Alot of old school gamers, like my self, like to say that games are too easy these days. People like to say that too many games these days hold your hand and treat you like a dumb child. Im an old school gamer(been gaming since I was 5 and now I am 25 years old now), and I strongly disagree with this notion that games have become too easy or dumbed down. Back in the NES days, alot of games were so difficult because of the fact that you had limited lives and once all those lives were gone it was game over and you had to start the game over again. Some games would have continues and reset the amount of lives you had, but even then, once you ran out of continues it was game over and you had to start the game from the beginning. Design choices like that make games feel overly frustrating and sometimes make you want to stop playing.

Recently a game that has gained alot of attention from gamers, Dark Souls, has borrowed alot of design choices from the games of old. Dark Souls challenges players by having enemies and bosses that do considerable amounts of damage to the player every time the player gets hit and there is little to no room for error on the players end. Human beings are not perfect, we make mistakes and errors all the time. Yes we can learn from those mistakes and make better choices or decisions about how to approach a challenge, but when the challenge is borderline impossible or unfair, it causes most of us to not enjoy the journey as much. Im not saying that challenge is a bad thing, but the challenge should be fair enough so that we can learn from our mistakes and overcome obstacles without having to start over or retry a billion times.

A great example of great game design are the Zelda franchise from Nintendo. These games are very challenging but what makes them great is that the challenge isnt so overbearing that you get frustrated and want to quit the game, you can learn on the fly during boss battles and adjust your strategy accordingly to overcome the bosses in the game. You still get the satisfaction of defeating a very challenging boss while still enjoying the adventure that the game puts forth. Having to retry parts of games over and over for hours is just frustrating and tedious and makes games less fun for the player. People that look for that overbearing difficultly in games dont understand that not everyone has the "skill" or patience level to deal with the tediousness of games such as the recent Dark Souls games. Its a shame that a game so rich with atmosphere and interesting lore and a solid combat system has to be as annoyingly difficult and tedious as it is, because having to repeat 15 or 20 min of gameplay over and over again creates a situation where most people would just drop the game and do something else that doesnt feel like a waste of time.

In conclusion, all Im trying to say is that i dont think games are too easy today at all. I just think that game design has improved so much over the last 2 decades, that games just dont have those frustrating elements to them that plagued games of the past therefore resulting in the game feeling easier. We have come a long way since the 8 and 16 bit eras of gaming and now not only enjoy games for their gameplay, but also the characters, story, atmosphere, etc. I believe that for the most part, gaming has only gotten better since the old days. Although some devs and or publishing companies are making crappy business decisions lately, The quality of games has generally improved over time, give or take a few exceptions.