Are we over the era of easy games now?

2 gens ago. Games had Health regen, linearity, sometimes even vitachambers?! Older gamers in their 20's thought this was stupid. I thought it was stupid because it's not as deep or as complex as these paper tiger games made it look.

I think the era of easy games is over. Sure games have to be accessible and get good revenue back but I think the era of CoD clones is over so now it's time to be creative and make every game be a Souls like or a have a hardcore mode and a casual mode.

Now games are hard ass you want them to be.

So is it safe to say that games have gotten a bit more tough.

Yes the era of easy games is over, but is that a good thing or a bad thing? I prefer to be able to CHOOSE what difficulty I play my games at, rather than have developers force me to choose hard difficulty. I gave up on Bloodborne when I reached Nightmare of Mensis because the Frenzy effect kept killing me. No easy option made me quit.

I don’t mind easy games or hard games, as long as I can choose the difficulty. From Software failed to provide the freedom of choice, so I have lost respect for them.

I'm basically in complete disagreement with above. My preference is games without choice in difficutly. Kirby wouldn't be a better game if it had a hard mode; aesthetically it's meant to be a relaxing breezy cute experience. On the other hand, if Returnal gave you an option of lowering the difficulty, the sense of dread would be harder to experience when relief is just sitting a few clicks away in an options menu.

I think it's like food and demanding difficutly settings in every game is like asking for ketchup in a 3 michilen star restaurant. It's up to the chef to season the food exactly as they intend.

Also, it's never as even of an experience when they offer choice. Like Sekiro is basically a perfect experience with it's one mode, where each boss battle has a really well calibrated level of tension. Most games with setttings I find that for a mode, it's either a little too easy or if you choose a harder mode, there's a subtle uneveness to the pacing; perhaps the boss took a few too many hits to maintain the tension or you die in too few to feel fair. You always have to 2nd guess your difficulty choice to know if you're getting an optimal experience instead of just focusing on the game.

Having said all that, the difficutly modes in some of the Metal Gear Solid games is actually handled pretty well because they actually went out of their way to massively modify the AI in fundemental ways. That's more of an exception than a rule though.

@Naylord: why would you be against the idea of having choice in difficulty? If you like the high difficulty of Dark Souls, the existence of an easy difficulty would not prevent you from choosing hard mode (pretend easy mode doesn’t exist). You can easily ignore the difficulty slider in the options menu, so you won’t get any relief from an easier difficulty.

It reminds me of people who complained about fast travel in Oblivion, while praising the lack of it in Morrowind. If you dislike fast travel, then don’t use fast travel. Problem solved. Not sure why people want their freedoms removed instead of choosing what they want.

@lavamelon:

It's not that simple; these choice laden games simply don't have the balance. The argument you're making is that a buffet is always better than a fixed menu restaurant basically. Hey if that's what you're into I'm happy for you and there's plenty of choices that offer you that kind of choice. There is no way that it can come together as cohesively. Again, there's no difficulty slider fast travel enabled Bethesda-styled game that is cohesive as Sekiro or Returnal or even Super Mario World

I think we are in a really good spot where we can have our cake and eat it, too.

We have really difficult games, that are designed to be difficult. And we have games that can be scaled to a player's skill and abilities, be they hardcore or casual.

It's really nice when I boot up a new game and the difficulty options are plentiful. Sometimes I want to have a challenging time exploring, but I don't want to have to grind for resources, and it's nice when I see all kinds of sliders for difficulty for these various aspects. I can leave the core gameplay difficult, for example, but then have an option to double the resources I gain from loot. It's nice.

As a former chef, this is not necessarily true. Yes, we have our artistic vision, but ultimately we are in the hospitality industry, and that means catering to the customers needs and wants. If they want ketchup with their $300 foie gras and wagyu beef, then they get ketchup.

With that said, you do get the occasional primadonna that puts their wants above the customers, and I always disliked it whenever I read about some chef kicking someone out of their restaurant or refusing to do something simple because they disagreed with it. You're really refusing my asking to not have tomatoes on my sandwich? To cook a steak well done? Really?

Ultimately though it's a two-way street where hopefully the consumer knows and respects the vision of the artist's product (be it food, game, film, etc), while on the flipside the artist tries to incorporate options for the consumer.

With that said, it's a moot argument I suppose: people that go to 3 Michelin-starred restaurants know what they're getting, they won't ask for ketchup.

@mrbojangles25: All this talk about wagyu beef is making me feel hungry haha.

Personally, I am a big fan of respecting artistic visions, but that vision shouldn’t come at the cost of what consumers want (unless consumers are asking for something silly or too impractical). In my view, consumer desires come first, artistic visions come second. I still believe that artistic visions are important, but consumer desires shouldn’t be sacrificed to achieve it. If you are a former chef I will gladly respect your artistic visions on how food is prepared, but if a customer wants to order something different, see if it’s possible to provide it to them. In some scenarios the consumer may ask for something too impractical to cater to, so in those situations I believe artistic visions would come first.

Now in the case of Souls games, if they added a difficulty slider, the easier difficulty would only make the game slightly easier. It wouldn’t make the game super easy to the point where you can kill the bosses with one hit lol.

I don't play hard games. Life is stressful, let games be relaxing.

Also I don't want to "git guud" at games. I prefer to enjoy my games and use my energy to "git guud" at life.

I must admit i do prefer some games like red dead and GTA that have no difficulty settings. But there is a place for games with difficulty settings but not all games need it.

Most who see the games I play probably think I only like hard games and that's just not true.

Always found a good balance across the years, the AAA market however is namely easier games that hold your hand to the finish-line, pat you on the head, and hand you a cookie. Can at times seem very condescending.

Never really cared if a game is easy or hard but more is the game fun to play, and how much control and options are they giving me, the player. I like choice, discovery, and flexibility. I can play Demon's Souls and Astro Bot Playroom in the same month and have a great time (and I did at PS5's launch) one is a drastically more difficult game than the other, but both have tight and rewarding gameplay.

Typically lean more towards games that have a little bite to them though, but that's due to my want of more replay-value and making the most of a games mechanics; namely when I'm having a lot of fun.

I don't find tough games stressful, not games with solid gameplay anyway.

The most stressed and exhausted I get from a game is when I feel it's mocking the time I'm investing into attempting to find some fun in a bland lifeless product created by no-talent hacks. Looking at you Dragon Age 3. To me that time is the part that must be satisfied. I don't want to be playing bloated hot air.

I can respect people who think modern gaming is too easy, but at the same time, the gaming community seems to have turned difficulty into a fetish. Obviously, a game needs to offer some pushback, but I think a lot of the talk from "old-school gamers" comes from a place of rose-colored glasses, ignoring the fact that the games of the 8-32-bit-eras were artificially difficult in order to either bilk kids for quarters or keep people from beating the games on a rental. With games being longer and more involved, there's no real need to make games that are unreasonably difficult. The days of games like Contra being beatable in 30 minutes once you learn all its nonsense are over.

Obviously, no one likes a game that offers no challenge at all. We've all played games like Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure or Granstream Saga, games with little in the way of difficulty, which seem like mindless busywork. However, we've also played games like those classic 8-bit games, the Castlevanias of the old days that were hair-pullingly difficult to the point of impossibility. Honestly, this is where playtesting is so important. It was something that struck me when playing through Portal with the commentary on, how much attention Valve paid to balance, to building up the difficulty as the game moved on and the player had more skills under their belt. I think if more publishers did playtesting like that - and listened to their testers - Games would be better balanced and more capable of riding the line between too easy and too hard.

@YukoAsho: I agree that for a few retro games they are designed as the arcade experience, which is simply for the individual to purchase continues. Coin munching is the design philosophy. However, it's not this way for all retro gaming, just as not all newer games are easy fluff for brain-dead fish.

Plenty of retro games are designed around the expectations of a player to use the mechanics given even from level one, and yes this does mean trial-and-error, because how can one know what one hasn't played yet? Older games didn't do these one hour tutorials, it was learn as you play, and the player will see game over screens, and plenty, as they learn.

The difficulty curve for a few retro games is most certainly due to games only being around an hour of length, especially to those who have learned to play them. So to keep them playing the games have to have many obstacles to overcome with little breathing room.

It's all about the in-game skills the player has learned. Namely input timing, patience and observation.

the Castlevanias of the old days that were hair-pullingly difficult to the point of impossibility

I personally disagree with this, but maybe it's because I play CastleVania games. They do not replicate the coin munching experience from an arcade game. CastleVania III is the only retro entry from the franchise (that's not a Gameboy game) that I actual think is cheap by design, and only for certain levels, as it requires a near perfect run. Even Rondo, which is a very difficult game just requires patience and observation. The player has many tools to make the journey easier.

It may seem impossible when looking at extremely easy games though/ a fair share of modern gaming, and that's simply because pretty brain-dead. Don't even need to know what the game plays like to finish. With no patience or observation required in the slightest.

Uncharted for example auto-saves every 20 seconds, so you can just muscle through, and even solves your own puzzles when you take longer than a minute. I believe this feature is even in the new God of War. Uncharted was designed so everybody will see the credits roll at the end regardless how much one is paying attention. Which is fine for those who like to do three things while playing a game. But a requirement to paying attention while playing CastleVania doesn't make CastleVania impossible.

@RSM-HQ: I dunno if I fully agree on you about the 8-bit Castlevanias. For the record, I have beaten the US version of Castlevania III, which was intentionally made more difficult compared to the Japanese Akumajo Densetsu (Seriously, play the Japanese version, it has more than a few things that make it far more forgiving).

Obviously, not everything was stupidly hard in the old days. Games like Solomon's Key, Dragon Warrior and the like were mostly fair, for example, and with the exception of the original Zelda, Nintendo's 1st party games were mostly well-balanced (which is kind of ironic given how the stupidly-imbalanced games were called "Nintendo Hard.")

I've only played through the first Uncharted, really do need to play the others, but I don't really remember it doing the puzzles for me. Honestly, the only games I've seen with "you suck, we'll do it for you" options were the Wii/Wii U Mario titles. Most games just drop you back where you were and make you do it again, which isn't exactly making it easier.

Hell, outside of Rhapsody (which I mentioned in my previous post), I can't think of any game that didn't require me to pay attention. I sometimes wonder if I've just completely missed something.

@YukoAsho: I have only ever played the Japanese edition, well that was until the collections which allow to try all versions. Personally feel all it really added was more respawns and potentially the speed of a few enemies, which makes the levels take longer but that's about it overall. Suppose it could get annoying when making cautious jumps. Keep in mind I overall find the third game cheap anyway and is one of the few games I do not enjoy replaying.

Played the first CastleVania quite a lot and I really like the game, never found it cheap, but admittedly I have played them fairly often. I'm not new to these games. Akumajō Dracula/ CastleVania is one of my all time favorite franchises. One of the retro series I return to the most often. Initially bought Nintendo handhelds such as the DS to play the newer games as well.

CastleVania isn't quite quite Makaimura/ Demon World Village which has more of that coin munching arcade design. And I like those games also, but am going to admit they are some of the most difficult games around, and they are frankly cheap.

Suppose I keep forgetting about the SEGA CastleVania game that got a lot of buzz for being difficult. Yet after the collection and finally playing it multiple times, I don't think it's that bad. The end-game gauntlet is taxing (I think it's eight bosses back-to-back) so it doesn't give a lot of room for error, however it does provide two health refills along the way. Whether in III this is not the issue by design. The third game is designed to hit the player mid-jump, so a lot of the bad design in the third instalment is down to luck and the player being forced to take leaps of faith. Unless you've memorised every spawn-point timing the third game will kill the player fairly often. It's honestly bad platforming and just thinking about it stirs my blood lol.

I've only played through the first Uncharted, really do need to play the others, but I don't really remember it doing the puzzles for me.

Haven't played the first game since, well the PS3 many years ago, but I recall Uncharted 2 the characters would shout the answer (which also is boldened in the subtitles) if you took too long, and it was not very long till they told the player what to do. And from what I am aware it became more common and quicker as sequels continued. Furthermore the camera would auto-move to the answers fairly often as well.

Heck Assassins Creed is designed around holding a button and the game practically plays itself. The auto platforming and auto combat are infamous in the series.

I understand preferences but to me these elements are no less poor design than the above with the third CastleVania, they're disrespecting the player who is playing the game, breaking the pacing of the experience.

The aspect I was getting at anyhow is hard games can be fun, and does not mean hardcore games for tryhards because they love pain. That's the same as saying all casual games are made for babies who can't hold a controller, neither are true. It varies from game to game.

Some are challenging because you need to click with the gameplay functions, and are designed around the player learning new tricks along the way.

I'm sure some people only want edgy Souls-clones stating "the harder the better" and with that whole I'm better than you because I like dying in games. I've seen these people a few times on forums. Honestly they tick me off, and I don't like people with this stupid attitude, as it makes games with any challenge look like they've got a negative following.

Doesn't stop me having fun with a game with some bite. It's just sad that it puts some people off playing a game like Dark Souls, which admittedly is about mid in terms of difficulty. Releasing the same time as the overly popular Uncharted/ Assassins Creed however made Souls games have the illusion of being "impossible" because they did require patience or observation; whether as Uncharted and Assassins do not. And the sad truth is a lot of modern games did get streamlined to the point they're taking the game away from the player, as they don't trust the player to get the job done.

Sure I like challenge, that's different from enjoying artificial difficulty. Overall I enjoy games that are well designed and don't insult the player, games should be fun. And while fun is subjective I think CastleVania wouldn't have as many sequels as it did if they're solely cheap. Challenge can be fun if managed the right way and designed so the player can look at a situation and come out on-top.

But it's the same with modern games, I like Animal Crossing, and a few on these forums know I've praised the series for years. And games don't come more casual than Animal Crossing. Why do I like AC, because it's well designed and fun. Letting me enjoy the game and have full control of my actions.

I believe games should be as easy or as hard as you want. People should not be judged for having fun. I'd support an easy mode in Elden Ring or a hard mode in Super Mario Odyssey. Activate God Mode, I don't care. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to play a game.

I honestly don't know if I ever played easy games. I always liked challenging games. If there is a difficulty setting in place I will at least always play on normal mode. I remember playing contra when I was like 5 or 6 years old and it was Soo hard for me to play that game at that age but it's what made it fun. Years later when I got older I tried the game and it was so basic for me and not as nearly fun. I think the whole purpose of any game even a card game is the challenge to it.