Poll: Difficulty in games is changing.

[Archer666]

I prefer the old system. It makes the game challenging, you start to focus to you don't screw up. Dying actually had an impact, instead of being just an inconvenience.

 

[Roxor]

I can certainly see a difference between Super Meat Boy (2010) and Commander Keen (1991).

Both games have you as a One Hit Point Wonder [http://tvtrope.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneHitPointWonder] and neither game has checkpoints anywhere in the levels. If you die, it's back to the beginning of the level.

The levels in both games are difficult, but entirely possible to beat.

Commander keen is a bit less forgiving because the levels are longer, so you lose more progress if you get yourself killed, and you have a limited number of lives.

Super Meat Boy can be considered harder to actually play because the player needs extremely good reflexes and precision to complete a level without getting killed. However, it is also more forgiving because the levels are so short. Even if you do get sent back to the beginning after getting killed, your amount of lost progress is minimal.

I don't think the total amount of difficulty in games has changed, it just manifests itself slightly differently. I think we've moved from losing a lot of progress when you fail while having lower skill requirements on the part of the player to losing very little progress on failure but increasing the amount of skill needed to actually play the game.

 

[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.

...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)?

Fair enough, I could cripple myself just like I did in Megaman, but at the end of the day, it is not a solution at all.

There's clearly something wrong with the game, if I conciously have to 'shoot myself in the leg' in order to get any difficulty from it. While we're at it, try to beat RE4 using only your left hand. That should spice it up.

No wait.. that's not enough. Beat it with your left hand while doing a handstand with your right. Wow, this sounds dirty.

 

[Mozza444]

Well i have to say i hate the old way of doing it, if i have to do the same long level more than say.. 3 times?
I'll probably just stop playing.
However games like COD are also terrible, More action and explosions does not = more fun.

Games like Oblivion however.. that works for me, you can save mid mission have difficulty set to whatever you want and just enjoy the experience.
However if you fuck up that last save and you have no others... looks like you starting the whole game again.

So i don't think any game has it just right.. all have advantages and disadvantages.
Can't say there is a best way to do it.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

Yeah, see here's my problem with games of today. Difficulty is genuinely there, but the game let you work around it. Bioshock for one one on Survivor is easy as hell. My first playthrough of the game was working towards the 'I Chose The Impossible' trophy which is Survivor difficulty with Vita Chambers turned off. Who needs a Vita Chamber when I can save before each difficult section?

It's in most games and whilst it's convenient, it gives an easy escape for screwing up.

 

[Jaxtor]

Old games couldn't deliver the same kind of experience as we have today, especially the old games from the NES era.

Thus old games relied on presenting the player with a challenge, whereas modern games, with the kind of visual fidelity we have today, generally rely on presenting the player with an experience instead.

There are of course many instances where the above doesn't apply, but I think the general pattern is pretty clear: Old games presented a challenge, whereas new games present you with an experience.

 

[mexicola]

I prefer the new system. Obsolete "lives" mechanic or game not allowing you to save but only use checkpoints with upwards of half an hour between them are just relics of the old arcade games where the developers aimed to squeeze out money from your pockets. In this day and age I think that's ridiculous. If you are so hardcorez then go ahead and follow some self-imposed challenges to get what you consider "harder" game-play. And if you just want to restart right before the damn boss that killed you for the 5th time you shouldn't be forced to trudge through 15 minutes of pointless gameplay before that. You bought the game, you should be able to enjoy it the way you see fit.

 

[MisterMaster]

Old games couldn't deliver the same kind of experience as we have today, especially the old games from the NES era.

Thus old games relied on presenting the player with a challenge.

Modern games, with the kind of visual fidelity we have today, generally rely on presenting the player with an experience instead.

There are of course many instances where the above doesn't apply, but I think the pattern is pretty clear.

Old games presented a challenge, whereas new games present you with an experience.

Why can't it present both?

''We'll make games with better graphics and stuff, but the difficulty... yeah, that has go.'' - to me that doesn't make sense at all.

 

[tidus1661]

I know where your coming from man
yesterday i started playing Final Fantasy 8 and twisted metal 2 again and my god they are so much harder then normal games

But I guess you can say that they dumb down the difficulty to make it more appealing wider crowd. I mean if COD was difficult no one would play it and play something like battlefield. SO developers have to dumb it down to get sales because theres always gonna be a game like the one their making that people can easily play instead of theirs.

 

[AndrewF022]

Old games kinda needed that difficulty and those live/checkpoint/continue systems because you would finish many games in no time at all if they didn't impose those kinds of restrictions.. New games don't have that limitation, thus they don't really need them IMO (bar say Call of Duty, but crack that up to Veteran and its pretty damn hard, curse you grenade spam!). However I do believe that games are to easy on the medium settings these days, but I suppose if they need to do that to get more people playing the games then I'm all for it, I'll just stick to the high difficulty settings for my challenge.

Who can really say they enjoyed a game where there was no continues and when you died you had to restart from the start of the whole game again though haha, those were nightmarish.. I remember playing one of the Terminator games on the NES (might have been SNES, was a while ago) which had that system, I couldn't get passed the second level, playing the first one over and over again.. not fun.

So yeah, the old system worked for its time, but I much prefer the newer systems, they keep the gameplay (and story if there is one) flowing at a nice pace and don't have you repeating things over and over again just to pad out the game.

 

[Zhukov]

The old system can die in a ditch.

I do not want to repeat any more than necessary.

 

[Pirate1019]

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.

It's no big secret or new revelation that games were retarded hard back then and had gameplay focused on hoovering up all of your quarters.

However, the newer games are proportionally harder per segment than the newer games,(. . .)

I don't think 'harder' means what you think it means. Games back then were rigorously planned out for a bunch of reasons, mostly stemming from hardware limitations. Unlike back then, developers don't need to plan shit out down to every last sprite on screen, so gameplay is more haphazard, which does not equal harder. It's just sloppier, and is part of what things like regenerating health and frequent checkpoints were created to address.

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

Those games are incomparable. Operation Flashpoint is a war sim and strives to have at least a modicum of reality in it's gameplay, so fixed health and no saves. Call of Duty has gone off the deep end and resides in a world of pure fantasy. A world where you can ramp a snowmobile off a cliff and land on the other side of a several hundred foot wide canyon and it will still be intact enough to keep driving. The gameplay was designed to limit frustration and railroad the player forward from cutscene to cutscene with setpieces sprinkled in for the wow-factor.

 

[not_you]

Games now-a-days are WAYY too easy....

I managed to walk-through games like Bioshock, Bulletstorm, CoD (4, 6 and 7), even God of War (2+3... never played 1) on maximum difficulty....

The ONLY modern game I haven't finished on max difficulty is Metro 2033 (but in progress of that now)

Then I wind back the clock, (and tune up the DOS emulator) and play games like Abuse and Carmageddon...
Playing Abuse, I couldn't even pass level 7 (in a 20 level game) on Extreme (as hard as it goes)

Games now-a-days are pathetic in difficulty.... Except for the few extreme challenges you come across like Demon's Souls and Ninja Gaiden...

 

[Gotterdammerung]

For those people who had said that my comparison of OpFlash and CoDBlOps was unfair, I agree that they are vastly different games, with very different playstyles.

However, OpFlash is Nintendo Hard, like most NES and SNES games, and so I chose it to compare to CoDBlOps, which is one of, if not the biggest, FPS out at the moment. The reason I chose, OpFlash to contrast CoDBlOps with, instead of an older shooter, is that they are both 3D FPSes, and I thought that a 2D shooter, though it may be a lot similar thematically than CoDBlOps, would be less similar in gameplay, which is mainly what the difficulty hinges upon.

If you still feel that the comparison was wrong, or you know a better shooter for comparison, please say so.

 

[TiefBlau]

Yes, difficulty in general is decreasing. Part of it is because developers want to accommodate a wider audience. But also because games are becoming more user-friendly.

Let's take Super Meat Boy as an example. It has all the challenge and gameplay mechanics of a retro game.
There's no question that Super Meat Boy is an incredibly challenging game that takes a lot of skill to pull off. But it's not nearly as frustrating. Why? Because they took out all the crap that old games had to deal with. In Mario or Megaman, deaths had an irritating animation that would take ~5 seconds before resetting the level. In comparison, in Super Meat Boy, you respawn instantly. In any game from the past, your deaths were limited by a lives system after which you would have to do the entire stage over again. This is an antiquated system good only for pretty much taking out all your quarters from the arcade booth. Super Meat Boy makes sure you can die as many times as you please, because lives were a pointless thing to do anyways. Finally, controls in SMB are just so much smoother. All games from the 8-bit past maneuver like shit. No exceptions.

By improving upon all these things, Super Meat Boy becomes a game that is hard without being frustrating.

So yes, games nowadays are getting easier, but that's for two reasons, and one of them's pretty swell.

 

[GrizzlerBorno]

Games now-a-days are WAYY too easy....

I managed to walk-through games like Bioshock, Bulletstorm, CoD (4, 6 and 7), even God of War (2+3... never played 1) on maximum difficulty....

The ONLY modern game I haven't finished on max difficulty is Metro 2033 (but in progress of that now)

Then I wind back the clock, (and tune up the DOS emulator) and play games like Abuse and Carmageddon...
Playing Abuse, I couldn't even pass level 7 (in a 20 level game) on Extreme (as hard as it goes)

Games now-a-days are pathetic in difficulty.... Except for the few extreme challenges you come across like Demon's Souls and Ninja Gaiden...

So you're definition of a game with "Good difficulty" is "No-one plays all the way through it"?

So, by proxy, Man Vs. Wild with Bear Grylles [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDZzTyCxbHE&feature=relmfu] had the best difficulty level of any game this year?

 

[Jaxtor]

Why can't it present both?

''We'll make games with better graphics and stuff, but the difficulty... yeah, that has go.'' - to me that doesn't make sense at all.

Because you win more consumers with an experience than with a challenge.

Most people would rather have an experience they get for free, than an experience they have to work hard for.

If people have the choice between running a marathon and then being rewarded with a vacation, or just going on a vacation. Most will choose the latter.

 

[Rayansaki]

Games now-a-days are WAYY too easy....

I managed to walk-through games like Bioshock, Bulletstorm, CoD (4, 6 and 7), even God of War (2+3... never played 1) on maximum difficulty....

The ONLY modern game I haven't finished on max difficulty is Metro 2033 (but in progress of that now)

Then I wind back the clock, (and tune up the DOS emulator) and play games like Abuse and Carmageddon...
Playing Abuse, I couldn't even pass level 7 (in a 20 level game) on Extreme (as hard as it goes)

Games now-a-days are pathetic in difficulty.... Except for the few extreme challenges you come across like Demon's Souls and Ninja Gaiden...

Its a bit weird that you mention Demon's Souls as extreme challenge and god of war on maximum difficulty as a walkover. God of war 3 in Chaos Mode is much much harder than anything in Demon's Souls. The only difference is in the checkpoints and punishment for death.


On topic:
I prefer the frequent checkpoints and minimal punishment but very adjustable difficulty you find in a modern game like God of War or Killzone, to the frustrating linear difficulty of a game like Demon's Souls (and old games which mostly followed the same formula). It's the difference between replaying 2 minutes of game until you figure it out, and get better at the game, and a difficulty where you could be easily sliding through the level only to die to a hidden pit and lose 20 or 30 minutes of progress.

I don't think the total amount of difficulty in games has changed, it just manifests itself slightly differently. I think we've moved from losing a lot of progress when you fail while having lower skill requirements on the part of the player to losing very little progress on failure but increasing the amount of skill needed to actually play the game.

Basically this. I prefer the modern difficulty.

 

[MikailCaboose]

I prefer old, as in most new games with unlimited lives, I end up just trying to muscle my way through it, instead of actually thinking. Now, albeit Ninja Gaiden on the NES was anything but fair, with clunky controls.