Are Games Getting Easier? 854
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?"
Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, there's nothing more fun than being teabagged by some jerk who has no life or job so they spend 24/7 practising so they can feel their life has meaning when some wage slave logs on to go find some fun for a few hours.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate how game companies today are shoving everyone toward online play - though I understand, because it frees them from having to... you know... create content for the game.
Some of us want to be able to play single player in exchange for our $60... it's not too much to ask.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Interesting)
Fully agree. That said, you just have to pick your games: Assassin's Creed 2, Red Dead Redemption, GTA4 and many others offer extensive single player content. I love stuff like the Modern Warfare games, but I make sure to buy them used and cheap.
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Red Dead Redemption? GTA 4? Really? Sorry, but I gave up on GTA and GTA-clones YEARS ago. There's no "story" there either, and the "sandbox" just consists of, again, doing the same crap over and over till you get bored with it.
I take it, then, that you haven't played these games.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:4, Informative)
For local splitscreen gaming on the Xbox, the Gears of War series is pretty good. Also Madden, if you're into that sort of thing.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:4, Insightful)
Red Dead Redemption? GTA 4? Really? Sorry, but I gave up on GTA and GTA-clones YEARS ago. There's no "story" there either, and the "sandbox" just consists of, again, doing the same crap over and over till you get bored with it.
How do you earn the right to criticize a game without playing it?
Hunting a group of deer, I heard coyotes approaching from a distance. I shot the deer quickly, only to have the coyotes turn on me and my steed instead. Later, hunting beaver in the mountains, I found myself more afraid of wolves and bears than any human threat.
"Westerns are about place," [Dan Houser] said. "They're not called outlaw films. They're not even called cowboys-and-Indians films. They're called westerns. They're about geography."
"We're talking about a format that is inherently geographical," Mr. Houser added, "and you're talking about a medium, video games, the one thing they do unquestionably better than other mediums is represent geography."
Way Down Deep in the Wild, Wild West [nytimes.com]
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:4, Funny)
Why would he even want to? Analog downloads, now that's where the good content is.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Informative)
You mean because they give you extensive single-player content?
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
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what is an s-word ?
is this a long sword ?
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't mind multiplayer. In fact, I encourage it... but I don't do PVP. Most people equate multiplayer to competitive and that's where I think multiplayer gaming gains a big red "x" for some people. What we need to do is encourage developers to develop a storyline and allow jump-in cooperation from people you approve.
Personally I feel like MP games need to break a bit from the linearity of single player gaming (and I know people will disagree with me on this.) I'd love to be completing storyline missions in one town and let my friend go off and sell loot from our last mission or whatever they like (even if it's breaking form the party and exploring that cave over there.)
I spend most of my time investigating the cooperative aspects of games so that I can log in and play with friends and complete objectives.
I don't have nearly as much fun in games when it's just me.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
When I want to be social, I go be with other people and socialize. I really don't want to be forced to socialize with others in order to play a computer game at home.
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Find a better server.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, unless you are part of the "community" and can devote a lot of time to a game, you aren't going to have fun because the majority of people online are assholes.
There is a line between simply being bad at a game and 14 year old kids cursing you out because you can't devote 8 hours a day to the game.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:4, Informative)
Except for the fact there is a difference between simply losing and being told you suck repeatedly from people who have no life other than the game.
The problem is, unless you are part of the "community" and can devote a lot of time to a game, you aren't going to have fun because the majority of people online are assholes.
There is a line between simply being bad at a game and 14 year old kids cursing you out because you can't devote 8 hours a day to the game.
This is essential. In the MMO context, at least in WoW with their random dungeon finder thingy, the difference in these types of people is striking. Take these two examples where someone notices you're 'doing it wrong', they can:
A) Whisper you discretely with either a short tip or an offer to answer any questions you may have...
or
B) Declare to the world how greatly you suck, enjoy a laugh at your expense, and vote to kick you from the group...
FPS games seem dominated by the latter, but the former is very rare in any setting.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
So how do you get better if you die every few seconds? Does every multiplyaer game have segmented ability-based collections? If I'm awesome at one weapon, can I go to the n00b leagues and try getting better with another one?
I letigimately don't know. what I do know is I played COD 2 for about 10 minutes at a friend's house and got shot a milliion times, and had no desire to ever play the game again. How do I get better? Just walk around and hopefully someone misses so I can fire my weapon once?
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So how do you get better if you die every few seconds?
Good games have a mechanism for dealing with that. Few people if any think that it's fun to get blasted immediately, most people do however enjoy a challenge. Not sure about FPS games, but I know that some games do have a ranking system to try to match people up so that the game could go either way.
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"How do I get better? Just walk around and hopefully someone misses so I can fire my weapon once?"
This is exactly what is wrong with gaming, nobody wants to put in any effort to practice getting better.
The whole point of _competitive_ multiplayer is to compete you only get better by playing people better then yourselves. The same way you build muscle by lifting weights until exhaustion.
Back in the quake days everyone got their ass handed to them and we found this FUN and together on private servers with s
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This is exactly what is wrong with gaming, nobody wants to put in any effort to practice getting better.
The whole point of _competitive_ multiplayer is to compete you only get better by playing people better then yourselves. The same way you build muscle by lifting weights until exhaustion.
Oh really? Then why is it that certain types of people camp out on a game they've already mastered, afraid to move on to something new?
Lots of these competitive games are a lot of fun for the first two weeks while everyone is figuring it out. Beyond that, the chances of 'getting better' are nearly nil as you'll get no opportunity to practice anything. Anything except being dead, that is, and we're all already pretty good at that.
Starting above your 1 rep max (Score:5, Insightful)
The same way you build muscle by lifting weights until exhaustion.
But you don't start with a weight that you can't lift for even one repetition.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
Two things need to happen. First up, matchmaking desperately needs a better way to match players of similar skill.
Second, whoever came up with the "play for X hours, get 'experience points' to unlock all the uber fucking gear" for Call of Duty, that every other goddamn FPS-multiplayer has been mimicking ever since, needs to fucking die. It's already bad enough that the lifeless basement-dwellers ruin the game for anyone else coming on to play for fun, now they get an extra advantage in more body armor and deadlier weapons too?
No. Thank. You.
I gave up on playing anything multiplayer on Xbox Live for one simple reason: I can't go on to anywhere, find a "new players" server, and get comfortable in the game. No, all that's available are the deathmatch and ctf-playing 14-year-old fatsos who live in their parents' basement, never see natural light, and scream "faggot" into their headset constantly if you don't do everything picture perfect and have a goddamn photographic memory for every little fucking nook and cranny and weapon respawn time so that you're standing right on the rocket launcher the moment it comes back up from their using the ammo up and dropping the last spawn.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm really sorry to say this. Most games are competitive.
These days that's largely true. Which is part of my complaint. Cooperative and/or single-player games are getting harder to find. Which is a problem, if I don't feel like playing something competitive.
If you're not having fun, you probably suck.
I'm very willing to accept that I suck. I don't have hours to devote to practicing enough to become good. And I'm ok with that. You aren't going to insult me by telling me that I suck. I know this already.
But simply losing at a game can still be enjoyable - if the people you're playing with are not jerks.
There's a difference between playing a friendly match and losing to somebody who is a good sport, and playing with somebody who is screaming random obscenities and insulting you every time you die.
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Cooperative and/or single-player games are getting harder to find.
Au contraire, there seems to be quite a revival of co-op lately - Left 4 Dead, Borderlands...
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Yep, there's nothing more fun than being teabagged by some jerk who has no life or job so they spend 24/7 practising so they can feel their life has meaning when some wage slave logs on to go find some fun for a few hours.
Indeed.
I used to have more time on my hands. I used to be able to play Unreal (pre-tournament!) for multiple hours a day. I got halfway-decent at it. It was fun.
But those days are long-gone. I don't have the time to get good enough at a modern multi-player title for it to actually be fun. If I log into something multi-player these days I just get my ass handed to me time and again. Usually while somebody mocks me. Not my idea of fun.
This wouldn't really be a problem if there was more single-player co
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>>>teabagged
Apparently your gaming environment is a hell of a lot more fun than mine.
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Yep, there's nothing more fun than being teabagged by some jerk who has no life or job so they spend 24/7 practising so they can feel their life has meaning when some wage slave logs on to go find some fun for a few hours.
Not that I disagree with you, I don't (though I think you are grossly exaggerating the scale of the problem), but I do find it somewhat ironic that a thread about how easy games have become is filled up posts like yours... discussing how games are full of people way better than themselves ;)
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Funny)
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!!!"
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
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got it... jerks don't deserve to ruin the fun of everyone else.
FTFY.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Insightful)
got it... jerks don't deserve fun.
Sure they do. I'd just prefer it if their fun wasn't had at my expense.
why don't you make your own games?
Because I already have a job. I don't want to spend my few leisure hours trying to code up a video game. I want to relax and enjoy myself.
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Better yet, you could make a lot of money if you can write code that detects asshats and draws them all to the same server while leaving more fair-minded players alone.
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Connect via MIDI? Did you mean serial or parallel cables?
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Serial midi, on the Atari ST
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parallel MIDI ??? it existed ?
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Re:Where is the fun? (Score:5, Informative)
In the days before RS-232 we had current loop, which was basically the same idea, but used "current flow"/"no current flow" instead of RS-232 +15V/-15V to signal zeros and ones.
MIDI 1.0 is a current loop serial port that runs at a bizarre baud rate 31250 bps. Yet it uses a nice standard async protocol of 8N1 just like a serial port.
Depending on the peculiar non-standardness of your serial port, it might, with minimal hacking, be made to work MIDI.
Take a UART chip, add a RS-232 level shifter like a MAX-232 or those ancient 1489 1488 level shifters, add a DB-25 and you've got a RS-232 port. Take the same UART chip, add some optoisolators and resistors, wire to a 5 pin DIN jack, and you're got a MIDI port. Not as different as you'd think. The software is a bit different of course.
Or working the other way around, on the Atari ST, the MIDI ports could be connected in a "MIDI null modem"-ish cable, and you could play multiplayer games, although I never owned a ST.
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ps, don't put +15/-15V in a modern motherboard serial port, if you still have them, that is...
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Note 'long' cables. As opposed to 'really long' cables, for which you want RS-232's long-r
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Why bother putting tons of money and effort into solo gameplay when multiplayer is so much more attractive to everyone?
Because it's not more attractive to everyone. It's more attractive to some. After the disappointment of the most recent MoH single-player campaign, I won't be buying another. But I most certainly will be buying Dragon Age 2, Fallout Vegas (though it's very buggy) etc.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:4, Insightful)
Decent AI is intensive in terms of both processor cycles and programming time. Conversely, representing a character (say, in B1943) only takes a few numbers: x/y/z coordinates and velocities, polar "look" coordinates and velocities, weapons held, and whether it's been fired. All the hard stuff is done by the (other) users and creates a game that is far more varied and "realistic" than any AI I've ever played against.
For games with a strong multiplayer angle, spending a fortune on the AI for the solo game isn't economically brilliant.
Re:Where is the fun? (Score:4, Informative)
Though in some genres... in RTSs, simply making an AI that could beat the player fairly is a very difficult task. To make the games challenging at all the AI usually needs to be given huge advantages like a pre-built base or infinite resources, which just makes the player feel incredibly annoyed when they realise the difficulty is artificial.
More players = More money (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes, it's a business decision, but I'm not sure you've got the reason correct. I don't think multiplayer appeals to more than 50% of the audience. However, multiplayer is trivially "sticky" which means by spending a little time adding multiplayer you can keep people who do buy your game playing longer and talking about your game for longer. If people are playing longer that means you have a longer sales window before used copies start seriously competing with new copies of the game. If people are talkin
We wanted it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember all those pains involved in having such ignored and even ridiculed way of spending time? How "games were only for kids", and only weird and awkward ones at that? How, if only the masses would really try, they would understand and like it?
Well, it happened. So now many games are made for them, not you. Deal with the consequences of what we wanted (this is extremely easy, considering huge numbers of great "hard" games made also now; even if limiting oneself to what's available, more than can be playe
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Seriously, if someone is so nostalgic for old school game difficulty, go play those games. They are still there, they still work, and I'm sure you didn't play all of them. Go beat Ghosts n' Goblins twice.
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People still playing multiplayer need an actual copy of the game and cannot resell it to Gamestop or a friend. People who are done with a single player game can resell the game which means no new profits for the company who made/published the game.
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Make some enemies. Fight up a ladder. Start a flamewar over wall-hacking. Realize you're competing with real human beings.
Oh, and once you've gone through single-player once, this happens:
"No storyline. No progression. The same exact things over and over again."
At least with online when you get into the same situation the enemies facing you won't fall for the same diversion twice. Or maybe they will. This == Deeper.
Could it be... (Score:2)
Difficulty Settings! (Score:5, Interesting)
... Halo, Modern Warfare 2 are the worst of the lot. The whole reason for this article is Medal of Honor ...
I can't speak for Halo but I'm pretty sure MW2 had difficulty settings and I know Medal of Honor has difficulty settings because I played that piece of shit game last night. Easy and Normal maybe but I think that Difficult would take more than a couple tries on most levels.
You're just mad because it doesn't mean anything to beat a game anymore. Sure, on XBox you can get gamer points or achievements for beating it on the hardest setting but it bothers you that others can experience the same rewarding progress dopamine that you get. Well, that's never going to change. By the very nature of how that is rewarding to you is the fact that you're a select few of maybe ~10% of the population that can beat the game.
So Craptivision can either shutout some of their content to the vast majority of players or introduce difficulty settings so the toddler across the street can mash the controller in order to beat the game in easy mode. That drives profits and the only thing they see as a sacrifice is the rare super gamer that feels a bit miffed he or she just forked over $60 in order to autopilot through a game.
You know I still played through all the levels of difficulty in Goldeneye on the N64 and didn't feel cheated. When I ran that train level on 00-Agent difficulty night after night after night I can still think back to those rare times when I would laser the engineer room hatch open with my watch and then drop down with Natalya only to have to run down the length of the train with people shooting at our backs. One bullet in either of our backs and we were basically dead. That goddamn bitch always died. Always. I swear to Christ when I eventually passed that level it was by sheer bug alone that she did not die. So after that cruel Sisyphean task that my friend and I worked together strategizing and getting through it, I was rewarded and will never forget some of those levels.
Games are getting easier but I ask you what does it matter? You will have your difficulty settings (usually) so play only on the hardest setting and enjoy your Contra III style impossibilities [thebestpag...iverse.net]. The era of earning progress through a game has largely come to pass unless you look at the end game material of WoW at any one moment. Final Fantasy XIII was a travesty in this respect. And profit dictates it will stay that way.
Re:Difficulty Settings! (Score:5, Informative)
Halo gives you the options to make the game incredibly difficult - not only are there the 4 difficulty settings but there's a whole slew of skulls you can activate to make things harder (Limitted Ammo, Enemies like to use grenades more often, and of course Iron mode (any death by you or a team mate if you are playing co op means you restart the whole level, no checkpoints).
So if he is complaining about Halo 3 or Reach not being difficult enough, I challenge him to legendary with all skulls on, and try beating that in anything less than 6 hours and I will bow down and call him the gamer king.
He is just reminiscing the days of difficult platformers where every moving object on the screen was trying to kill you, and one touch meant you were dead and lost a life, and you only got 3 to start.
Don't get me wrong, games ARE getting easier, but that's not a bad thing. When I first played the new Halo Reach - it was with a buddy of mine and we were trying it on Legendary, no skulls. We got about half way through in one night - and its only because we've played all the halos through since the DEMO of Halo 1 - so our skills in those games are rather refined. When I was playing the game for myself, I wanted to jump in on multiplayer as soon as possible, but I also wanted to finish the campaign, just for the storyline - I would do Legendary another time when I felt like the challenge. Being able to breeze through the campaign on easy was a good thing, like an added feature to the game. When a game is storyline driven, as most games try to be now-a-days, its not a bad thing to have an easy difficulty setting where you can progress the game more like a movie.
Re:Difficulty Settings! (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, games ARE getting easier, but that's not a bad thing. When I first played the new Halo Reach - it was with a buddy of mine and we were trying it on Legendary, no skulls. We got about half way through in one night - and its only because we've played all the halos through since the DEMO of Halo 1 - so our skills in those games are rather refined. When I was playing the game for myself, I wanted to jump in on multiplayer as soon as possible, but I also wanted to finish the campaign, just for the storyline - I would do Legendary another time when I felt like the challenge. Being able to breeze through the campaign on easy was a good thing, like an added feature to the game. When a game is storyline driven, as most games try to be now-a-days, its not a bad thing to have an easy difficulty setting where you can progress the game more like a movie.
I've found I do this more and more often. I just don't have the time anymore to slog through on the higher difficulty settings, trying levels over and over. I used to love that, but now I just want to see the story and have some good, relaxing fun.I think the change in difficult reflects the changing demographic of game players. When I was young, and Nintendo games were all the rage, it was basically only kids playing - kids with ample time to try and re-try the same level until they do everything perfectly. You could get away with having a challenging game, because even if you frustrate the player, they are going to come back for more - because they have ample time to master it. Today, gamers are on average significantly older, and they (generally) just don't have time to master every game that comes along. If I run into a roadblock in a game these days, where I try a few times and can't get past something, I'm unlikely to pick up that game again - I get to the point of frustration, but don't have time to work at it until I get beyond the frustration to the reward. When that happens, I tend to move on to the next game.
That said, I grew up playing games on PC (and before that Commodores; first PET then 64), and there were very few that I'd say were all that hard. It is mostly the impenetrable platformers from the NES and other consoles that people remember as being really difficult, and I never had much interest in those anyway.
Re:Difficulty Settings! (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree. When we were kids, we had the time to keep perfecting. I guess they still do, judging from the multiplayer action. And keeping attempting to beat that difficult boss is actually a fundamentally different experience than lowering the difficulty level. If you invest a lot of frustration into a game (I remember 10 or 20 or more attempts to complete something), it will feel like one helluva achievement to beat the game. Not the same if you have to try two or three times before you proceed.
And I think we, the grownups, are to "blame" for this. I can take months to complete games. Obviously, I'm not a big gamer anymore - but I find it entertaining enough once in a while. I certainly play at "Please don't hurt me"-difficulty levels. And we, the grown-up low-key gamers are legion. We probably make up a very solid chunk of the market. After all, to us 50 bucks is not a whole lot of money. It's money, but not a whole lot, so we have a lower treshold to pick something up just to try it. And consequentially, if you measure hours spent in the game, we will be a much smaller demographic.
Re:Difficulty Settings! (Score:4, Insightful)
As others have mentioned, of *course* there is limited ammo by default. The skull makes enemies drop half as much ammo as they would normally.
Ironically, you compare Goldeneye, the game where you could carry every gun you found so you'd never have to make the choice of "do I want 2 rockets or 60 shots in my DMR?" that Halo has.
Next you'll be telling us kids to get off your lawn.
Easy or Stupidly Difficult (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Profit! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Demon's Souls (Score:2)
It's a breath of fresh air compared to the current crop of watered down games on today's consoles. It ushers in the rage inducing difficulty level that many of us grew up with as kids. If you haven't played it yet, you're in for a real treat.
Just play Soldner X on Impossible (Score:2)
If you can finish it in a couple of hours, I salute you!
Completed? (Score:2)
It's adult gamers (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey we're busy. We really don't necessarily all want to struggle with games. We want something fun, that's a little challenging that we can get through. 12 hours of content for 60 bucks? That's about even with a movie.
Personally, I gravitate to the games I can play over and over again, rather than big story games, but I get it.
And the games we do play a lot are usually more social these days. The author complains about a short story in Halo or Modern Warfare. Well duh. Most people are paying for the multiplayer experience which infinitely re playable. The single player parts are a sideline. Is a 5 hour single player worth the money there? No. But that's not what people are buying anyway. It's like complaining about hugely expensive veg and potatoes while ignoring the steak that came alongside.
Hate the mind numbing "Boss Battles" (Score:5, Insightful)
I really enjoy games with interesting puzzles and goals, until I get to those damn boss battles at the end of a segment. Who finds that any fun after the second time around? Really, do I need to die 30 times before I manage to hang on long enough to get past it?
Which games? (Score:4, Insightful)
and what do you mean by easier?
The time to complete something it's a good indicator of whether or not a game is harder.
I played Might and magic and it took 100 hours to complete. Does spending 40 minutes killing 10000 skeletons by hitting the same two keys hard?
More gamers have lives (Score:2, Insightful)
If games are getting easier, I think you need look no further for the reason than the rising average age of the gamer demographic. When I was in college, I could spend six hours a day for a week on games if I wanted to. Now I have a job and a family, and I might have an hour a day in which I could play games—but probably not. On those rare occasions I do play something, well, it wouldn't be very exciting to play for an hour and just make it through the tutorial.
Shorter games are better for busy peop
No Possibility Huh... (Score:2)
The problem is that if games continually get harder as time goes by, new players to computer games overall will never be able to complete them and quit buying them out of frustration.
If games are too easy then experienced players will quit buying them. Game makers will see the trend and increase the challenge.
Or you could just overclock your PS3..
I'm not sure... (Score:5, Funny)
Indie Games (Score:2, Insightful)
There are, however, independent developers who are still making difficult games. They don't ha
Everything was better in my day (Score:4, Insightful)
When I was young, everything was better. Today, everything is worse.
Sincerely,
Every Generation Since the Dawn of Time.
UFO: Enemy Unknown (Score:3, Informative)
I played UFO: Enemy Unknown quite a bit when I was a young lad. I remembered the game as being pretty hard.
So, I got the chance to play it again. I laughed a bit at remembering it being "hard", and figured it would be piss easy now.
If it was hard when I was 12 years old and had no clue what I was doing, it should be easy when I'm 25 and have gamed quite a lost these last 10 years..
Ok, so I load it up, getting filled by nostalgia, shoot down my first UFO, and go out to pick up the remains. Ship land, first t
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The DOS era was for pussies. The arcade era was the REAL heyday of gaming. It was also, completely coincidentally, when I was young.
It is me or... (Score:2)
Is it me or is there a story on here about how games are too easy or not long enough every couple of weeks or so?
Go back a few years and people were complaining of how difficult and frustration games were (to this day I haven't beaten Mega Man, the first one with the horrible box art).
This is a cycle, we're just in the "easy-peasy" part of it, the difficulty will come back, just like leggings... *shudder* Speaking of which, spandex is a privilege, not a right!
Well... (Score:2)
Well... (Score:2)
Well if you guys keep buying them, they'll keep making them!!
Money is fun (Score:2)
Also, it seems that people are increasingly willing to buy watered down shit, ignoring quality and focusing on theme. I'm looking at you, sports games.
Beating hard games doesn't make you a badass. (Score:2, Insightful)
Some of my friends played through Mass Effect 2 on Insane difficulty, and felt like badasses by the end, because they had done something hard.
Neither of these things actually makes you a badass, though. One is just pretending in a story, and one is just developing proficiency at a game. The difference is, I don't have any ill
ROI (Score:5, Informative)
(All opinions expressed herein may not reflect the views of my employer, and in fact we try to avoid falling into this trap but it's a pretty prevalent attitude in the industry right now):
I work as a game designer on big-budget shooters for a living, so here's my take:
Game companies are consciously making the decision to do this for two reasons:
1) Easier games have broader markets, by increasing the likelihood and rate at which the user receives validation we increase sales, and much more importantly:
2) It's unusual for more than 50% of the people who beat the first level of your game to beat the last level. Money spent on later levels is generally money wasted, and shortening the experience altogether is a function of the increasing development cost per hour of gameplay and ROI of even having more than 10 hours of content at all. If 95% of the people who bought the game complete the first level (as tracked by developers through achievement systems) but only, say, 35-40% finish the game, that necessarily influences how you invest your limited development funds.
--Ryv
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it couldn't be that the later levels were rushed, sloppy, unimaginative, and ultimately just boring. Or the game in general wasn't that good to begin with. Nah, it must be the gamer's fault. *facepalm*
Good games hook you all the way through and still leave you wanting more, enough so that you play it through again a few times. When you first finished the game you did it at 6am, because you just couldn't put the game down, it was that good.
If your achievement spying system indicates half your pla
Re:ROI (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with that line of argument, which I'm sympathetic to personally, is that the rough numbers I'm describing are (give or take 5%) reflected across every major FPS/action title in the past several years.
Quality and engaging stories are critical to good base sales and customer satisfaction, but you'd be surprised by how little impact they have on player completion rates.
The solution taken by the better studios in the industry, and I apologize as judging from the responses I seem to have poorly presented my point - is not to phone in the ending, but rather to shorten the experience while maintaining consistent quality throughout.
I think a lot of people don't realize that the levels you see in, say, Modern Warfare 2 cost literally millions of dollars to make, and the debate regarding optimal running time is still very much in progress.
--Ryv
A Rather Terrible Analogy, There (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if Tiger Woods just gave up the first time he swung a golf club because he didnt get a hole in one? What if Michael Jordan gave up because he couldnt dunk straight away? Both Golf and Basketball are games just like any other game, you play because its fun and in time you learn to play better and improve.
Well, if Tiger Woods had to play his first ever game of golf against Jack Nicklaus, he probably would have been so frustrated with the experience that he might have considered not bothering. That is how multiplayer (your favorite FPS here) is for many people. That is exactly why I only played the first Quake for about an hour - and the rest of the series not at all. People who are new to the games end up in multiplayer games against people who play it 16 hours a day and hence find themselves annihilated faster than they can even figure out which button opens a door and which button changes weapons.
People aren't giving up games quickly because they are hard - more often they are giving up because there is no point in trying to compete when there are no new players around. It would be as it there was no such thing as amateur boxing, everyone had to get started by fighting Mike Tyson; many people wouldn't even consider it out of fear of immediate death.
Easier, more entertaining, or are you older? (Score:3, Insightful)
Games are certainly getting easier if you define it as "I can beat it."
Back in the early console days, I only ever beat maybe one in ten of the games, "beating" meaning that I got to the end credits. PC games were a different story because you could save the game state. With sheer endurance, you could make it to the end.
Older games didn't have much going for them but the play mechanics themselves and they could be fiendishly difficult and completely unforgiving. "Twitch gaming" is not a recent development.
So yeah, through sheer endurance, you can beat most games out these days. The question is whether you can maintain enough interest to bother.
The thing I've noticed as I've gotten older is that it takes a greater effort and more originality to pique my interest. I have no tolerance for annoying play mechanics, derivative designs, and rehashes of games I've already played.
I've been a fan of RTS games for a long time but nothing kills my interest in a game more than seeing something five or ten times shinier than the last RTS I played with AI and pathfinding every bit as awful as the last one.
Of course they are (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems pretty obvious to me.
When I was a kid and had my NES, games were TOUGH. Old Atari games were tough as well. Even into the Genesis and SNES games were often still hard.
Now, I'm older, and better at games, so that makes a difference. But I'd say that the average game now, even on 'normal', is easier than it was.
There are a couple of reasons. First is games aren't coin-ops now. When I was a kid, most games were either coin-op conversions, or designed by companies who were used to them. They were used to designing games to make you fail, so you had to stick in more quarters.
Second, hard games turn people off. Battletoads was fun, but I couldn't get past the elevator stage as a kid, even in two player. Contra is famously hard. Super Ghouls and Ghosts? Tough! There were some easier games, but that could be killer. Rent a game and it's too hard, you give it up. You don't buy the game. You don't buy the sequels. When it feels like you're being punished by the game, it's not fun.
Games are evolving. Super Mario Galaxy had some very tough moments (especially getting all the stars). But you could die until you game over and lose basically nothing. The lives are irrelevant. Today most FPSes have regenerative shields (thanks to Halo) so you don't get stuck somewhere with 1 health, unable to move.
Games have moved on. They can still be punishing. Some are designed that way (Ninja Gaiden for the XBox), some can just be set that way (various songs in Rock Band on expert). Are things like Ratchet & Clank easier than older platformers? I'm not sure.
I'm happy about this. I enjoyed FF X and XII, but I never finished them. They got too hard, and I had to grind and grind and grind just to get to the next area. It stopped being fun. Last summer I played The Legendary Starfy on the DS. The game was easy as heck, but it was quite enjoyable. I expect the same thing out of the new Kirby game. That isn't always a bad thing. A game can be easy and still a ton of fun. We've learned replay value doesn't just come from forcing you to replay the game over and over just to survive to a new area.
What I really hate is what other commenters have noted: online play. When Q3 did it they had a good reason: it was a FPS with no story and the bots weren't that great. But today, it's an excuse to make less content. It's an excuse to make a buggy game. It's an excuse to try to force me to buy an XBox Live subscription. I almost never care. The only times I've really enjoyed online games where when I ended up stumbling upon a server I could play on all the time, with people I knew who would take care of griefers and generally played the game.
On the whole, online play is usually tacked-on and not that great. When I see a preview for a game that's not dedicated online, and online is one of the first features they talk about, I know I'm not going to care much.
Dumbed down? Bring it on! (Score:3, Interesting)
My philosophy is fairly simple: I buy a game, therefore I own it (albeit the EULA saying that it's only rented/licensed/leased to you, blah-blah). Bottom line is I can play it however I want. So... that's what I do.
I know my limits. Aged 31 and working 'till 2 AM every night, I know that my reflexes aren't that good; my patience runs short; and I want to have fun. For me, fun is when you cruise through a game without wasting an insane amount of energy and frustration to advance. So in order to obtain that fun, I set the difficulty level to the lowest possible. I also try to grab all games which offer a rich sandbox mode. Examples: Prototype, Just Cause 2, Assassin's Creed, GTA 3, 4, The Saboteur, etc.
Metagaming and immersion is a lot more important than mindlessly following the main storyline through corridors from A to Z. I usually ignore the main storyline whenever I can and only follow it when I want to change something. I had endless hours of fun in Just Cause 2 (played for almost 100 hours of game time so far) and it's still fun to do stuff in there. Same for GTA 4. Same for Prototype. I just wish there were more games like these out there on the market.
One sandbox-type game that I did NOT like is Spore, because you always are summoned to do this and that and have to go there and do it, otherwise bad things happen. Ugly and unrewarding. Another bad sandbox game is Mafia 2: nothing to do except roam around in a car. Boring.
As for Multiplayer: I enjoy co-op PvE games (such as Serious Sam), but I dislike PvP. My aggressiveness is around -7 on a scale from 1 to 10; combined with my bad gaming skills and my unwillingness to improve (call me lazy, I don't care) makes for a bad set of prerequisites for PvP.
MMOs: I play browser-based MMOs, which are fun; OGame was one of the more interesting ones, up to a point when everything sort of got stuck (some sort of "endgame" where the server had too few people to make anything a challenge). I also play EVE Online, but lately it became to aggressive on all levels to be enjoyable. Everybody seems to fight everybody else for no apparent reason.
One more thing about pretty much all MMOs I have played: the trolls, jerks and pubeless snoogans vastly outnumber all other types of players, thus poisoning the gamevironment. Yes, even EVE Online is invaded by such archetypes, polluting forums, chatrooms, etc. I had hoped the complexity of the game would drive them off; sadly, it's not the case.
Well, anyway, staying on topic: I have no problem with dumbed down games. What I have a problem with are:
- games which cheat. A good example would be racing games where everybody is 1 lap behind in the last lap, and all of a sudden you are ranked 6th.
- inconsistent game difficulty. An example is the bloody ninja rope trial in Worms: Reloaded. I cruised through most levels (with few exceptions) but got stuck on that stupid level for the last 2 months or so. Epic Fail from the producer. Not to mention the ninja rope's mechanics is completely different from all other Worms games.
- Bad ports from consoles. No further comment here...
All in all, so what if the main storyline ends in 3 hours? Good, now we can concentrate on having fun in the sandbox mode
You're conflating several unrelated things. (Score:3, Insightful)
Difficulty and "dumbed down" are not the same thing. World of Warcraft is much more complicated than Mario Bros, but that doesn't mean it's harder to "do well" at it. It's also not always easy to define the boundary between "dumbed down" and "streamlined". Comparing modern D&D to 1st Edition AD&D, for instance, I find that many things are much, much, simpler -- I no longer have to look up multiple numbers in tables most of the time -- but that the game as a whole has a much, much, more diverse set of options and choices at any given time.
Furthermore, it's not entirely obvious that there's any intrinsic virtue to games being "hard". Take a game you like. Now, modify it as follows: Every five minutes, there is a 20% chance that you instantly lose the game, including any and all "lives" or "continues" or whatever that you might have had. Now, is this game better than the one you started with?
Games used to be "hard" because arcade games were built around a business model where you had to put in twenty five cents to play the game "once". They had to have a definite end, and the end had to be as close to inevitable as possible. We aren't using that model anymore, and it is no longer particularly relevant whether games are "hard" in that sense. Instead, we start thinking in terms of whether games are challenging, because that's part of what makes them fun to us.
In many cases, games that have been "dumbed down" or "made easy" have actually been moved to a higher level of abstraction or thought. Modern MMOs are, in many cases, much easier to survive in than they were five or ten years ago... But this doesn't mean that there's no room for skilled play, it just means that what you get from being skilled is different from what it used to be. On the whole, I find them a lot more interesting now. With upcoming changes to CoH to make life easier on pretty much all characters (we'll get some combination of more powers to use or more energy to use our powers with), I don't expect that suddenly the game will "stop being challenging". I expect that it will be less frustrating in some cases, and that I'll spend less time easily winning a fight and then waiting a minute with nothing interesting to do while my character regenerates.
Re:*yawn* (Score:5, Funny)
Re:*yawn* (Score:5, Funny)
Then play it in Lawrence of Arabia mode.
"The trick is not minding that it hurts."
Re:*yawn* (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a cheat code:
Unix Unix Dem Dem Linux Repub Linux Repub Broadcom Apple Sun Start
Instant +5, Insightful and positive Karma.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The presentation was a bit trolly, but I agree with the sentiment 100%. The reason the guy can complete games so fast is because he's played so many of them. If you want more of a challenge and change, don't play the same type of over and over.
Re:*yawn* (Score:5, Funny)
Re:*yawn* (Score:4, Funny)
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: (Score:2)
Indeed. Halo Reach on Legendary is quite difficult.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Then how do you explain those of us who own their oen homes, have families go to sports event for the kids and still kick ass at games?
Re: (Score:2)
That should secretly set the difficulty to "ultra hard mode" and enable the webcam. You'll have to publish the game out of a school district though, thus avoiding all legal responsibility for the pictures.
Re:Never so easy as... (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously, you've never beaten Desert Bus [wikipedia.org]. Now *there* is an accomplishment!