DarkDragoonX
05-12-2008, 12:15 AM
The Escapist (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_148/4874-Hard-Times) has an article up about difficulty in video games. The article interested me, as I find that games today are way, way too fucking easy. Quicksaves, no death penalties, combat that a lobotomy patient would consider child's play... the list goes on.
For the lazy, one of the more interesting quotes from the article:
In the years between then and now, there's been a fundamental shift in our expectations. Once upon a time, games were competitors. Now, primarily, they're entertainers. They aimed to beat you. Now, to be beaten. Our language says much, really. While we've talked about difficulty curves forever, the problems now are "difficulty spikes." No one ever critiques a game for a difficulty-trough - because the former stops you getting anywhere and the latter is just something you coast through.
This much really can't be argued with... games used to be out to get you. Arcade games were designed to be very hard, yet still fair once you were skillful enough. Take the arcade classic Defender, for example. The creators never expected anybody to get past the first few levels. The game is specifically designed to eat your face and suck quarters out of you... and yet, as people played, they started getting good, and pretty soon could play for an extremely long time. Another classic game (and one of my all-time favorites), Rastan, is often considered murderously difficult by first-time players. I've witnessed people use several continues just to clear one stage. Yet I've played the game enough, learned it's littles rules, that I can clear it on a single life without any trouble.
There was a time that you didn't just play a game, didn't simply finish a game... you had to beat the game, you had to learn how the damn thing worked before you could really be any good at it. Now, of course things have to be a little different on a console... since you aren't trying to suck quarters out of somebody, the game can't be quite as infuriatingly hard as an arcade title. Even so, you have to play a helluva lot of Contra before you start getting good at it.
Remember the big fuss about how the original Devil May Cry 3 (not the toned-down special edition) was "way too hard?" Bullshit. It's difficult at first, yes, but if you take the time to learn how to really play the damn game, you'll find you can tear through it without too much trouble.
"Difficulty spike" really is a term used a lot nowadays, and "difficulty curve" is hardly used at all. Players expect to be able to get into a game and play it at a competent level from the get-go, without any significant escalation in difficulty. They don't want to have to learn how to play. They want to skip merrily through tulip-covered fields so that they can see the next goddamn cutscene. And there certainly can't be any part of a game that requires them to reach a new level of aptitude, or they bitch about how unfair boss X is, or how part Y is way too difficult.
Another nice quote from the article:
The results of the entryist movement have been mixed. Compare what happens when you say "Knights of the Old Republic," which practically beat itself, and "Deus Ex: Invisible War," which was nigh impossible, in a room full of gamers. Fine-tuning difficulty remains problematic for developers. While it may have been satisfactory for System Shock 2 to sell 250,000 units in 1999, sales numbers like that in today's development environment would be disastrous. So while Bioshock plays similarly to SS2, it's far more forgiving if you're not an experienced first-person gamer. Ken Levine was famously quoted as telling the team he wanted his grandmother to be able to complete it on "Easy."
Which is all well and good, but there's a problem with entryism: No one appreciates the top end, since everyone follows the path of least resistance. If "Grandma Mode" is available, hardcore gamers are more likely to waltz through the game than attempt a harder difficulty. There's no point to putting yourself through a tougher experience if the end result is the same. Fundamentally, the entryist movement has failed - the bottom level has been lowered, but the top level, the level at which games were originally designed to be played, has been weakened in turn.
Now, ignoring the bizarre statement regarding the difficulty of Deus Ex 2, a game that can't really be considered hard by anybody not missing an arm, this is rather interesting. The major reason for the steadily declining difficulty in games is simple: hard games don't sell well enough to be profitable any more. As the cost of making games rises, publishers can only jack up the cost of the game so much... they already raised the base price to $60 for this generation of consoles, and people are cranky enough over that. The only other solution is to a make a game that will appeal to the widest possible audience to generate more sales.
Unfortunately, this means fucking over the hardcore gamer in favor of catering to casual gamers/less skilled gamers, as a hardcore gamer will still play through an easy title, but a less-skilled gamer will rarely put in the time to learn how to play a hard game. Not too long ago, I overheard some teenager at the local EB mention that he didn't like Ninja Gaiden (referring to the Xbox game, not the NES game) because it was "too hard" and he couldn't make it past the second level. This made my jaw drop. If he thought Ninja Gaiden was hard, all the old NES games I played when I was half his age would eat him alive. And yet, instead of improving his skills, learning to play, he found it easier to just play something else.
The problem is, I don't see any way out of this situation. The group of gamers that comprise players of the NES era and earlier are no longer the mainstream. We're a fringe group now. Those of us who would butt heads against a seemingly impossible game until we came out on top have been pushed to the side by the much larger group of people who shy away from the slightest bit of adversity in their games, and developers have to go where the money is.
It's incredibly frustrating to somebody who really enjoys the old style of gaming, because asides from a few franchises (notably DMC and Ninja Gaiden) and the occasional niche title, the industry has moved towards increasingly easy games. Even action/adventure titles (Legend of Zelda, Okami) and RPGs are much easier. Being easy isn't necessarily a flaw, mind you... I can and do enjoy easy games. Even so, there's a certain sense of accomplishment, of satisfaction, that only a truly challenging game can deliver, and the general public's (thus, in turn, the gaming industry's) aversion to that level of difficulty is disheartening.
Thoughts?
Oh, and pardon any grammatical and/or spelling errors in this... I couldn't be arsed to double-check it, so it probably contains a few minor stupidities.
For the lazy, one of the more interesting quotes from the article:
In the years between then and now, there's been a fundamental shift in our expectations. Once upon a time, games were competitors. Now, primarily, they're entertainers. They aimed to beat you. Now, to be beaten. Our language says much, really. While we've talked about difficulty curves forever, the problems now are "difficulty spikes." No one ever critiques a game for a difficulty-trough - because the former stops you getting anywhere and the latter is just something you coast through.
This much really can't be argued with... games used to be out to get you. Arcade games were designed to be very hard, yet still fair once you were skillful enough. Take the arcade classic Defender, for example. The creators never expected anybody to get past the first few levels. The game is specifically designed to eat your face and suck quarters out of you... and yet, as people played, they started getting good, and pretty soon could play for an extremely long time. Another classic game (and one of my all-time favorites), Rastan, is often considered murderously difficult by first-time players. I've witnessed people use several continues just to clear one stage. Yet I've played the game enough, learned it's littles rules, that I can clear it on a single life without any trouble.
There was a time that you didn't just play a game, didn't simply finish a game... you had to beat the game, you had to learn how the damn thing worked before you could really be any good at it. Now, of course things have to be a little different on a console... since you aren't trying to suck quarters out of somebody, the game can't be quite as infuriatingly hard as an arcade title. Even so, you have to play a helluva lot of Contra before you start getting good at it.
Remember the big fuss about how the original Devil May Cry 3 (not the toned-down special edition) was "way too hard?" Bullshit. It's difficult at first, yes, but if you take the time to learn how to really play the damn game, you'll find you can tear through it without too much trouble.
"Difficulty spike" really is a term used a lot nowadays, and "difficulty curve" is hardly used at all. Players expect to be able to get into a game and play it at a competent level from the get-go, without any significant escalation in difficulty. They don't want to have to learn how to play. They want to skip merrily through tulip-covered fields so that they can see the next goddamn cutscene. And there certainly can't be any part of a game that requires them to reach a new level of aptitude, or they bitch about how unfair boss X is, or how part Y is way too difficult.
Another nice quote from the article:
The results of the entryist movement have been mixed. Compare what happens when you say "Knights of the Old Republic," which practically beat itself, and "Deus Ex: Invisible War," which was nigh impossible, in a room full of gamers. Fine-tuning difficulty remains problematic for developers. While it may have been satisfactory for System Shock 2 to sell 250,000 units in 1999, sales numbers like that in today's development environment would be disastrous. So while Bioshock plays similarly to SS2, it's far more forgiving if you're not an experienced first-person gamer. Ken Levine was famously quoted as telling the team he wanted his grandmother to be able to complete it on "Easy."
Which is all well and good, but there's a problem with entryism: No one appreciates the top end, since everyone follows the path of least resistance. If "Grandma Mode" is available, hardcore gamers are more likely to waltz through the game than attempt a harder difficulty. There's no point to putting yourself through a tougher experience if the end result is the same. Fundamentally, the entryist movement has failed - the bottom level has been lowered, but the top level, the level at which games were originally designed to be played, has been weakened in turn.
Now, ignoring the bizarre statement regarding the difficulty of Deus Ex 2, a game that can't really be considered hard by anybody not missing an arm, this is rather interesting. The major reason for the steadily declining difficulty in games is simple: hard games don't sell well enough to be profitable any more. As the cost of making games rises, publishers can only jack up the cost of the game so much... they already raised the base price to $60 for this generation of consoles, and people are cranky enough over that. The only other solution is to a make a game that will appeal to the widest possible audience to generate more sales.
Unfortunately, this means fucking over the hardcore gamer in favor of catering to casual gamers/less skilled gamers, as a hardcore gamer will still play through an easy title, but a less-skilled gamer will rarely put in the time to learn how to play a hard game. Not too long ago, I overheard some teenager at the local EB mention that he didn't like Ninja Gaiden (referring to the Xbox game, not the NES game) because it was "too hard" and he couldn't make it past the second level. This made my jaw drop. If he thought Ninja Gaiden was hard, all the old NES games I played when I was half his age would eat him alive. And yet, instead of improving his skills, learning to play, he found it easier to just play something else.
The problem is, I don't see any way out of this situation. The group of gamers that comprise players of the NES era and earlier are no longer the mainstream. We're a fringe group now. Those of us who would butt heads against a seemingly impossible game until we came out on top have been pushed to the side by the much larger group of people who shy away from the slightest bit of adversity in their games, and developers have to go where the money is.
It's incredibly frustrating to somebody who really enjoys the old style of gaming, because asides from a few franchises (notably DMC and Ninja Gaiden) and the occasional niche title, the industry has moved towards increasingly easy games. Even action/adventure titles (Legend of Zelda, Okami) and RPGs are much easier. Being easy isn't necessarily a flaw, mind you... I can and do enjoy easy games. Even so, there's a certain sense of accomplishment, of satisfaction, that only a truly challenging game can deliver, and the general public's (thus, in turn, the gaming industry's) aversion to that level of difficulty is disheartening.
Thoughts?
Oh, and pardon any grammatical and/or spelling errors in this... I couldn't be arsed to double-check it, so it probably contains a few minor stupidities.