Game Developers Have Become Too Scared

[Th3MaN1]

In the PS2 / XBOX era, I remember games being hard, at least most of them. Sometimes frustration, sometimes a fair and fun challenge. Take the Hitman series for example: I love the franchise, mostly because it makes you think, despite being put in an environment where you can go and rampage around. One example I can give is in the first Hitman game, where, you must approach every situation incredibly carefully, and even the slightest mistake can cost you. What I loved in that game though, was the fact that even after you fail a mission, you have possibility to continued, and wreak havoc. With all that in mind, when I saw the first gameplay footage of Hitman: Absolution, I was ecstatic, but when I saw actual gameplay footage of the game being played, I felt like I was lied to. I find it hard to even acknowledge that you can kill crowds of people yet you can still pass the mission. Pure bullsh*t.

 

With that said, I honestly think that game developers have dumbed down the difficulty of games (Hitman right there an example) way to much, to a point where every Youtube let's player can complete these games without breaking a sweat, and honestly, that hurts a game's level of fun. Remember Contra? I do. I just pure and simply don't feel the same level of accomplishment when I beat an NES game. My mind blew when I completed Megaman 1. Nowadays, when I beat a game that's quite new, well... meh.

 

What's your opinion about all of this? Do you agree, or disagree? Why?

[Geralt of Rivia]

Gaming has become mainstream.

 

That's all there is to it. Developers would be shooting themselves if they made a Contra game again and expected it to sell well to everyone.

 

Video Games now are a way to relax and just have some fun.

Edited March 15, 2014 by TheMasterfocker

[Th3MaN1]

Gaming has become mainstream.

 

That's all there is to it. Developers would be shooting themselves if they made a Contra game again and expected it to sell well to everyone.

 

Video Games now are a way to relax and just have some fun.

Back in the NES era, games were made to have fun with too, and while it wasn't as popular as it was back then, every kid needed to have an NES with them, just so they could be cool. I understand helping the player to a certain extent, but not so much as to completely change the style of a game.

[Mr Oraange]

Developers see challenging games as a risk.

And why take a risk when you can ship out an annual release with little effort?

[Mista J]

Games are too expensive to make now to take big risks. Tbh, HD ruined gaming.

[Zancudo]

I suspect at least 60% of games before 2005 weren't hard because they were designed to be hard - they were simply too freaking clunky and that's what made them "difficult".

 

Personally, I don't find hard games fun. What makes a good game to me, is the storytelling, world design, gameplay's "fun factor", etc. Difficulity is sometimes indicated, it might give a certain segment of a game a sense of 'exciting insecurity', like in some boss fight for example. But if it's over the top, if I'm dying seven hundred times every 30 minutes, and I eventually complete the game after 30h just because it was a pain in the ass... the hell no, officer. That's simply frustrating, kill the experience for me. It's like watching a movie on your PC, but having to complete some puzzles every now and then to continue the film.

[trip]

I think there is enough indie and small firms keeping true to the craft. If you need to relive some of the fun and frustrations of difficult games - you just have to look around since they aren't going to be marketed and published by the big publishers running the scene today.

 

The current gaming landscape is way different then it was not too many years ago. It is mainstream. That isn't bad...that just means more stuff for gamers to play, more options, and stuff like that.

 

I play all of my games on the easiest possible setting. I'm too old and slow these days and now I just want to enjoy the entertainment of playing.

 

The thing is; I'm sure anyone here could kick my ass in any current video game, but I'm willing bet money that I could kick you ass(es) in any pre-1990's arcade game - and those f*ckers are the hardest of game play games if you ask me.

[kipakolonyasi]

you didn't have any "save" option back then, too (i'm talking nintendo famicom times). you just had to beat the game in one sitting. games weren't that long too, though.

Edited March 15, 2014 by kipakolonyasi

[Boxman108]

lol @ PS2/Xbox/GC games being hard. Try NES.

[FranklinDeRoosevelt]

^

 

I remember Prince of Persia: Sands of Time on the PS2, one of the hardest games I have ever played. MGS1 was also incredibly difficult on the PS1, in fact I was actually scared of some parts in the game when I was little.

[Geralt of Rivia]

lol @ NES. Try Atari.

[Mista J]

Lol @ Atari, try Odyssey. Makes you sh*t yourself

[Geralt of Rivia]

lol @ Odyssey. Try real life.

 

[Fireman]

I love these people who complain about how easy everything is while they've never played any game above "normal" mode and were never arsed to buy the more difficult games because they'd be too difficult for them to finish.

 

Instead let's all cry about everything being too easy because we're too scared to turn the difficulty up.

[poklane]

I know, but it's all because of one thing: sales. These days production costs and marketing costs are so high you need really good sales. A game like Tomb Raider took months to become profitable, they were even worried it would end with a loss, because these days most games take years to make with a group of hundreds of people, months of marketing and expensive development tools. Too bad one solution to this is making the game easier so players with less skill can also enjoy those games, thus selling the game to more people. However, games should bring those old difficulties back as option IMO.

[Th3MaN1]

I don't want the games released in the present to have the difficulty they had during the older era's. I'm just asking for a little challenge in my games. Also, what point I was trying to make is that lowering the difficulty can actually change the way a game is meant to be played, again, take Hitman as an example in the OP. What was a genuine, tactical stealth game more or less turned into an action game.

[Doublepulse]

 

This video makes some valid points and similar ones people suggested in this thread.

 

I think it also has to do with experience. Often our experience with games also has changed, but that does not mean games evolved as well.

 

But yea, I wish some developers would make a leap of faith and not hold your hand through the entire game with checkpoints. I think you are right, Developers are scared to trust players to figure out what they are suppose to do. They don't want players to feel frustration so much they simply just give up.

 

I hate to say I think GTA series has kind of fallen into this trap a bit as well. Older games had little or no checkpoints. If you failed a mission on GTA 3 or GTA Vice City, you went to the hospital, and had to get back to the mission trigger and restart it from scratch. There was a few occasions, where they do have a checkpoint, but it was limited. I don't remember seeing it too much in GTA IV, but GTA V is pretty apparent in them.

GTA is only 1 example. I'm gonna leave my thoughts there, since I'm heading to sleep now.

[Moth]

Games are too expensive to make now to take big risks. Tbh, HD ruined gaming.

This is pretty much it, at least when it comes to triple A games. When you are spending tens of millions if not hundreds of millions on a game development, you don't want to spend that money on a game that won't make the money back.

 

Not a big problem with indy games though. Their budgets are hell a lot lower, and thus are more likely to take risks since they'll lose a lot less money.

 

And the only reason why NES/SNES and other older generations were harder, is cause they were designed to be unfair. A lot of the time, you had to break the game in order to beat it. They still were being designed like they were going to be placed in arcades and attempt to get as much money off of you as possible.

[Secura]

Anyone who claims the HD era of gaming has given up on the idea of difficult games has clearly never played a single one of From Software's Souls series. Demon Souls, Dark Souls and the newly released Dark Souls: II are some of the hardest videogames, not just of the current generation, but of all time. They however aren't difficult in the same way that games from the early 1980's to mid 1990's were, those games were still being designed from the viewpoint of the arcade.

 

Think about it, the point of classic arcade gaming was to get someone to experience a short, but sweet burst of adrenaline on a videogame, before shutting them off and making them pay a little extra cash each time, you weren't meant to survive for ages in those sort of games unless you'd already sunk £40 to £50 into them so that you'd be able to understand and manage the clear handicaps that you're dealt. They were simply unfair, the difficulty would spike for no reason, enemies would no-clip, or automatically lock on to you, move faster than you, or your attacks would be delayed just long enough so that you aren't able to just walk-off any single encounter.

 

To put it simply, the older generations of games, despite moving away from the arcades, still based a lot of their design ideas off of what they learned making games for arcades. That's not the only reason that games that were around ten to twenty years ago were much harder and very unfair towards the player. Lack of space was another feature that prompted insanely unfair difficulty spikes that the developers knew the players would spend hours grinding through, because they were intentionally difficult so as to prevent the player from progressing quickly from area to area and beating the game in less than an hour. With the PlayStation 4 and X-1 we no longer have limitations like that because we can make games ten times the size of GTA V or Skyrim with little to no problem, but back then, the absurdly unfair difficulty was all that prevented you from swearing off videogames because you sped through a £60 purchase too quickly and decided that games just aren't worth the cash for the amount of time you'd get out of the investment.

 

Today games are still difficult, the difference is that they're not unfair, a difference that I feel too few gamers have come to understand. I mean, come on, if someone is going to sit there and tell me that they can beat The Last of Us and its DLC Left Behind on Survivor difficulty with relative ease the first time they play it then I'm going to call bullsh*t. The reason the game is so hard at that point is because it starts employing arcade style difficulty spikes, handicapping the player by adding limitations to what usually wasn't limited or simply not allowing them use certain abilities that they had come to rely on in order to beat the game.

 

I don't think the issue here is games not being hard enough, I think the issue is that too many gamers like to jump on a bandwagon that they know is wrong, just for the sake of conformity. So many people have never played the original Half-Life games, but you can bet your ass that when the third game is inevitably announced, they'll flip their sh*t anyway because it's become a cultural phenomenon of sorts in gaming, so has ripping on difficulty and then regurgitating clearly wrong arguments that claim such bullsh*t as making hard games is a risk and what have you. Difficulty isn't the problem, as long as the game is fair and people realize that every time they screw up in a game, it's their fault, it won't matter, if every time you f*ck up you learn something new then there's nothing wrong with that, even still, the vast majority of games include adjustable difficulty settings so that the player can play at a level that they themselves feel comfortable with.

 

Personally? I'm willing to bet that 99% of you who claim that videogames are too easy nowadays haven't even puckered up to looking for games more inherently focused on their difficulty. Hell, it's far more likely that most of that 99% still play games at the base difficulty not even bothering to raise it when the option is not clearly presented to them in the opening menus, and even if it is, they'll more than likely choose to ignore it just so that they can bask in the ignorance that their blatant bandwagoning has made them grow accustomed to.

Edited March 16, 2014 by Secura

[Killerdude]

I don't think it's like that at all.

 

If you're looking for Blood boiling, rage inducingly difficult games, the Indie Sector has you covered and then some.

It's just the Big budget games are more casual and easier.

Edited March 16, 2014 by Killerdude8

[Th3MaN1]

@Secura

I'm not the kind to brag, but completing Contra 1 without the 30 lives code does mean something, right? There's also Castlevania 1 and 3 (Simon's Quest was sh*t), Ninja Gaiden 1 and 2, Megaman 1-6. My main point is that easy difficulty can bring a game's quality down, or change it's genre to an extent (only example I can give is Hitman: Absolution). I don't want difficult games, I want a certain level difficulty in games. You do make a great point, which I can agree with, but back then, games teached you how to play. Today, they show you how to play, all the way through. This isn't the case with every game, but I can't help but feel that developers nowadays think we gamers are too stupid to figure out things by ourselves.

[Secura]

General accessibility isn't something you should be pissed at, it's a good thing that enables all sorts of people, regardless of their individual skill-level to learn at their own pace. When a game starts to break away from the genre that it's apart of just to get more sales then I understand how you feel, but most games aren't designed around being lessons, and more about letting the player enjoy the experience, I know for a fact that if the next Uncharted game adopted a Dark Souls level of hand-holding (or there lack of it) it would be ridiculed by nearly every major critic in the videogame industry today for doing exactly what you're claiming that Hitman: Absolution has done.

 

Though with the power of the PS4, X-1 and modern PC platforms we should have no problem incorporating systems that dynamically change the difficulty of games for those of us that feel a little under or overwhelmed by the task as at, regardless of whatever it might be. Even still, there's nothing to stop a gamer that wants more of a challenge from changing the difficulty mode you're currently on, to match the feeling of intensity you're going for. Though, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have to once again remind you that most games aren't meant to be as challenging as they are enjoyable, sometimes we simply have a craving for a game that'll let us loose on an environment like a force of nature, tearing apart anything we dislike about it, and to incorporate an artificial level of difficulty that wouldn't really add any enjoyment and potentially take away that sense of power that the game originally gives us could be seen as, and in most cases is detrimental to the overall experience.

Edited March 16, 2014 by Secura

[Th3MaN1]

I'm not pissed of accessibility, and while some people just like to sit down and play a game, without being frustrated because they died 50 times at the same part, devs should grow some balls, and make things just a little difficult, by any means possible. Neither am I asking our current generation to be like the past ones, but I was kind of pissed off when I completed GTA V without breaking a sweat. Games like TLoU or Max Payne 3 do a good job of making a game fun, and challenging.

 

To keep it short, just little balls. Not big, bull balls, but little kid balls. Babies learn how to talk by themselves, games should let us do the same.

[Secura]

The difference is that The Last of Us and Max Payne are linear experiences that can be easily tailored to providing a more controlled level of difficulty. GTA is a series of games dedicated at its heart to pure and utter chaos, adding a sense of unneeded difficulty to that would sour the experience, I'm not saying that GTA should be incredibly easy, but it should provide us with the tools to allow us to go on crazy killing sprees and such, seeing as that's the reason that almost the entirety of the current fanbase got into the series in the first place.

Edited March 16, 2014 by Secura

[Th3MaN1]

I'm not talking exactly about GTA, but how come that the older GTA's were actually challenging? Sure, they were easy for the most part, but they threw in some harder missions. Take SA's "Supply Lines" for example. That mission is renowned for it's difficulty, but if you learn how to pass it, it becomes easy. Also, if you compare Max Payne 3 to other third person shooters, Max Payne 3 proves more difficult. Sure, Bullet TIme makes the game very easy sometimes, but the fact alone that in later levels you are forced to headshot enemies adds a certain challenge. Either you empty an entire magazine into a guy, or only 1 shot into the enemy's head. Also, your health goes down way to fast in that game, compared to other shooters.

[Secura]

Alright, look you're not making that much sense, the final sentence of your last post implies that you think Max Payne 3 was too difficult in that particular respect, yet you're praising it for its difficulty balancing anyway? Regardless, the reason the older GTA's were harder is once again due to hardware and software limitations. Max Payne 3 is a fair shooter, its controls are fluid, the game runs steady and looks beautiful in motion, it's extremely responsive and the older GTA's just can't compete with that. GTA SanAndreas had an awful targeting system, and I'd like to see anyone on the planet do any good with that game's awful free-aim system, technological limitations prevented the game from being easier, it wasn't a choice made by design but rather by necessity.

 

Supply Lines is a terrible example because that level of difficulty wasn't built up to, it was a spike, a spike that required the player to know too much when presented with a minimal amount of information, of course it becomes easier if you've seen it done in a video or a guide book, but it's something that no player would ever be able to manage straight off the bat, it's a skinnerbox of a mission, the only reason people praise it is because once you know how to beat it you can't forget, the problem is that knowing how to beat it can take months or even years for some and that right there is a sign of poor game design. The mission itself was designed so poorly that they had to redo how the fuel system worked in the PC port because in the original game fuel wasn't dependent on your usage of it, simply on the time you took, bad game design isn't a good thing and it's not something that you should be using as a benchmark when looking for difficult games in the modern market.

 

Being unfair doesn't equate to you having made a difficult game, it just means that the game is based around unbalanced systems and failure is more often than not the fault of the game's mechanics and components instead of the player.

Edited March 16, 2014 by Secura

[Th3MaN1]

I think you didn't read my post correctly. I was stating that the game's difficulty was exactly made for me, and when I said that you health depletes way to fast, I was comparing it to the other shooters on the market.

 

With Supply Lines, you are right, but practice makes perfect (or in this case, good enough to pass the mission). That mission was in no way unfair, as it gave you the basic instructions, and after that, it was up to you to figure out what to do. THAT is what I want. That game didn't treat me like a stupid person with a disability to think. As long as you've got the basics down, and you actually give a sh*t, you can pass that mission. Same with the NES games as well. I agree, most of them were unfair, but the ones that weren't always showed you how to do something, not what to do.

[Secura]

That mission was in almost every way unbalanced, and entirely unfair, you had practically no idea where and how to get where you were going, that and the fuel system in the original console version was a load of f*cking, f*ckity, f*ckity, f*ck. Unfair game mechanics are not a good way to convey difficulty, if you like being shown how to do something, that's great, just don't make it so you leave the person actually performing the mission more handicapped than was originally made out to be.

 

I think you've fallen into the trap of associating bad game design with fair, balanced, difficulty settings. Max Payne 3's an adjustable experience, if I so chose I could quite easily stick the auto-aim on, put it on the lowest difficulty and watch as I blaze through the entirety of the game in just over two hours, the difference between Max Payne 3 and SanAndreas is that the base game, without any tweaking is actually playable, it's responsive, and its fair, every bullet is yours to aim and control with pin-point accuracy. What you seem to have deemed difficult other people would say is f*cking absurd. You never go as far as to handicap the player unless your game is based around that entire school of thought from the start, ala Dark Souls.

 

It's not that game developers don't have the guts, it's that they have the common sense to give the player a fighting chance, a fair game is one that the player, if he's lucky enough can beat all the way through without failing once if he pays enough attention. Max Payne 3 is fair because meets those needed requirements, missions like Supply Lines are based less on skill and more on broken game mechanics, they therefore are not inherently fair, perhaps sometimes you'd prefer to be at a disadvantage and that's fine, when it makes contextual sense for you to be at one. I see no reason why I couldn't have completed the Supply Lines mission without using the tools that were given to me, there was no reason for CJ not to be able and use the military arsenal he'd acquired to take out those vans rather than use a tiny plastic plane, when said plane's travel mechanics are a load of sh*t.

[Th3MaN1]

I think we're going a little off-topic now. There's no contest when comparing a 2012 games vs a 2004 one. Of course SA had broken mechanics. The point I'm trying to show here is that we gamers are not stupid, and in no way do I consider Supply Lines easy. I consider it challenging, and yes, while the game's flying controls may suck, you can get used to it. This is what I'm trying to tell: games should never show you entirely what to do, or remind you every 2 seconds to kill this person, go to point A etc. What I'm trying to say is that only basic instructions should be given. Take Max Payne 3, again, as an example. The first chapter of the game teaches you the basics of playing the game, from Bullet Time to Last Stand. It introduces the basics of the game once, and after that, you're on your own to deal with the enemies in what possible ways you can.

 

Now let's get back to Supply Lines. Again, as I said, I'm not the bragging kind, but after 3 tries, I got the hang of it. I learned how to fly the small Dodo well enough so I can complete the mission (played it with a gamepad, just saying). I don't remember exactly, but if I do, you get multiple pop-ups of the basic controls you need to fly the plane. That is enough for me, and as I've said in my last post, if you actually have a functioning brain, and pay a little attention, you can pass the mission no problem. Just interested; what do you consider broken with SA? Sure, it's far from being a game with good mechanics, but it's just good enough so you can understand them.

 

To keep things on-topic, I will not continue giving games as examples. A quite significant portion of games hold your hand during gameplay way too often, instead of letting you experiment with what you can do. Either that, or they rub the objective in your face, or the way to complete the objective is being poked in your eyes. Now of course, these problems mostly apply to open-world games, as linear games mostly cannot, or don't have these difficulty problems.

 

I think Supply Lines is not at all about the broken mechanics, and skill and attention is all you need (maybe sometimes a bit of luck).

[Doublepulse]

I think bring up technical limitations and controls is kind of on-topic and off topic at the same time. We are discussing difficulty, and we are also discussing the fact they hold your hand through every step of the way. It is kind of finding that balance. Dark Souls in my opinion is an example like "f*ck your balanced gameplay, we aren't holding your hand or giving you an easy time." The controls for the game aren't completely perfect either.

Few games actually build their games around their limitations and integrate it as part of the challenge. Sometimes it isn't what you can do, but what you cannot do.

 

I heard a good example regarding Resident Evil 4 being a nice example. Due to it's tank like controls and limitations with how you shoot your guns. It benefits the game and the genre since it adds more to the tension and feeling of being trapped. It is suppose to be survival horror experience.

 

I think one of the other concerns I have with games not holding your hand is, if you aren't telling a person where to go in a game or what to do, what makes someone feel like they need to rely on a strategy guide? Does the game need to be a non linear game?

 

I admit, some of these games, you would never know something exists if you never opened the strategy guide.