Isn't it a bit of a misleading or just plain redundant question (no offence intended personally - it's a well written opening post)?
Because what
kind of games are you/we really discussing? Given the ever increasing variety of experiences that makes up the medium, surely games have become easier, harder, better,
and worse all depending on a vast set of variables - which are unavoidably subjective as well as historic (in both cases that's massively shaped by what how old someone is, and when their formative gaming experiences were).
So speaking entirely subjectively I'd say the medium's never been in as healthy a position before, and that the diversity of experience means things are easier and harder depending on preference. To go into detail about design we need to specify genres or even franchises. TES, for example, is generally seen to have gotten easier - but to even the hardcore Morrowind's systems and mechanics are surely archaic, and so there is good and bad about both ends of the spectrum. An IP has
evolved [into the mainstream], and it's simple preference as to whether that's positive or negative, harder or easier, superior or inferior 'design'.
I tend to greatly value and admire games where challenge is essentially a matter of player preference, and I'm not referring to diff settings. I go into DS[1] below, but Elite Dangerous is another good contemporary example; the complexity of its build system (i.e. outfitting a ship to perform specific roles, or fulfill multi-role duties, much like DS's character builds) gives players the option to tailor the experience they want. The game can be a relaxing [space] walk in the [space] park requiring the bare minimum of knowledge of builds, or it can be a ferociously competitive, min-max OCD nightmare entailing lots of visits to the Engineers (who customise your ship modules/weapons, but do so via a lot of RNG)...
They're quite rare, but games that can adapt to a player's preferences are an ideal, in a way, at least to me. And I feel games these days are more capable of supporting that kind of adaptive, malleable experience. Game design has certainly become more nuanced and diverse over the decades, which benefits far more people than it used to.
Saelune said:
And quest arrows...something else Pokemon has fallen victim to, but more notably The Elder Scrolls.
Morrowind you get no quest arrows, and have to actually know what you're doing and even if you're on a quest. But Oblivion most of it you can do without much though, and Skyrim even more so.
Heh, I assume the archives have been lost long ago, but when Oblivion came out I ranted on a TES forum against quest arrows/arrows-of-idiocy/the green-arrow-of-doom page after page, thread after thread, probably year after year. I was declared a Morrowhiner (fast travel in Oblivion was another major sin).
I adored how Morrowind did things, and to rebuke someone else's mention of the sometimes poor quality of the directions?
Good, I liked that - it made it feel more real, and its denizens just as irritatingly vague or just plain wrong as people really can be. I concede it's arguably poor game design... but fuck it, I loved it, and I'd take some esoteric directions on a page over the patronising, thoughtless idiocy of waypoints and map markers any day.
Coupled with a glorious lack of fast travel (but plenty of options for travel points), and Vvardenfell remains one of the best open-world experiences I've ever had, with a sense of cohesion that nothing else has quite matched, because you came to know its contours and landmarks by necessity. What some saw - or see - as 'challenging', I simply embraced as immersive and engaging. The lack of cheat-oh-arrows also enriched role-play no end (e.g. a search for Mehrunes' Razor became a week long hunt which became a pivot point for my character's arc. simply running to a stupid icon on a map requires no thought or intelligence or effort, on either the devs part of the player).
Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne do a good job of being hard for the right reasons. They arent actually as hard as people say because your death isnt the end. Even more so in Bloodborne where you dont hollow, but because of that being easier, it lets the enemies be harder and the game fun for it.
DS1 certainly could be challenging - and very occasionally it arguably
wasn't fair - but part of its genius was, as you allude to, making death a part of the actual game loop itself; death was a setback, an opportunity to learn (if you were paying attention), but once you leveled up in plain ol' gameplaying terms (e.g. knowing how to avoid threats instead of having to fight them all, which often involved knowledge of shortcuts) the challenge was usually more about whether you could get back to those tens of thousands of souls at your bloodstain.
So the 'difficulty' - and the respective punishment - often shifted depending how many souls you had on you, what you were planning to do with them, and so on. Scouting with barely any souls was always an option, which greatly reduced any punishment. The player was actively engaged in just how hard that game was (spellslinging ostensibly being easy mode), along with the punishment.
