Have games gotten easier or have we gotten better?

[Flamb3Nobunaga]

I bring this up because I was babysitting my 9 year old cousin last weekend and we were playing a bit of Call of Duty. (His parents let him play it so don't ***** at me) We were taking turns playing the campaign on recruit and it occurred to me that little Jayden was getting as frustrated at it as I was playing Jak 3 when I was his age. Granted, Jak 3 was hard, but it brings up a point I'd like to address. People (including me) say that games have been getting progressively easier in recent years. Everyone I know who say this are 20-somethings who have been gaming for most of their lives. Have they, really? Or has our collective, overall gaming ability improved while the games, themselves, stayed the same? Or, on a completely different note, am I just talking out of my ass?

 

[tippy2k2]

I believe it is the gamers who have gotten better.

Some gamers don't seem to understand that what's easy to us is not easy to someone who doesn't game. I have been gaming for...shit...about twenty years now. My Dad, however, has not been. It's taking a while but I started him off with some less complicated games (Dragon Age/Mass Effect). I am slowly giving him more complicated games (Skyrim now) as I attempt to make a gamer out of him.

With that said, games have become more accessible (I don't think that makes it easier but some might argue it does). Instead of being given directions to the next dungeon, you get a way-point. Instead of walking across the vast wilderness, you get quick travel. Instead of losing a hour of data because you forgot to save, you're losing five minutes because the game auto-saves constantly.

 

[Keoul]

Games are indeed getting easier.
Difficulty mechanics used back then are now called cheap tactics to extend game life.
-One touch and you're dead (mario)
-Multi-formed boss battles with shitloads of health (Final fantasy)
-tonnes of grinding required to be strong enough to progress (final fantasy)
-Bullet Hell (metroid among other games)

These days games are streamlined not to give a massive payoff at the end but small amounts of euphoria throughout the game, The little rewards, the achievements, the new levels. All there to make you feel accomplished now instead of a major payoff later.

TL;DR Games are easier so people feel better now instead of later.

 

[Zhukov]

Both.

Obviously we've all gotten better at games the more we play them.

Also, we've become more familiar with the conventions of various genres. For example, when you boot up a generic fantasy RPG, even one you've never played before, you already know that you should probably give your fighters point in strength, endurance and dexterity, your rogues get dexterity and intelligence, your mages get intelligence and something magic related and.

As for the games, yeah, they've gotten easier. Early games were designed for arcades. They were crushingly hard and unforgiving because more deaths meant more coins disappearing down the slot. When they made the jump to home consoles, it took developers a while to realise that they didn't need to do that anymore and that not doing so allowed them to sell games to people who hadn't been playing them obsessively since age 4.

 

[Cpt. Lozan]

Remember the last level of Castleviania 1. I do, it still haunts my nightmares.

Games have gotten easier (but you can still find really hard games too)

 

[Flamb3Nobunaga]

I personally, don't mind a game being accessible, as long as it's a challenge. As you can see from my Avatar, I am a Gears of War fan. Gears of War 3, and 1 and 2 to a lesser extent, were accessible. But tell me, did you not pull clumps of hair out of your scalp at the final boss of 3 on insane? If a game tells me where to go, I'm fine with that, just as long as the path to get to that point is a challenge.

 

[Tom Waits' hat]

Been revisiting some of the childhood classic lately. Oh boy, games were hard back then. I guess rather saying it's gotten easier, probably can say we just don't have that much patience anymore.

 

[TehCookie]

If you've think you've gotten better go play an old game and see how well you do. It's a bit of both for me. I have improved and a lot of that is thanks to the internet since I can talk to people about the games and learn techniques I would of never thought of by myself. However I put in an old game it's easier than it was when I was 10, but it's still harder than current games.

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

I don't think games have gotten "easier," per se, but they have changed. All those older games that we play now and they seem so much harder than our modern games, they aren't hard more than they are designed for repetition. The games they stuck in arcadesin the eighties and nineties were designed to eat quarters, so most of them required you to persevere at each challenge before you could overcome it. They weren't hard so much as they wore you down through attrition, requiring you to put more money in to grind through the challenge.

Today, with that requirement gone from most games, they don't have to be so unforgiving. The developers don't want you to keep dying so you keep paying; they already have your money. In fact, now they want you to get through the game faster so you can buy their DLC and add-on packs and such. So, if you want to say that has made games easier, I guess I won't argue. But realize that it's not because people are lazier, it's because the market strategies have changed.

That said, I think that as a culture we are better at games than ever before. I hadn't played Timesplitters 2 in a couple years before I decided to put it in today, and I was actually better I have ever been. I tried a few of the challenges and started beating my previous high scores. So yeah, even by playing different games I have become a better player of this one. And now that more people than ever are at least casual gamers, and the gamers of the eighties have grown up and now have gamer kids, we are becoming a more video game literate culture. So I actually foresee a rise in general game difficulty in the near future, as more and more the highly skilled gamers become a real force in the market.

 

[triggrhappy94]

I think a big part of it is that GUI's have gotten better and more accomidating.
Compared to Obilivion, character creation and leveling is a lot easier because there's a lot less to keep track of and a lot less menus.
The less thought involved in the boring menues, the quicker player can get back to the action. The faster people can get back to the action, the more fun the game will be. The more fun the game is, the bigger the audience you're likely to have.
I don't think it's a bad thing for games like XCom to try to reach a broader (even more mainstream) audiences. It's annoying, however, when it comes at the cost of customization and player choice--I mean this in general, I'm not referring directly to XCom.

 

[lechat]

lemmie answer your question with another question:
"do you remember the days when you could actually fail a game and game over meant something?" because back in my day half the games i played i either couldn't finish or i only had a chance of finishing before i ran out of lives/time

 

[The Madman]

I'm also going to echo both.

We have gotten better at games, but even so a lot of old games were designed specifically to drain quarters from some poor kids pocket and so are intentionally difficulty. NES games also suffered from a case of "We can't fit many levels into this cartridge, so we'll just make it really hard to get from one level to another!".

So yeah, both.

 

[scorptatious]

Sorta both.

I've been gaming for at least sixteen years now, and I can say that I'm at least decent at most kinds of games. Of course, back when I first started playing, I was pretty bad. I couldn't even get past the fifth level in Crash Bandicoot 2 until several years later.

Now? That game isn't all that hard to me anymore.

Today, I do see developers creating games that are more accessible, and really, I don't see that as a bad thing. So long as you don't go overboard, I'm perfectly find with being told how to play the game or where specifically to go. There are plenty of games that do that which are still challenging.

Also, Jak 3 hard? Geez, that game was a cake walk compared to Jak 2. Holy shit that game went absolutely overboard in terms of difficulty. Of course, there were pretty frustrating moments in Jak 3 as well.

 

[darth.pixie]

They've gotten easier. Right now it's possible to have games where you just can't die or it doesn't mean anything. Way back when, the devs were ruthless. There were a lot of games with levels that you had to go through again and again and time your motions just so to get it. One mistake could ruin the whole thing so you had to go for the perfect run. Not saying that's alright, but the sense of satisfaction was that much more powerful.

Gamers haven't gotten better. If anything, I think we've gotten worse. There's hardly any challenge. Like Dark Souls, hyped for its difficulty, when in truth it was nothing that an older game didn't have. You just needed the timing.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well some of them got stupid easy, I remember finishing my last CoD and then booting up Half Life 2 to wash away the bad taste, yet suddenly I got my ass whooped by a game that I never found hard before, modern stuff just babysits you on so many ends you forget what a simplistic experience it is.

And after so many of these casual shooters going back to something like Serious Sam... I get utterly stumped, this is a game I used to beat on the highest difficulty and now I can barely crawl to the end of a level on easy.

 

[Bat Vader]

I think part of it is that we have gotten better since we have played them for so long and know what to expect most of the time. Another part too is that games aren't linear anymore. Not in terms of story but in terms of level design. In Call of Duty players can usually take cover behind several different buildings or other objects and flank enemies too sometimes. Very older games never really allowed players to do that because they couldn't.

 

[Sprelf]

There are a lot more easier games, yes. But the aim of games has shifted, generally. Early on in gaming history, games were played primarily on arcade machines, machines that you fed quarters into when you failed. The games were designed to kill you A LOT because it made money. This mentality of game design stuck even when games started being made for the NES/SNES generations, etc.

Now, games aren't designed with that mind: they now want you to finish them. People are more likely to pay money for a game they can complete. Since it makes money, games now have easier modes.

That's not to say they've taken challenge out of all games; many games are still exceptionally challenging, and I don't think having easier difficulties on that same game takes anything away from the challenging experiences the higher difficulties give.

 

[Auron]

Looking back at old somewhat simple console games now I understand perfectly that the difficulty bar on arcades was so you paid more and on consoles it was most of the time to hide the game's rather short length. You can finish Sonic or Streets of Rage in an hour if you get your mechanics right, it took me months when I was a kid. Some earlier games like Battletoads were and contra were borderline impossible and still are unless you decide to learn the game inside out to evade every little thing that will kill you in seconds.

There are still some brutal games around though, like every Paradox strategy game ever. I mostly play Multiplayer nowadays though, the human challenge is often far more interesting.