8 ms·

Are modern games easier or simply designed better?

30 points by dmoney67 13y ago

kapuzineralex 13y ago
I've asked myself the same question after recently playing Battle Isle 1 again... Seems to me like the learning curve of modern games was so much shallower. But this is of course only one example and not representative as such.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
drawkbox 13y ago
Limited time and a leaning towards mobile/casual has led to very simplistic intros to games. The best games are simple to play, hard to master. Back in the day games like Zelda or Metal Gear on the NES were very hard without a Nintendo Power Mag and maps (they even used to have a Nintendo hotline for players stuck). Mega-man is freaking hard, pixel level mess ups. I played Mega man 9 with throwback sprite single buffer flicker and difficulty, it wasn't as fun. Plus all this was pre-internet and pre-mobile with much less entertainment vying for our attention. Games should be fun, usually that means simple to get started, but deeper and harder to master still needs to be there. I have always thought the mobile appstore type gaming handheld market we have now is closer to the experimentation of the arcades and back then it was all in-app purchasing only tied heavily to progression (via quarters/tokens). Now it is to deepen the experience and customize it for the most part. Customization was very minimal then. I really think this is the best age to be a game developer and game player. The console markets stopped many great game devs from entering and helping to propel that market, mobile and web gaming has no such limitation to their benefit.
- sharkweek 13y ago
  I remember playing Ocarina of Time for N64 shortly after we got internet connection at my house in 7th grade. Like many people, I got stuck at the water temple. I tried for weeks to figure that stupid level out. One of my friends linked me to a site (I think I had been complaining to him over AIM about how difficult it was) that had a walk through. I stared at that link for days, sitting in my internet explorer bookmarks, internally debating whether or not to use it, before finally giving in to just use the walk through... I went on to beat the game shortly after, never able to fully accept that victory, as I had cheated my way through a major part of the game.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  The best games are simple to play, hard to master. Not sure how I feel about this statement. Such games are certainly excellent examples of what a game is. Chess is a classic example. But I derive quite a lot of enjoyment from more complicated games that are also hard to master.
  - Zardoz84 13y ago
    DooM for example
yareally 13y ago
A lot of older games abused "cheap" ways to make the game more difficult (though still sometimes happens today, but not as often). Games of today, in some cases I think have been watered down for the sake of letting a more casual game player beat them before getting overly frustrated. However, not all games are like that and some of the games I've played in recent years are as hard as they come if you're upping the difficulty. If you're playing on easy/normal, then that's the issue :) Just some things I recall from really bad games in the 90s and early 00s: -Only having one or a few lives for the entire game -No saves/continues (usually combined with the above) -Ridiculously short timers for getting through an area -No health meter (one hit and you're dead) -Having to go back through areas of the game you already beat to do some inane mission that's slightly different and feels like it was added to pad the difficulty/play time -Spawning for the sake of having more fodder thrown at you (or spawning in ridiculous areas like the ledge you're about to jump to and the enemy was not there before jumping). I still hate spawning to this day in most cases. If you just left an area and destroyed everything in sight, it should not be totally rebuilt as soon as you turn around. -Unfairly slanting difficulty towards enemies (like bullets that travel through objects, while yours do not) -Dying and having to restart a huge level all the way from the beginning -Poor clipping so your weapon passes through enemies unscathed or you get hit by an enemy when you shouldn't have. Also clipping that results in you missing a platform when you clearly didn't. -Poor controls (still a problem now, but nowhere as bad as it was) My list is nowhere complete though and I'm sure others have plenty of annoyances to amend it with.
- ShirtlessRod 13y ago
  TV Tropes has an endless supply of these: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard Great for nostalgia. :)
- galaktor 13y ago
  see also Angry Video Game Nerd [1] for some examples of accidentally difficult game design in older games. [1] http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/ http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/
- tadfisher 13y ago
nextstep 13y ago
Some old games only had 50 or 100 levels and were intended for repeat play. So the developers made some games super hard so that people could get many hours of play out of them.
vacri 13y ago
These aren't mutually-exclusive qualities.
gegtik 13y ago
Here is a viewpoint I found fascinating, viewing the refinement as a net loss: http://storify.com/gegtik/j-chastain-on-primitive-gaming http://storify.com/gegtik/j-chastain-on-primitive-gaming
edias 13y ago
A interesting comparison I think is between Starcraft 1 (1998) and Stacraft 2 (2010). In the original Starcraft you were constantly fighting against the game engine. Unit pathing, spell casting and a several glitches which players could utilize (most notably mutalisk stacking) made the game incredibly challenging to do anything, let alone pull off complex strategies. The speed at which you could perform actions was crucial to being a top player. Stacraft 2 introduced several mechanics that made the game substantially easier. Multiple building selection allowing you to produce units from several buildings at once rather than selecting each individually. Increased unit selection from 12 to 255, the max you would realistically expect to hit. Better unit pathing so players need to focus less on army control and numerous other changes. The down side of this is that many argue the mechanical difficulty of SC1 helped make the game so competitive and the sequel is inferior in that sense, which I agree with but think there are numerous other reasons for that as well. If any of you want me to expand on or explain anything just let me know. Starcraft is really the only thing I talk about on the internet. Edit* This is what I mean by mechanical difficulty [1]. RTS games, especially the Stacraft series, are extremely difficult just by the nature of the game. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4UTDudShDY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4UTDudShDY
- Dewie 13y ago
  The way to solve that is "just" to increase the skill ceiling in some other dimension. Warcraft 3 has easier macro mechanics than SC2 - five workers per gold mine, less expands, less unit-producing buildings, wood as a resource is often a non-issue - but makes up for it by having a higher skill-ceiling when it comes to micro mechanics. You could for example make larvae inject optionally auto-cast, as long you add some other mechanic that the zerg have to (or should) worry about (like more complicated creep spreading, for instance).
_pmf_ 13y ago
Getting 3 "achievements" or "trophies" just for playing through the tutorial (or, in Mass Effect 2's case, sitting through the tedious opening sequence introducing the cheesy and badly written travesty EA seems to regard as a "plot") is a bit off-putting. Maybe targeting 13 year old suburban ADD patients requires constant cheap attention grabbing to prevent these people from playing one of their 47 other games if there is a tiny obstacle.
- fhd2 13y ago
  While I don't agree with your prejudices, I do believe you're on spot here by saying that choice is one of the major factors in games becoming ever friendlier. Not only are there considerably more games today, being pushed out with considerably more marketing. We're living in the age of free to play, where the next free game is just a download away. To make any kind of money in F2P, the developers need to keep players playing, so that they'll eventually pay. Basically the same goes for selling DLC. So I'd say the lack of difficulty is mostly caused by how games are monetised these days.
- whateverfor 13y ago
  Just so you know, those achievements are like tracking cookies: the video game companies can't just send home whatever data they want, but they can see achievement data. So that achievement was just to see how many of the people who bought the game actually started to play, to provide a baseline for how many (go halfway/beat the game/play the multiplayer/anything else they can jam in an achievement).
  - _pmf_ 13y ago
    I never thought of this; it does make more sense now. Thanks!
Steko 13y ago
In Pac Man the endgame was that the ghosts moved faster and if you didn't get there you didn't miss much. Early hardware limitations meant "just make it harder" was often used to extend games. Today they just put in more content, which costs money and they want the player to experience.
columbo 13y ago
Eh... yes and no.. and in some cases oh-god-no (http://thelettervsixtim.es/ http://thelettervsixtim.es/) When I was able to get a hold of arcade/snes/nes games on emulators I replayed all of my hardest games. I beat all of my top twenty in a weekend. How? Because all the emulators came with Quick Save & Quick Load. F5 and F6 are the major reasons why games are easy these days. It's a night and day difference. Playing some of the ultra-hard NES games became a walk in the park; really just repeat the last action until success. I even beat the arcade versions of Ghosts & Goblins, then Ghouls and Ghosts in about an hour for each. I've been playing a ton of nethack lately and I really wish games like Skyrim and other open-world-games had a 'permadeath' difficulty setting. Sure, I can choose to play that way, but I like it incorporated into the game. I want a system where it difficulty is just a percentage of more guys & less ammo, rather difficulty should be a fundamental change to the game.
- chii 13y ago
  Speaking of the quick save/reload reminds me of why Braid is so good - its designed so that mistakes aren't costly, and the player is encouraged to explore and not fear making an error and loosing progress. Games _should_ be designed that way.
  - joshschreuder 13y ago
    I think it depends on the game and the experience desired by the creator. For something like Day Z, you want the progress lost when dying to be part of the story and the experience. For something where the overarching narrative is featured, like Braid / Journey, I think the quick restarts are just as important.
- joshschreuder 13y ago
  VVVVVV was great fun. I couldn't recommend it for everyone, but it was a challenge, and that challenge made it satisfying to complete. The best part was that it wasn't unclear what you had to do, it was just hard and skillful to achieve it, so I never had to turn to a guide. I feel quite similar with Hotline Miami. It's a tough game and you die a lot, but it's extremely satisfying plotting your strategy and executing it to success.
Kaali 13y ago
Older gamer used multple cheap techniques to prolong the otherwise short games. But I do think that many of the modern games are really easy by design, when compared to the old games. For example the 8-bit and 16-bit era games are skill based, where you have to dodge multiple bullets, have good reactions to enemies and even the environment around you. And you are punished for your mistakes; which sometimes borders on cheap tactics. Many modern games have reduced to button smashers with little to no need for any other than simple timing skills. Shooters have autoaim, and with normal difficulty levels you are a bullet sponge, even a rocket might not kill you. Of course there are a lot of exceptions, and higher difficulty level in some games can help. The games can still be really enjoyable regardless of the design change. But the ongoing evolution to more cinematic gameplay is really worrying to me. For example, Ryse: Son of Rome, that was revelaed for XBox One an E3, looks really great visually, but the gameplay seems more or less like Simon Says. You as the player are included in amazing set pieces, by letting you press one button at a time, as soon as the game tells you to; and see how the game character and the world reacts to that. It's a scary trend to me, that the stories cannot be told by the gameplay anymore, but with cutscenes where you have little or no effect on the result. There is a world of difference letting me as the protagonist struggle and get better, than having a non-player character tell me that in a cutscene.
- chii 13y ago
  Its interesting you mention the cutscene style story telling - most games do employ this now, simply because its the easiest way to direct an experience. really good games like portal doesn't do this, but i imagine the sort of effort required, and a lot of AAA publishers just aren't willing to take such a risk. So the root cause is the high producitno costs associated with games causing it to become liek this.
- epsylon 13y ago
  > Shooters have autoaim Only on consoles, though. > For example, Ryse: Son of Rome, that was revelaed for XBox One an E3, looks really great visually, but the gameplay seems more or less like Simon Says. You as the player are included in amazing set pieces, by letting you press one button at a time, as soon as the game tells you to; and see how the game character and the world reacts to that. Worse, the QTEs are actually automatic : http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/06/why-ryse-is-the-most-frustrating-game-of-e3/ http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/06/why-ryse-is-the-most-frustr...
keypusher 13y ago
Interesting premise, and a few years ago I might have agreed wholeheartedly that modern gaming is pandering to the masses and has become too easy. But then along came games like Dota 2, Day Z, Dwarf Fortress, Path Of Exile, and Dark Souls. The learning curve to not embarrass yourself in a public game of Dota 2 is probably around 100 hours. It has some fiendishly obtuse rules and requires split second reflexes as well as in depth knowledge of the metagame as well as deep domain knowledge of the item tree and hero skills. And it is by far the most popular game on Steam right now, with over 400,000 concurrent players online some days and over a million logging in each month, not to mention a very active competitive scene. Path Of Exile has proven to be a very successful action RPG where the most respect is earned by playing "hardcore mode", that is reaching the endgame without a single death. Speaking of permadeath and difficult games, look at DayZ. No instructions, no tutorial, permadeath, weird bugs and glitches, dropped in an open world military sim with zombies running around and the map is in Russian. That's pretty difficult, and it was a smash hit. It's similar to the resurgence of other roguelikes such as Angband which feature permadeath, arcane key mappings, minimal curses style GUI with primarily ASCII graphics, and successors such as Dwarf Fortress. Oh, the author wants to talk about difficult platforming games on the console? How about Super Meat Boy, which offers all the platform challenge of the yesteryear classics. Shmups? Check out Really Big Sky and Sine Mora. There's plenty of great, challenging games out there today if that is what you are looking for.
- Kuiper 13y ago
  I think that improved design has made it possible for many modern games to ramp up difficulty. One of the reasons that Super Meat Boy gets away with its fiendish difficulty is the incredible fidelity of control that the game offers. When you die in Super Meat Boy, it's never the fault of "awkward controls" or the "weird physics" (two complaints common for many primitive platformers); responsibility for Meat Boy's death lies solely with the player. The same is true of Dark Souls, where everything about the game from its combat mechanics to its level design affords an immense degree of player agency. Previously, some games had to be more forgiving to make up for shortcomings in game design.
- arjunnarayan 13y ago
  DotA 2 is somewhere between Crack Cocaine and Heroin on the addiction scale. The other side of DotA's learning curve is that apart from being steep, it is also very deep: you can STILL learn so much more at the top skill levels because the game space is so large and unexplored. I personally ended up building some custom Markov Chain Monte Carlo models (because with the Steam API you can pull a lot of match data) with shared priors just to understand the farming/win relationship per hero (and you need hierarchical Bayesian models because with 100+ heroes, 10 heroes per game, and needing to account for between-hero relationships, you run into the curse of dimensionality quickly). It's almost more fun to analyze DotA computationally and watch tournaments than to play it (I watch more than I play). That's a truly ridiculous skill space and I could probably do an entire PhD's worth of statistics mining just off DotA 2.
joshschreuder 13y ago
I think Super Metroid is a really interesting game in that it doesn't rely on tutorials to tell you how to do things. It relies on you paying attention to the environment (the animals tell you how to perform tricks and do things easier), and requires you to experiment with equipment to find shortcuts and power ups. I actually got stuck early in the game by not remembering there is a run button. Such a simple function, but it's never actually shown to you until you need to use it. Presumably this was in the manual I neglected to read :) I'm not sure 'easier' is the right word for it. I'd say that newer games just explain everything to you, and don't really leave much exploration or experimentation in controls or playstyle. Also, I don't think it's really padded for length as some people here have mentioned. I started and completed it recently on the Wii U (albeit with a few sneak glances at an FAQ in parts), and it took me around 6 hours. Not very long by today's standards, though I'm a little young to say whether this applies to the older generation of games.
- beaumartinez 13y ago
  > "I actually got stuck early in the game by not remembering there is a run button." I know exactly the bit! Super Metroid is a fantastic game. Perhaps requiring a bit more dedication than is common today, but it is still a fantastic experience.
  - minikomi 13y ago
    Indeed. Placing that super bomb on a whim in the water tunnel and having the effect it had after endless fruitless searching for the next place to go on the map is a very fond memory for me :)
- JonnieCache 13y ago
  Which bits do people think are padding? That game's basically perfect AFAIC.
  - joshschreuder 13y ago
    Maybe I misread what people were saying about older games being padded with difficulty to account for their short length / to add to their replayability. I definitely think Super Metroid is pretty close to perfect.
aunty_helen 13y ago
Dammit Guybrush, push the cannon to get the gunpowder to blow the fort!
eru 13y ago
Funny enough, Super Metroid was seen as too easy back then.
- csense 13y ago
  Yeah. I seem to remember Super Metroid as a fairly easy game. Unless you're trying to finish without dying, get all the items, or finish under the three hour mark for a slightly different ending.
dsuth 13y ago
Both. Some are stupidly easy, eg. God of War "Load Game. Face Plant Controller. Finish Game. Get Star!". In defiance of this trend, games like Dark Souls are coming out, which are wickedly hard, but extremely well-designed (for the most part). Or Monster Hunter 3. These games stress player skill to the max, but offer almost no 'cheap deaths'. This is my favourite kind of game. I strongly hope that the skill-based system of gaming comes back to MMOGs (remember EQ? I do.), but I'm still waiting.
- Dewie 13y ago
  > Both. Some are stupidly easy, eg. God of War "Load Game. Face Plant Controller. Finish Game. Get Star!". God of War was not easy at all for me on Hard.
  - cheald 13y ago
    There's "Hard" and there's "Megaman Hard". Today's "Hard" just doesn't even approach the brutality of games a few generations ago, with the exception of some games like Super Meat Boy and Dark Souls. The big thing on most modern games is the frequent auto-checkpointing. This is done to prevent the player from becoming frustrated and walking away, but it saps a critial element of difficulty from the game in that you have to execute a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence, and screwing up anything puts you back at the beginning. Modern games are very guilty of the overuse of checkpointing, which can frequently mean that you never lose more than a few seconds of progress. The frustration of doing 98% of a boss fight, flubbing one guard, and having to replay the whole level again is mirrored in the reward you feel when you overcome the challenge; modern games frequently minimize frustration via checkpointing, overly-verbose tutorials, "look here!" neon signs, and the like, all of which reduce both frustration and satisfaction.
    - Dewie 13y ago
      You're using my mention of the Hard difficulty as a springboard to talk about something totally different? My point was that God of War is not so easy as to cruise through the whole game on the harder difficulties (and if it is then I guess you are very familiar with and good at hack-and-slash games). > The big thing on most modern games is the frequent auto-checkpointing. This is done to prevent the player from becoming frustrated and walking away, but it saps a critial element of difficulty from the game in that you have to execute a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence, and screwing up anything puts you back at the beginning. "Executing a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence" is not a good design for a lot of games. It is good for those "match the button pressing to the prompts on the screen" (ala Guitar Hero) and classical platformers, but not for stealth and/or strategy games. It isn't very satisfying for me when it comes to hack-and-slash games, eiher, because it de-emphasizes reaction and adapting to novel situations. Frequent check-pointing is often a crutch to mask poor gameplay design, but the tedium of having to do a series of perfectly executed actions is often a design that screams "we didn't bother to come up with something really satisfying". > Modern games are very guilty of the overuse of checkpointing, which can frequently mean that you never lose more than a few seconds of progress. The frustration of doing 98% of a boss fight, flubbing one guard, and having to replay the whole level again is mirrored in the reward you feel when you overcome the challenge; modern games frequently minimize frustration via checkpointing, overly-verbose tutorials, "look here!" neon signs, and the like, all of which reduce both frustration and satisfaction. No, the frustration is not nearly worth it. Using hours on one level - and the crushing boredom of having to repeat the first 25% of the same god damn level 50 times - does not culminate in some triumphant feeling when everything eventually falls into place. Maybe for something like 10 seconds, but that was hardly worth the frustration. Maybe that's just me, not being a masochist and all. Games shouldn't try to hold your hand in order to frustrate you - it shouldn't try to hold your hand because it is satisfying to figure things out more by yourself. It will only frustrate you if you are too impatient or if the developers designed the game with poor hinting towards what you should do. And not holding your hands demands better design - or else the frustration is magnified. If you bang your head against the wall for hours, trying every reasonable way (within the confines of the game) to get further ahead, and you only find out about it through reading some FAQ (Or those Nintendo Magazines) that you should balance on the pixel-wide rope, make a jump on the night of the lunar moon and press square - or any other way that doesn't make reasonable intuitive sense within the games universe - that is a failure on the part of the designers, not some "hardcore" feature of the game. I guess the hard games of old are kinds of badges of honor for some people (having completed them). I guess suburbanites who grew up during the nineties has to have their battle stories, too.
pandaman 13y ago
Modern games are not better designed. Quite the opposite. It's very easy to make a hard game. Making a fun game, on the other hand, requires talent. When you have a fun game you can sell it no matter how hard it is. A game that is not fun still can be sold pretty well - you just need to make it look pretty, invest into advertising and make it easily accessible so people could assess its high production values. This works because most of the competition is not very fun either. The reasons why the modern game design is not producing fun games in any significant numbers are up for debate. Personally I agree with the Richard Garriott's opinion [1] but I don't believe it's the only reason. [1] http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-designers-suck/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-desi...

30 points by dmoney67 13y ago

I've asked myself the same question after recently playing Battle Isle 1 again... Seems to me like the learning curve of modern games was so much shallower. But this is of course only one example and not representative as such.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

drawkbox 13y ago

Limited time and a leaning towards mobile/casual has led to very simplistic intros to games. The best games are simple to play, hard to master. Back in the day games like Zelda or Metal Gear on the NES were very hard without a Nintendo Power Mag and maps (they even used to have a Nintendo hotline for players stuck). Mega-man is freaking hard, pixel level mess ups. I played Mega man 9 with throwback sprite single buffer flicker and difficulty, it wasn't as fun. Plus all this was pre-internet and pre-mobile with much less entertainment vying for our attention. Games should be fun, usually that means simple to get started, but deeper and harder to master still needs to be there. I have always thought the mobile appstore type gaming handheld market we have now is closer to the experimentation of the arcades and back then it was all in-app purchasing only tied heavily to progression (via quarters/tokens). Now it is to deepen the experience and customize it for the most part. Customization was very minimal then. I really think this is the best age to be a game developer and game player. The console markets stopped many great game devs from entering and helping to propel that market, mobile and web gaming has no such limitation to their benefit.

sharkweek 13y ago
I remember playing Ocarina of Time for N64 shortly after we got internet connection at my house in 7th grade. Like many people, I got stuck at the water temple. I tried for weeks to figure that stupid level out. One of my friends linked me to a site (I think I had been complaining to him over AIM about how difficult it was) that had a walk through. I stared at that link for days, sitting in my internet explorer bookmarks, internally debating whether or not to use it, before finally giving in to just use the walk through... I went on to beat the game shortly after, never able to fully accept that victory, as I had cheated my way through a major part of the game.
sliverstorm 13y ago
The best games are simple to play, hard to master. Not sure how I feel about this statement. Such games are certainly excellent examples of what a game is. Chess is a classic example. But I derive quite a lot of enjoyment from more complicated games that are also hard to master.
- Zardoz84 13y ago
  DooM for example

yareally 13y ago

A lot of older games abused "cheap" ways to make the game more difficult (though still sometimes happens today, but not as often). Games of today, in some cases I think have been watered down for the sake of letting a more casual game player beat them before getting overly frustrated. However, not all games are like that and some of the games I've played in recent years are as hard as they come if you're upping the difficulty. If you're playing on easy/normal, then that's the issue :) Just some things I recall from really bad games in the 90s and early 00s: -Only having one or a few lives for the entire game -No saves/continues (usually combined with the above) -Ridiculously short timers for getting through an area -No health meter (one hit and you're dead) -Having to go back through areas of the game you already beat to do some inane mission that's slightly different and feels like it was added to pad the difficulty/play time -Spawning for the sake of having more fodder thrown at you (or spawning in ridiculous areas like the ledge you're about to jump to and the enemy was not there before jumping). I still hate spawning to this day in most cases. If you just left an area and destroyed everything in sight, it should not be totally rebuilt as soon as you turn around. -Unfairly slanting difficulty towards enemies (like bullets that travel through objects, while yours do not) -Dying and having to restart a huge level all the way from the beginning -Poor clipping so your weapon passes through enemies unscathed or you get hit by an enemy when you shouldn't have. Also clipping that results in you missing a platform when you clearly didn't. -Poor controls (still a problem now, but nowhere as bad as it was) My list is nowhere complete though and I'm sure others have plenty of annoyances to amend it with.

ShirtlessRod 13y ago
TV Tropes has an endless supply of these: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard Great for nostalgia. :)
galaktor 13y ago
see also Angry Video Game Nerd [1] for some examples of accidentally difficult game design in older games. [1] http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/ http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/
tadfisher 13y ago

nextstep 13y ago

Some old games only had 50 or 100 levels and were intended for repeat play. So the developers made some games super hard so that people could get many hours of play out of them.

vacri 13y ago

These aren't mutually-exclusive qualities.

gegtik 13y ago

Here is a viewpoint I found fascinating, viewing the refinement as a net loss: http://storify.com/gegtik/j-chastain-on-primitive-gaming http://storify.com/gegtik/j-chastain-on-primitive-gaming

edias 13y ago

A interesting comparison I think is between Starcraft 1 (1998) and Stacraft 2 (2010). In the original Starcraft you were constantly fighting against the game engine. Unit pathing, spell casting and a several glitches which players could utilize (most notably mutalisk stacking) made the game incredibly challenging to do anything, let alone pull off complex strategies. The speed at which you could perform actions was crucial to being a top player. Stacraft 2 introduced several mechanics that made the game substantially easier. Multiple building selection allowing you to produce units from several buildings at once rather than selecting each individually. Increased unit selection from 12 to 255, the max you would realistically expect to hit. Better unit pathing so players need to focus less on army control and numerous other changes. The down side of this is that many argue the mechanical difficulty of SC1 helped make the game so competitive and the sequel is inferior in that sense, which I agree with but think there are numerous other reasons for that as well. If any of you want me to expand on or explain anything just let me know. Starcraft is really the only thing I talk about on the internet. Edit* This is what I mean by mechanical difficulty [1]. RTS games, especially the Stacraft series, are extremely difficult just by the nature of the game. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4UTDudShDY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4UTDudShDY

Dewie 13y ago
The way to solve that is "just" to increase the skill ceiling in some other dimension. Warcraft 3 has easier macro mechanics than SC2 - five workers per gold mine, less expands, less unit-producing buildings, wood as a resource is often a non-issue - but makes up for it by having a higher skill-ceiling when it comes to micro mechanics. You could for example make larvae inject optionally auto-cast, as long you add some other mechanic that the zerg have to (or should) worry about (like more complicated creep spreading, for instance).

_pmf_ 13y ago

Getting 3 "achievements" or "trophies" just for playing through the tutorial (or, in Mass Effect 2's case, sitting through the tedious opening sequence introducing the cheesy and badly written travesty EA seems to regard as a "plot") is a bit off-putting. Maybe targeting 13 year old suburban ADD patients requires constant cheap attention grabbing to prevent these people from playing one of their 47 other games if there is a tiny obstacle.

fhd2 13y ago
While I don't agree with your prejudices, I do believe you're on spot here by saying that choice is one of the major factors in games becoming ever friendlier. Not only are there considerably more games today, being pushed out with considerably more marketing. We're living in the age of free to play, where the next free game is just a download away. To make any kind of money in F2P, the developers need to keep players playing, so that they'll eventually pay. Basically the same goes for selling DLC. So I'd say the lack of difficulty is mostly caused by how games are monetised these days.
whateverfor 13y ago
Just so you know, those achievements are like tracking cookies: the video game companies can't just send home whatever data they want, but they can see achievement data. So that achievement was just to see how many of the people who bought the game actually started to play, to provide a baseline for how many (go halfway/beat the game/play the multiplayer/anything else they can jam in an achievement).
- _pmf_ 13y ago
  I never thought of this; it does make more sense now. Thanks!

Steko 13y ago

In Pac Man the endgame was that the ghosts moved faster and if you didn't get there you didn't miss much. Early hardware limitations meant "just make it harder" was often used to extend games. Today they just put in more content, which costs money and they want the player to experience.

columbo 13y ago

Eh... yes and no.. and in some cases oh-god-no (http://thelettervsixtim.es/ http://thelettervsixtim.es/) When I was able to get a hold of arcade/snes/nes games on emulators I replayed all of my hardest games. I beat all of my top twenty in a weekend. How? Because all the emulators came with Quick Save & Quick Load. F5 and F6 are the major reasons why games are easy these days. It's a night and day difference. Playing some of the ultra-hard NES games became a walk in the park; really just repeat the last action until success. I even beat the arcade versions of Ghosts & Goblins, then Ghouls and Ghosts in about an hour for each. I've been playing a ton of nethack lately and I really wish games like Skyrim and other open-world-games had a 'permadeath' difficulty setting. Sure, I can choose to play that way, but I like it incorporated into the game. I want a system where it difficulty is just a percentage of more guys & less ammo, rather difficulty should be a fundamental change to the game.

chii 13y ago
Speaking of the quick save/reload reminds me of why Braid is so good - its designed so that mistakes aren't costly, and the player is encouraged to explore and not fear making an error and loosing progress. Games _should_ be designed that way.
- joshschreuder 13y ago
  I think it depends on the game and the experience desired by the creator. For something like Day Z, you want the progress lost when dying to be part of the story and the experience. For something where the overarching narrative is featured, like Braid / Journey, I think the quick restarts are just as important.
joshschreuder 13y ago
VVVVVV was great fun. I couldn't recommend it for everyone, but it was a challenge, and that challenge made it satisfying to complete. The best part was that it wasn't unclear what you had to do, it was just hard and skillful to achieve it, so I never had to turn to a guide. I feel quite similar with Hotline Miami. It's a tough game and you die a lot, but it's extremely satisfying plotting your strategy and executing it to success.

Kaali 13y ago

Older gamer used multple cheap techniques to prolong the otherwise short games. But I do think that many of the modern games are really easy by design, when compared to the old games. For example the 8-bit and 16-bit era games are skill based, where you have to dodge multiple bullets, have good reactions to enemies and even the environment around you. And you are punished for your mistakes; which sometimes borders on cheap tactics. Many modern games have reduced to button smashers with little to no need for any other than simple timing skills. Shooters have autoaim, and with normal difficulty levels you are a bullet sponge, even a rocket might not kill you. Of course there are a lot of exceptions, and higher difficulty level in some games can help. The games can still be really enjoyable regardless of the design change. But the ongoing evolution to more cinematic gameplay is really worrying to me. For example, Ryse: Son of Rome, that was revelaed for XBox One an E3, looks really great visually, but the gameplay seems more or less like Simon Says. You as the player are included in amazing set pieces, by letting you press one button at a time, as soon as the game tells you to; and see how the game character and the world reacts to that. It's a scary trend to me, that the stories cannot be told by the gameplay anymore, but with cutscenes where you have little or no effect on the result. There is a world of difference letting me as the protagonist struggle and get better, than having a non-player character tell me that in a cutscene.

chii 13y ago
Its interesting you mention the cutscene style story telling - most games do employ this now, simply because its the easiest way to direct an experience. really good games like portal doesn't do this, but i imagine the sort of effort required, and a lot of AAA publishers just aren't willing to take such a risk. So the root cause is the high producitno costs associated with games causing it to become liek this.
epsylon 13y ago
> Shooters have autoaim Only on consoles, though. > For example, Ryse: Son of Rome, that was revelaed for XBox One an E3, looks really great visually, but the gameplay seems more or less like Simon Says. You as the player are included in amazing set pieces, by letting you press one button at a time, as soon as the game tells you to; and see how the game character and the world reacts to that. Worse, the QTEs are actually automatic : http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/06/why-ryse-is-the-most-frustrating-game-of-e3/ http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/06/why-ryse-is-the-most-frustr...

keypusher 13y ago

Interesting premise, and a few years ago I might have agreed wholeheartedly that modern gaming is pandering to the masses and has become too easy. But then along came games like Dota 2, Day Z, Dwarf Fortress, Path Of Exile, and Dark Souls. The learning curve to not embarrass yourself in a public game of Dota 2 is probably around 100 hours. It has some fiendishly obtuse rules and requires split second reflexes as well as in depth knowledge of the metagame as well as deep domain knowledge of the item tree and hero skills. And it is by far the most popular game on Steam right now, with over 400,000 concurrent players online some days and over a million logging in each month, not to mention a very active competitive scene. Path Of Exile has proven to be a very successful action RPG where the most respect is earned by playing "hardcore mode", that is reaching the endgame without a single death. Speaking of permadeath and difficult games, look at DayZ. No instructions, no tutorial, permadeath, weird bugs and glitches, dropped in an open world military sim with zombies running around and the map is in Russian. That's pretty difficult, and it was a smash hit. It's similar to the resurgence of other roguelikes such as Angband which feature permadeath, arcane key mappings, minimal curses style GUI with primarily ASCII graphics, and successors such as Dwarf Fortress. Oh, the author wants to talk about difficult platforming games on the console? How about Super Meat Boy, which offers all the platform challenge of the yesteryear classics. Shmups? Check out Really Big Sky and Sine Mora. There's plenty of great, challenging games out there today if that is what you are looking for.

Kuiper 13y ago
I think that improved design has made it possible for many modern games to ramp up difficulty. One of the reasons that Super Meat Boy gets away with its fiendish difficulty is the incredible fidelity of control that the game offers. When you die in Super Meat Boy, it's never the fault of "awkward controls" or the "weird physics" (two complaints common for many primitive platformers); responsibility for Meat Boy's death lies solely with the player. The same is true of Dark Souls, where everything about the game from its combat mechanics to its level design affords an immense degree of player agency. Previously, some games had to be more forgiving to make up for shortcomings in game design.
arjunnarayan 13y ago
DotA 2 is somewhere between Crack Cocaine and Heroin on the addiction scale. The other side of DotA's learning curve is that apart from being steep, it is also very deep: you can STILL learn so much more at the top skill levels because the game space is so large and unexplored. I personally ended up building some custom Markov Chain Monte Carlo models (because with the Steam API you can pull a lot of match data) with shared priors just to understand the farming/win relationship per hero (and you need hierarchical Bayesian models because with 100+ heroes, 10 heroes per game, and needing to account for between-hero relationships, you run into the curse of dimensionality quickly). It's almost more fun to analyze DotA computationally and watch tournaments than to play it (I watch more than I play). That's a truly ridiculous skill space and I could probably do an entire PhD's worth of statistics mining just off DotA 2.

joshschreuder 13y ago

I think Super Metroid is a really interesting game in that it doesn't rely on tutorials to tell you how to do things. It relies on you paying attention to the environment (the animals tell you how to perform tricks and do things easier), and requires you to experiment with equipment to find shortcuts and power ups. I actually got stuck early in the game by not remembering there is a run button. Such a simple function, but it's never actually shown to you until you need to use it. Presumably this was in the manual I neglected to read :) I'm not sure 'easier' is the right word for it. I'd say that newer games just explain everything to you, and don't really leave much exploration or experimentation in controls or playstyle. Also, I don't think it's really padded for length as some people here have mentioned. I started and completed it recently on the Wii U (albeit with a few sneak glances at an FAQ in parts), and it took me around 6 hours. Not very long by today's standards, though I'm a little young to say whether this applies to the older generation of games.

beaumartinez 13y ago
> "I actually got stuck early in the game by not remembering there is a run button." I know exactly the bit! Super Metroid is a fantastic game. Perhaps requiring a bit more dedication than is common today, but it is still a fantastic experience.
- minikomi 13y ago
  Indeed. Placing that super bomb on a whim in the water tunnel and having the effect it had after endless fruitless searching for the next place to go on the map is a very fond memory for me :)
JonnieCache 13y ago
Which bits do people think are padding? That game's basically perfect AFAIC.
- joshschreuder 13y ago
  Maybe I misread what people were saying about older games being padded with difficulty to account for their short length / to add to their replayability. I definitely think Super Metroid is pretty close to perfect.

aunty_helen 13y ago

Dammit Guybrush, push the cannon to get the gunpowder to blow the fort!

eru 13y ago

Funny enough, Super Metroid was seen as too easy back then.

csense 13y ago
Yeah. I seem to remember Super Metroid as a fairly easy game. Unless you're trying to finish without dying, get all the items, or finish under the three hour mark for a slightly different ending.

dsuth 13y ago

Both. Some are stupidly easy, eg. God of War "Load Game. Face Plant Controller. Finish Game. Get Star!". In defiance of this trend, games like Dark Souls are coming out, which are wickedly hard, but extremely well-designed (for the most part). Or Monster Hunter 3. These games stress player skill to the max, but offer almost no 'cheap deaths'. This is my favourite kind of game. I strongly hope that the skill-based system of gaming comes back to MMOGs (remember EQ? I do.), but I'm still waiting.

Dewie 13y ago
> Both. Some are stupidly easy, eg. God of War "Load Game. Face Plant Controller. Finish Game. Get Star!". God of War was not easy at all for me on Hard.
- cheald 13y ago
  There's "Hard" and there's "Megaman Hard". Today's "Hard" just doesn't even approach the brutality of games a few generations ago, with the exception of some games like Super Meat Boy and Dark Souls. The big thing on most modern games is the frequent auto-checkpointing. This is done to prevent the player from becoming frustrated and walking away, but it saps a critial element of difficulty from the game in that you have to execute a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence, and screwing up anything puts you back at the beginning. Modern games are very guilty of the overuse of checkpointing, which can frequently mean that you never lose more than a few seconds of progress. The frustration of doing 98% of a boss fight, flubbing one guard, and having to replay the whole level again is mirrored in the reward you feel when you overcome the challenge; modern games frequently minimize frustration via checkpointing, overly-verbose tutorials, "look here!" neon signs, and the like, all of which reduce both frustration and satisfaction.
  - Dewie 13y ago
    You're using my mention of the Hard difficulty as a springboard to talk about something totally different? My point was that God of War is not so easy as to cruise through the whole game on the harder difficulties (and if it is then I guess you are very familiar with and good at hack-and-slash games). > The big thing on most modern games is the frequent auto-checkpointing. This is done to prevent the player from becoming frustrated and walking away, but it saps a critial element of difficulty from the game in that you have to execute a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence, and screwing up anything puts you back at the beginning. "Executing a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence" is not a good design for a lot of games. It is good for those "match the button pressing to the prompts on the screen" (ala Guitar Hero) and classical platformers, but not for stealth and/or strategy games. It isn't very satisfying for me when it comes to hack-and-slash games, eiher, because it de-emphasizes reaction and adapting to novel situations. Frequent check-pointing is often a crutch to mask poor gameplay design, but the tedium of having to do a series of perfectly executed actions is often a design that screams "we didn't bother to come up with something really satisfying". > Modern games are very guilty of the overuse of checkpointing, which can frequently mean that you never lose more than a few seconds of progress. The frustration of doing 98% of a boss fight, flubbing one guard, and having to replay the whole level again is mirrored in the reward you feel when you overcome the challenge; modern games frequently minimize frustration via checkpointing, overly-verbose tutorials, "look here!" neon signs, and the like, all of which reduce both frustration and satisfaction. No, the frustration is not nearly worth it. Using hours on one level - and the crushing boredom of having to repeat the first 25% of the same god damn level 50 times - does not culminate in some triumphant feeling when everything eventually falls into place. Maybe for something like 10 seconds, but that was hardly worth the frustration. Maybe that's just me, not being a masochist and all. Games shouldn't try to hold your hand in order to frustrate you - it shouldn't try to hold your hand because it is satisfying to figure things out more by yourself. It will only frustrate you if you are too impatient or if the developers designed the game with poor hinting towards what you should do. And not holding your hands demands better design - or else the frustration is magnified. If you bang your head against the wall for hours, trying every reasonable way (within the confines of the game) to get further ahead, and you only find out about it through reading some FAQ (Or those Nintendo Magazines) that you should balance on the pixel-wide rope, make a jump on the night of the lunar moon and press square - or any other way that doesn't make reasonable intuitive sense within the games universe - that is a failure on the part of the designers, not some "hardcore" feature of the game. I guess the hard games of old are kinds of badges of honor for some people (having completed them). I guess suburbanites who grew up during the nineties has to have their battle stories, too.

pandaman 13y ago

Modern games are not better designed. Quite the opposite. It's very easy to make a hard game. Making a fun game, on the other hand, requires talent. When you have a fun game you can sell it no matter how hard it is. A game that is not fun still can be sold pretty well - you just need to make it look pretty, invest into advertising and make it easily accessible so people could assess its high production values. This works because most of the competition is not very fun either. The reasons why the modern game design is not producing fun games in any significant numbers are up for debate. Personally I agree with the Richard Garriott's opinion [1] but I don't believe it's the only reason. [1] http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-designers-suck/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-desi...