FoolKiller said:
I think that no single one of these is to blame for a so-called too easy game. I just think that their uses need to be well thought out. I find that many game designers don't understand (or don't have the time to emphasize) the difference between difficulty and challenge.
The main issue is that while we keep mentioning all these problems, I have rarely seen any one come up with useful solutions. And any solutions that seem to be good, seem difficult to execute which would leave the game makers from using them.
I don't know if you have played Dark Souls, but actually it gives some solutions to these problems. It has the needed tutorial at the start, and that's all of it, from there on you have to discover things by yourself, no hints and no arrows, which I thought that worked pretty well. It's an open world game but it doesn't have any maps, still I never felt lost in the game, because the environments were very different the one from each other. No save points, because it had a constant autosave feature, but with a catch: you couldn't save and then load your progress, what was done could not be undone, which I also found as a great idea. Also it had a health bar, but there was no need to collect health items in your way, because you had a given number of healing items that would last for a good portion of the game and they were automatically refilled after a visit to a checkpoint. If it sounds too easy it isn't, because each time you recharged your health and healing items, all the enemies of the area respawned!
Besides Dark Souls, I can think of a few other games that offered some solutions:
Resident Evil games before RE Outbreak: Ink cartridges that you collected in the game and represented the number of saves that you could make. It was a balanced and good solution. Tomb Raider 3 was a variation of ink cartridges, because you could save anywhere you wanted in the world as long as you possesed a save crystal; good idea, but the problem was that the save crystals were scarce, which made the game really difficult towards the end, to a point that you needed to restart form the beginning only to make a better managament of the damn crystals.
Metal Gear Solid (definately the first one, probably all of them): You could equip your health items and as long as you had them equipped (and they hadn't run out) you had no danger of dying. Of course you had to constantly switch the rations with the key cards in the course, but I thought it was a small step forward beyond the classic med-kits that you used by opening your inventory each time.
Tomb Raider games made by Core, before the "lifting" of Crystal Dynamics. No maps also, and fairly open games too, especially TR 3 & 4. Again like Dark Souls there was no real need for maps, because each area had a very distinctive looks. Theoretically Uncharted, which for the time being is a linear game, in a future open world installment it could play perfectly without a map too, because of the great level of detail in the environments. In games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil maps are more necessary I agree, because it's the nature of the game: explore rooms, find keys, unlock doors etc. Though in the last area of Silent Hill, which was called "Nowhere" there wasn't any map either. This seemed frustrating at first, but with some patience you could make your way out.
Action-driving games, like GTA would be a pain without the GPS indeed.
