Are Games Getting Easier?

An anonymous reader writes "I can't help feeling that this generation of games for both consoles and PCs are getting increasingly dumbed down and easier to complete. There's no challenge in today's games, most of which can be completed on the day of purchase. Triple A titles such as Halo, Modern Warfare 2 are the worst of the lot. The whole reason for this article is Medal of Honor, this can be completed within hours of purchase. Where's the fun in that?"

Easy or Stupidly Difficult

[VoiceInTheDesert]

It seems the way to make AI these days is to make it really stupid and easy for the player to beat, unless the player turns it on hard mode, in which case, they see you from 5 miles away and one-hit you before you were aware the map had finished loading.

Studios are under a lot of pressure to churn out games as fast as possible these days and AI is suffering. The solution to making games challenging is to make them either never miss and insta-kill the player or to just give them tons of health and attack power, but keep them stupid. Neither strategy is entertaining and it would be nice to have actual care put into building intelligent, challenging AI instead.

Re:*yawn*

[khallow]

I don't know. This Slashdot game is pretty hard. I still haven't made it past level 1 where I get dogpiled by FP trolls. And I've been playing since 2001.

I'm not sure...

[brian0918]

I'm not sure - I haven't played a new game in years. Still working on Myst. I hope to have it completed by 2015, and then I'll move on to Riven. I may just finish this series before I die...

Re:*yawn*

[blair1q]

Then play it in Lawrence of Arabia mode.

"The trick is not minding that it hurts."

Re:Where is the fun?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a coincidence..thats how I like my women!

Re:Where is the fun?

[surgen]

Why would he even want to? Analog downloads, now that's where the good content is.

Re:*yawn*

[jarbrewer]

What I wouldn't have given to only have to walk up hills. Everything was mountains in my day. And the 'game' was called Getting Poked In the Eye With a Stick. And we were grateful.

Re:Where is the fun?

[commodore64_love]

>>>teabagged

Apparently your gaming environment is a hell of a lot more fun than mine.

Re:*yawn*

[Weaselmancer]

Luxury, Shilling. We used to have to pay 20 pence for our games which were nothing more than jumping from cowpie to cowpie just to keep warm in the snow. And when we got home my father would thrash us to sleep with an Atari 2600 controller.

Re:Where is the fun?

[JonySuede]

what is an s-word ?
is this a long sword ?

Re:Where is the fun?

[JonySuede]

parallel MIDI ??? it existed ?

Re:Where is the fun?

[interkin3tic]

Yep, there's nothing more fun than being teabagged by some jerk who has no life or job...

Are you saying it's more fun being teabagged by some nice millionaire with a lovely family? I'd think that would make it worse. "Not only is he better than me at this game, and his virtual nuts are in my virtual dead face, he's better than me at LIFE!!!"