Are games getting easier?

It seems to me like more games than usual are becoming...easy. I know, I know... Games have varying difficulty levels but what ever happened to games that when you beat them it felt like an accomplishment? I know there are still a bunch, but not enough. An example: LoZ Twilight Princess was alot easier that OoT. Or maybe I'm just alot smarter now than I was then? What do you think(about this trend)? Is it true?

Unlike back in the 80's developers nowadays want you to finish their games. Games nowadays need to be challenging, not just hard for the sake of being hard, so developers have caught on to that over the years. Have games been getting easier? Yes and no... back then you had one or two buttons and a stick in which to control your character/ship/whatever, now you have 8 or more buttons with a tremendous amount of options and customizations to choose from. Take someone off the street that has never played a video game in their life and the learning curve will be substantially longer than if you put a joystick in their hand and told them to play Galaga.

When it comes down to it I don't think games have gotten easier nor hard but have just merely evolved. That's how I see it at least. ;)

Unlike back in the 80's developers nowadays want you to finish their games. Games nowadays need to be challenging, not just hard for the sake of being hard, so developers have caught on to that over the years. Have games been getting easier? Yes and no... back then you had one or two buttons and a stick in which to control your character/ship/whatever, now you have 8 or more buttons with a tremendous amount of options and customizations to choose from. Take someone off the street that has never played a video game in their life and the learning curve will be substantially longer than if you put a joystick in their hand and told them to play Galaga.

When it comes down to it I don't think games have gotten easier nor hard but have just merely evolved. That's how I see it at least. ;)

juradai

Good Point!

Unlike back in the 80's developers nowadays want you to finish their games. Games nowadays need to be challenging, not just hard for the sake of being hard, so developers have caught on to that over the years. Have games been getting easier? Yes and no... back then you had one or two buttons and a stick in which to control your character/ship/whatever, now you have 8 or more buttons with a tremendous amount of options and customizations to choose from. Take someone off the street that has never played a video game in their life and the learning curve will be substantially longer than if you put a joystick in their hand and told them to play Galaga.

When it comes down to it I don't think games have gotten easier nor hard but have just merely evolved. That's how I see it at least. ;)

juradai

I see your point and i totally agree wth it. But i must say i popped GALAGA in the other day and man.. i couldnt get passed level 5...LOL.. that drove me nuts. But that was better than what my boyfriend did LOL...he couldnt get passed stage 3 HAHAH KAWICE HAHA HAHA!

Yes games have been getting easier. But I think that's more due to the sheer fact that A. Most gamers see to want to complete their games B. Due to high development costs developers have to try to appeal to as many groups as possible. But if your talking about the average game, then well from back in the day definately but that's because devs had many limitations in game size due to cartheridges, so instead of getting 80 levels you just got 7 levels but all of them ridiculously hard.

However there are a few games that come out here and there that are just as difficuty if not more so then the old games Ninja Gaiden , Trauma Center, Etrian Odyessy, and Devil May Cry are great examples. Also certain games offer easy, medium, hard, and extreme modes to suit everyones taste.

Games are definitely a LOT easier now than in the 80s and 90s. A) There are basically no more games that are a challenge for the mind. (adventure games) B) There sure aren't any games that require a complete restart if you die once and berate you while doing so. (Shinobi - Sega Master System - "You Failed!") There aren't too many games that beat you into a bloody pulp on level 3 just for laughs. (Battletoads) There are very few games today that require ridiculous amounts of memorization. (Any shooter)

Not that we are completely worse off for losing some of these forms of difficulty, but in terms of ability to complete games, I can assure you that if I sat you down with a stack of80's games and a stack of games from the present day and wouldn't let youleave until you had completed a pile, you would be better off picking the present day stack.

Games have become increasingly easier from a general standpoint, there's no question about that. I think in the earlier generations, moreso than now, a lot of the games' difficulty were caused by bad design. Ever play the first TMNT game on NES? What a ridiculously frustrating game, caused not by innacurate controls, but dumbass level design that shows just how much the developers were learning as they were going along. I think the difference in difficulty in games can be summarized in one word.

Battletoads.

Mother of god that game is hard. They don't make games this hard anymore, probably due to parents calling Nintendo in frustration about their children crying themselves to sleep with a controller in their hand. I guess the new Ninja Gaiden games are what you could consider some of the hardest games around these days, but I challenge you to go back to all three original NES games and beat them without save states or cheat devices. Good luck.

Games are easier overall for sure, but I think what has happened over the years is that developers have learned how to implement difficulty in a game that is otherwise playable by everyone. What happens frequently is that the most difficult portions of games will actually be optional, only for the person who digs the game so much that they want to see everything. It's a different design philosophy, one that's probably for the better. I still have nightmares about Battletoads.

I think games are getting easier. I believe it started when gamers could save their games. We can reload if we're stuck or get killed. I remember old-school games that gave you five lives, and if you died five times, that was it. Now that we can reload saves, we can try different strategies, go to different rooms, backtrack, etc.maddog95376

I would really like it if some developer brought the "lives" system back into their game, would be awsome just having 5 lives in lets say CoD4 or Assasins Creed.

I would disagree somewhat. I certainly would not want to play games that made you start over from the beginning when you die, or die a certain number of times.

The reason I think games seem easier now is because there are so many more games and many many more lp games which tend to be easier.

They're definately getting easier...I've never beaten most of the games on SNES, like Stage 6 in Starfox :( Man that was hard! I think I gave up eventually in frustration. But yea it definately shows in RPGs...maybe also cause I keep hoping it'll challenge me like Adventure games used to. I also don't like how a lot of times games FORCE you to play through tutorials on how to play the game; at least make it optional or something! I'd rather just read the manual (but I know most ppl don't like reading, eh?). Manuals now are just like...a really crappy picture book and a place to print the credits.

I miss adventure games T_T I try to play text games, but they're just so friggin hard they frustrate me.

[QUOTE="juradai"]

Unlike back in the 80's developers nowadays want you to finish their games. Games nowadays need to be challenging, not just hard for the sake of being hard, so developers have caught on to that over the years. Have games been getting easier? Yes and no... back then you had one or two buttons and a stick in which to control your character/ship/whatever, now you have 8 or more buttons with a tremendous amount of options and customizations to choose from. Take someone off the street that has never played a video game in their life and the learning curve will be substantially longer than if you put a joystick in their hand and told them to play Galaga.

When it comes down to it I don't think games have gotten easier nor hard but have just merely evolved. That's how I see it at least. ;)

punkybruiser83

I see your point and i totally agree wth it. But i must say i popped GALAGA in the other day and man.. i couldnt get passed level 5...LOL.. that drove me nuts. But that was better than what my boyfriend did LOL...he couldnt get passed stage 3 HAHAH KAWICE HAHA HAHA!

It's funny you should say that because I had my friend over that is very good at many video games and had never played Galaga. I decided to play it to kill some time when he decided to take a crack at it. He didn't get very far. He was amazed how far I had got playing and wonder how we ever got by playing video games back in the day. haha...that made me feel old.

I'd say that yes - games have gotten easier, overall, for the gaming enthusiast to complete - though as a sidenote, someone already made the salient point that this doesn't necessarily mean that the games are more accessible. In any case, the factors for why games have gotten easier (in my opinion) have already been laid out above: more sophisticated development and design tools, along with the maturation of the medium, which lead to better development and design choices. Instantly respawning enemies - in inconvenient places - from Ninja Gaiden on the NES? Gone. Simon Belmont's cumbersome gait? Gone.

As someone already said, another prime motivating factor of lowering difficulty in games is to let people finish them. That means that the choice was a conscious design choice made not to fix something that was broken, but to just go down a different path. That God of War and God of War II are quite easy to beat is testament to that - they're wonderfully designed games (for the most part... *curses at the balance-beam mechanic*) and they're quite enjoyable despite the ease of difficulty. Basically I'm saying that it's not just maturation and it's not just that people want consumers to finish their games, but a combination of both.

I will say I sometimes miss the days when games thumped their chests and dared you to beat them - games that said, "I'm better than you." Remember those magazine print ads for Equinox? What about the insanity that is the Gradius series? Thank goodness that Ikaruga made an appearance in modern-day United States videogaming.

At the same time, as the years pass I have less and less time to dedicate to learning a game. I still want to be able to appreciate my hobby without feeling inept, so I'm not upset that developers have decided to be more lenient in general. I just hope that there is a mini-resurgence of difficult games - or at least, crazy difficulty settings - to balance things out and keep me on my toes. I just started playing Soldier Blade on Virtual Console and my shmup skills are totally gone. Part of the fun for me in games is knowing that I conquered something challenging.

I also place a lot of the blame on gamers themselves. Anytime a game proves even a little bit difficult, there is an outcry from both the press and consumers. There were endless complains about DMC3 and Ninja Gaiden, so their special editions had to have easier modes. This type of thing has had an enourmous impact on WOW. Its not a very difficult game to start with, but it gets considerably easier with each patch because people fill up their forums with hundreds of threads about how hard something is.H3LLRaiseR

i said that about mgs and you are right i havn't played that on a harder level hell i hav'nt even unlocked eroperean extreame mode

Games do feel easier now, but that can be good or bad. It's good that developers no longer rely on annoying tricks like being unable to save and having a bunch of monsters pop up continuously and repetitively, but I feel that a game that is actually difficult is more satisfying at completion. Who cares if I have to keep trying a hundred times? At least there are some difficult and challenging games in a fun way still out there.

Overall, i say no.

The difficulty may not be as high as they were back in the day, but games are much, MUCH more complex today than they were yesterday. 10+ button controllers compared to the 4 on the NES. Games were much more straightforward back during the SNES and NES era. You either to left, right, up, or down. Maybe jump on a Goomba.

Look at Metroid Prime 2. That utilized EVERY button on the Cube controller, and the length of the game made it so that if you didn't play everyday, you forgot what to do.

Now you have tons of buttons, that when combined, do all kinds of things. Games may be less difficult, but the complexity of them make them much harder.

1: Well, if you take a game like Blaster Master on the NES and compare it to a game like... Soul Reaver 2 on the PS2, the only real reason why I see Blaster Master as the harder (hardest in my mind) comes down to one simple factor: Saving. If you died in Blaster Master, that was it, GAME OVER MAN! GAME OVER! You had to start again. But with modern games, if a boss beats you, the most you usually have to do is replay one level making it easy to learn boss paterns and level layouts. You can play Blaster Master for an hour, get killed by something, play for another hour, get past that point, get killed by something else... back to start.

You want your next new game to be hard? Before you play it once, remove your memory card and every time you die (if there are check points, set yourself a number of lives) start again from the beginning. Suddenly games will seem MUCH harder.

2: Here, I'm gonna compare the games Tomb Raider for the PS1 with Tomb Raider Anniversary for the PS2. Technically, Anniversary was the tougher. The levels were bigger, the puzzles were harder, and the secrets were more...uh...secret. But the original was harder...why? Controls. Even without the checkpoints that TRA offered up every half a step, the controls were the main thing that made the game easier. They were more responsive, easier to manage and offered up new abilities(yey, auto-grab!) and thus the game seemed easier than the clunky controlled original.