder AFTER credits roll. Conversely, I believe "The game is not over when the credits roll, it has only just begun."

If I game to relax, and a game starts to piss me off, it begins to get tiresome. Therefore I expect to be able to pick up an 'Incomplete' game and be able to relax. I expect it to be simple, and I expect it to be easy. Not too easy, that would be boring, but not rage inducingly hard to beat at any point. I expect the game to be challenging enough for me relax, but not sickeningly simple. That's a pretty low bar in my opinion and that gives a game enough room to be easy for the younger crowd.

When I do game to have FUN, I expect to pick up a 'Complete' game and be able to continue playing it without resorting to starting a new save or something like that. If I'm gaming to have fun, I don't want to slog through the tutorials and other hand-holding you get at the beginning of a new game. I'm out for victory, not nicely-nice storytelling time. XD
I expect to be challenged, I expect to have rage moments and I expect it to be tough. I don't mind that I had to play the game through once to unlock the hard mode, as long as that wasn't too nerve-wracking, I don't mind being stuck at some part.

To clarify, I consider a game 'Incomplete' when I have not yet achieved the first roll of credits. A game is 'Complete' when the credits first roll. But just because the credits have rolled, it doesn't mean the game is worthless. It just means it's no longer a suitable "relax" game and it gets played a little more often when I feel like tackling a 'hard mode' or unlocking <insert whatever here>.

 

[Akeraz]

Games are way too damn easy. OFC there are exceptions, but even with some of those exceptions you have to beat the game once first.
(I'm looking at you, order of ecclesia).
Alot of me thinks that it's down to the casual market and all the kiddies that play videogames now. I miss games that are face-meltingly hard, I really do.
(And for those that say demons souls/dark souls, I find those games ridiculously easy aswell. I beat demons souls with very few deaths, and not very much surprised me.)
I don't object to games being easier for the casual audience but adding in modes accessible from the start for veterans like myself is generally something I'd appreciate.

 

[TRIFORCE89]

A lot of games today are more of a "just play to get to the next cut scene" type of thing. I think the SuperNES had a good difficulty for its games. In that they were supposed to be that hard and yet they weren't near-impossible. With the NES and earlier... I think they were so difficult just out of bad design in most cases.

 

[pmarckoue]

I will agree that games now are easier than older games. I will say that I haven't played much hard games, the hardest I think was probably Turtles In Time. But I have seen and heard crazy hard games from the 80s - 90s than hearing about crazy hard games nowadays, even when those games a being played in hard mode. I think the reason for games being easier is because renting games, like Game Fly or Blockbuster, don't have a deadline to return the games. Back in the day, game developers made the games hard so people, who rented games, could not finish the game before they had to return it. So they'd have to go back and rent the game again. But that's just a theory.

 

[PsychoJigglypuff]

I personally was never a fan of absurd difficulty levels, and much prefer games I can sit down and play in my spare time, without the desire to smash my controller against the wall. Of course, I'm not saying video games should be super easy, since that would take the fun out of it. There needs to be at least a minimal amount of challenge to make anything fun.

Personally, when I replay many of my older games, I find that they were much easier than I remember them being. I have much more experience and common sense when it comes to video games than I did ten years ago.

 

[Brendino]

This may just be my own personal preference, but I don't mind when a game is a little easier. Granted, I don't want it to be the sort of game where you can "hold right to win," but I find that games that become too difficult actually take away from the fun of playing them. There are many games I've played that can't seem to find the right balance of difficulty, and I guess the developers decide to be on the safer side and make it a little easy, as opposed to making it too difficult and getting complaints about the final product.

My biggest gripe with games lately isn't that they are too easy though, it's that they aren't long enough. I remember playing Kingdom Hearts, and even though I was 12 or 13 when I played it, the game still took me a couple of weeks to beat. Comparing this to a Need for Speed game that I just played, I was able to beat the story mode of the game in just a little more than 2 days, and I hadn't played a racing game in years.

Many games also rely so much on cutscenes, and they take up a significant portion of the playtime where you aren't actually doing anything. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind cutscenes, but they do begin to bother me when a 3 minute cutscene shows up after you complete a 5 minute mission.

 

[Arcanine]

I have two views on this matters... sort of strange but yea two different views on the same matter.

1: Games are easier because these days people don't want to put time into one game. They want to beat it and move on. Thus why you see short singleplayer campaigns on games, they want to move on to the next game. So thus they make games easier to play and easier to beat.

2: Back when I was a kid I didn't know how to do anything, so I was so stupid that it took forever to beat a boss or level. Games aren't harder these days, I'm just more used to how they work and a little smarter.


I think both could be true.

I don't mind cutscenes, but they do begin to bother me when a 3 minute cutscene shows up after you complete a 5 minute mission.

I dare you to play and beat Metal Gear Solid 4. XD

 

[shengar]

Games are way too damn easy. OFC there are exceptions, but even with some of those exceptions you have to beat the game once first.
(I'm looking at you, order of ecclesia).
Alot of me thinks that it's down to the casual market and all the kiddies that play videogames now. I miss games that are face-meltingly hard, I really do.
(And for those that say demons souls/dark souls, I find those games ridiculously easy aswell. I beat demons souls with very few deaths, and not very much surprised me.)
I don't object to games being easier for the casual audience but adding in modes accessible from the start for veterans like myself is generally something I'd appreciate.

Any games will be ridiculously easy if you know the tricks, and the glitches, and using various guide from video or guide faqs.
But if you dare to put Demon's Souls and Dark Souls on the same level with games in general, then I must object.

 

[mymemories]

I don't think gamers have gotten soft, I just think now due to the easy access of browser games and social games, there are simply MORE gamers. The hardcore players still, and always will, exist and play tough games.

 

[ソラ]

I found some games that are pretty hard.
For example. Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix on Critical mode is pretty freakin' hard But this game is in Japanese, Japanese games are harder then it is in English. Like Standard for english is like Beginner for Japan, Proud is like Standard in Japan, Etc etc.
Also Tales games when they are on thier Unknown/Chaos mode can be hard too, but you have to unlock alot of them tho.
Persona 3 Portable on Maniac mode is difficult for me as well.

 

[Archer]

I found some games that are pretty hard.
For example. Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix on Critical mode is pretty freakin' hard But this game is in Japanese, Japanese games are harder then it is in English. Like Standard for english is like Beginner for Japan, Proud is like Standard in Japan, Etc etc.
Also Tales games when they are on thier Unknown/Chaos mode can be hard too, but you have to unlock alot of them tho.
Persona 3 Portable on Maniac mode is difficult for me as well.

See, I'd much rather play on the English Proud Mode and make my own restrictions to change the experience. I'm not big on stock items or level 1 runs, but I'm doing a magic focus run in KH2 at the moment and it brings a whole new twist to the gameplay. Again, if I want to make the Pokemon games harder, I'll do a monotype run (for a second play) or a run with weaker pokemon.

That said, I do get annoyed when other games are too easy.

 

[GGJ]

Well to be totally honest, all I play nowadays is FPS and I've gotten so good that I can snipe a enemy from across the map so ain't nuttin in that genre of gaming that really challenges me.

But it don't bug me none, no use complaining since I enjoy it and that is all I need.

 

[FrostPheonix]

I guess the storylines are getting too easy. most games take you a day or two, if not less, to finish their storyline. And endless random sandbox or whatever games get boring. If you ask me, we need a challenge...