Poll: Difficulty in games is changing.

[Gotterdammerung]

Recently, I decided to play some old NES and SNES games I own, and, after a while, I realised that the difficulty in those games worked on a completely different system to the way modern game's difficulty works.

Old Game: Long levels, few checkpoints, limited lives.
New Game: long levels, many checkpoints, unlimited lives.

However, the newer games are proportionally harder per segment than the newer games, because they know that each checkpointf is about 10 metres apart, and So they fill those 10 metres with a shedload of explosions, fire and lots and lots of bullets. Whilst in an older game of the same type, there might be 10 enemies per room on the hardest setting, on a newer game, there might easily be upwards of 30.

The best example of this is comparing a game like Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis with the new Call Of Duty.

OpFlash allows you 1 save per level, no checkpoints, fixed health, and so forces you to take on the enemies in small chunks, and plan tactically.

CoDBlOps, on the other hand, has generous checkpointing, and fast health regeneration, which allows attack enemies with a wild abandon, and unless you let yourself either get flanked, or run out of ammo, then you should be fine.

I'm not saying that one's better than the other, I mean, as much as I enjoy the tense realism of Red Orchestra, the simple and forgiving style of Halo got a lot of my friends into gaming. All I am wondering is, which one do you prefer, and why, as well as your views on difficulty in gaming in general.

 

[F'Angus]

I used to spend hours on old games doing repetetive things to get lives. I do sorta prefer that because it meant I was more patient.

 

[Katana314]

The rewards involved for that kind of difficulty aren't really worth it to me. This is why I hate RTS games; I don't like suddenly dying to say that my past 40 minutes of effort were worthless. I think it's fair that you can cram a whole lot of difficulty, and even strategy, into a 5-minute segment.

I also don't think it's fair that Call of Duty is the go-to analysis of modern gaming. Plenty of games today provide generous checkpoints, but still have very unique difficulties to overcome.

 

[Vault101]

well I guess current games have story as a main pull...where as older games..although you could tell a story it wasnt the main focus

 

[bjj hero]

I dont think COD and flash point are comparable, flash point is trying for realistic.

Having said that games are far easier now to lower the bar for entry. More gamers means more money. Old games killed you far more often than new games ever do.

 

[MisterMaster]

Games are easier nowadays and are designed to get you through as quickly and painlessly as possible. Why? I suppose people just don't want the frustration that comes with difficult games.

Just take Resident Evil. Back then, dying would mean that you lost at least an hour worth of gameplay not to mention the limited resources, cryptic puzzles and hunters that could kill you in one hit.

Now look at RE4. Checkpoints are everywhere, bullets are everywhere, herbs are everywhere. Basically, you are no longer punished for screwing up, which is really sad and detracts from the overall challenge of the game.

It's ridiculous to call these 'segments' in newer games hard, when there are absolutely no consequences for dying. You screw up, you just get to try again. No problem. And what the hell happened to the 3 continues tradition... God...

The older games were truly something that required hardcore skill to beat. Games like Ninja Gaiden, Battletoads, Contra III, Megaman, Silver Surfer etc- These games boast legendary difficulty and there's nothing that can stand up that that era of video game challenge.

 

[Lukeje]

Games are easier nowadays and are designed to get you through as quickly and painlessly as possible. Why? I suppose people just don't want the frustration that comes with difficult games.

Just take Resident Evil. Back then, dying would mean that you lost at least an hour worth of gameplay not to mention the limited resources, cryptic puzzles and hunters that could kill you in one hit.

Now look at RE4. Checkpoints are everywhere, bullets are everywhere, herbs are everywhere. Basically, you are no longer punished for screwing up, which is really sad and detracts from the overall challenge of the game.

It's ridiculous to call these 'segments' in newer games hard, when there are absolutely no consequences for dying. You screw up, you just get to try again. No problem. And what the hell happened to the 3 continues tradition... God...

So... the implication is that the reason you play games is to get frustrated?

 

[MisterMaster]

Games are easier nowadays and are designed to get you through as quickly and painlessly as possible. Why? I suppose people just don't want the frustration that comes with difficult games.

Just take Resident Evil. Back then, dying would mean that you lost at least an hour worth of gameplay not to mention the limited resources, cryptic puzzles and hunters that could kill you in one hit.

Now look at RE4. Checkpoints are everywhere, bullets are everywhere, herbs are everywhere. Basically, you are no longer punished for screwing up, which is really sad and detracts from the overall challenge of the game.

It's ridiculous to call these 'segments' in newer games hard, when there are absolutely no consequences for dying. You screw up, you just get to try again. No problem. And what the hell happened to the 3 continues tradition... God...

So... the implication is that the reason you play games is to get frustrated?

I play games to overcome the challenge and the frustration that comes with it. Beating a frustrating game brings me the satisfaction that I did something nobody else can do unless they spend many nights trying to perfect their own skill, so to speak.

For example, beating Mega man X6 only using the X armor and buster was absolutely orgasmic to me.

 

[The Wykydtron]

I like LA Noire's "difficulty" if you could call it that, you fuck up a case you get to spend the rest of the game wondering what the fuck happened and if you charged the right person.

Maybe the newer games have more checkpoints because the fastest way to make someone stop playing is to make them replay the same section over and over again just because they made one little mistake... That and giving the main character shouty DBZ powers for no adequately explained reason.

 

[Akihiko]

Can't we have an inbetween? A game doesn't have to not have checkpoints or only have 3 lifes to be challenging. You can have the most challenging boss in the world, and every time you die, you start back right before it, but that doesn't mean to say you're going to get past the fucker.

In conclusion, I like a challenge. I don't like having to redo an entire area that I've already done because I died, especially considering it doesn't add any challenge at all because you've already done it.

 

[oplinger]

I prefer the new. Not because I love things to be easy, I just don't think making one mistake and dying then having to start the entire game again can equate to difficulty. It's just annoying.

They both have their flaws though, having too many checkpoint just means you smash your face into the challenge as many times as you want until it's finished.

I like being reasonably punished for my mistakes >_> not mercilessly beaten with a telephone pole and then run over by a bus when I don't press A hard enough and my character doesn't jump.

I also hate it when there's a challenge, and then a way to completely bypass the entire thing with a single shot, like a huge army of nazis charging at you....but they just happen to be charging through a mined fuel depot rigged with C4 and you're 10 feet from the detonator that's hidden under a sheet of paper on a desk in the next room. The nazis pose an impossible challenge...buuuut...yeah.

I guess it doesn't really matter...the game just has to be designed properly around the difficulty scheme

 

[Lukeje]

Games are easier nowadays and are designed to get you through as quickly and painlessly as possible. Why? I suppose people just don't want the frustration that comes with difficult games.

Just take Resident Evil. Back then, dying would mean that you lost at least an hour worth of gameplay not to mention the limited resources, cryptic puzzles and hunters that could kill you in one hit.

Now look at RE4. Checkpoints are everywhere, bullets are everywhere, herbs are everywhere. Basically, you are no longer punished for screwing up, which is really sad and detracts from the overall challenge of the game.

It's ridiculous to call these 'segments' in newer games hard, when there are absolutely no consequences for dying. You screw up, you just get to try again. No problem. And what the hell happened to the 3 continues tradition... God...

So... the implication is that the reason you play games is to get frustrated?

I play games to overcome the challenge and the frustration that comes with it. Beating a frustrating game brings me the satisfaction that I did something nobody else can do unless they spend many nights trying to perfect their own skill, so to speak.

For example, beating Mega man X6 only using the X armor and buster was absolutely orgasmic to me.

...but you can still challenge yourself in modern games. You can make them as frustrating as you want. To take your RE4 example: what if every time you die you force yourself to go back to the start of the game (or every third time, if you want to reimplement the `3 lives' feature)?

 

[oplinger]

To take your RE4 example: what if every time you die you force yourself to go back to the start of the game (or every third time, if you want to reimplement the `3 lives' feature)?

That'd get a little asinine, considering older games in most cases are much shorter than modern games. Resident Evil 4 has a stated play time average of..what? 20 hours or something?

 

[Cylibus]

If you want to separte the games in terms of generation, the best game would be a good mixture of the two. Take for instance, the very first Zelda game for NES. This game could be considered very hard if you pit it up to some of it's modern day counterparts such as Twilight Princess which was so easy a 10 year old could do it. However, the more modern day games understand that a game should not only be for a player of a certain skill. There should always be an easy mode for the little 10 year olds with bad parents that let them play mindlessly violent modern games, and there should be many different difficulties up to the point that a member of MLG would scratch his head at them.

The reason why modern games seem so easy is because there's so many more functions in them. Take for instance Metroid. In the old games, it was walk, run, jump, shoot and that's all you had to work with. While in modern Metroid games, you can kill an enemy with 4 different types of beams, a charged shot, a missle, a supermissle, a morph ball bomb, a super morph ball bomb, or maybe just tear them apart with a grappling hook. Nowadays it's more a memory thing, where once you remember which weapon goes will with which enemy is all it takes.

A balanced game is one that is as considerably difficult as old games, while having the new updates of a new game, just with less asshole moves. It also needs a much bigger span of difficulty, which was tried with Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and failed miserably, because it wasn't a matter of how good you were, it was a matter of if you remembered all of Tabuu's moves and when they're coming and how to avoid them, and then beating him on insane is an absolutely easy task.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

I think it's a combination of games having more components to them, people's patience isn't what it used to be, tastes have changed, and people are simply better at playing video games. Now, I'm sure there are tons of people out there who are going to rally and go, "Well, I did it with no trouble at all," but if you set many modern games on the highest difficulty, you're going to get stomped. Resident Evil 5 had you dying in ONE hit from a basic attack if you play on Professional. The Call of Duty games crushed you into the ground if set on Veteran. Dragon Age Origins STILL gets posts on this very website from new players asking for help because the game on normal beats them into a coma. And do I even need to mention the current Ninja Gaiden games?
True, you can often save whenever you want, but that just means you don't have to replay everything you just did. I can't remember how many times I turned off Super Mario Brothers when I got all the way to Bowser on some levels, only to time a jump wrong and be sent all the way back to the beginning.

 

[Lukeje]

To take your RE4 example: what if every time you die you force yourself to go back to the start of the game (or every third time, if you want to reimplement the `3 lives' feature)?

That'd get a little asinine, considering older games in most cases are much shorter than modern games. Resident Evil 4 has a stated play time average of..what? 20 hours or something?

As I remember it was nearer 10 (actual playtime, not stated), but yeah. I suppose you could start from the beginning of chapters?

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

Dying thousands of times as you inched closer to victory certainly had its charm back in the day. I'm not a kid anymore. I tried going back and playing some of those games and I couldn't do it. New games have spoiled me.