Are games getting easier? About artificial difficulity

[SpaceMan++]

A notable complaint about video games today is that today's games are getting easier. It may be a good thing and a bad thing. I have proposed some explanation.

1. To lengthen gameplay for games with constrained disk space, they must increase difficulty (artificial or not). This leads to Nintendo Hard.

2. Old games use shallow methods to introduce artificial difficulty: Lives, jump puzzles, unrealistic odds, escort missions (maybe), and even cheating AI. Now, there are more teamwork going on in AI players and developers found new ways to increase challenge the deep way. The increase in AI difficulty can let the developers compensate by removing an artificial difficulty.

3. Two words: Casual gamers

Some of my examples:
The oldest Mega Man games: I am warned that they are difficult, and I finished them in several retries. For some gamers, "difficult" means you can't finish a round without practicing or retrying many times. In Mega Man 2, I was staying on that Dr. Wily's castle to hog a lots of lives.

Shooting games (Coded Arms, Mass Effect 3): Difficult AI but it allows infinite retry, this is least frustrating for me.

Solarmax: I beat that game by refining my strategy. While it doesn't force you micromanage, the artificial difficulty comes from the aliens having more stats. (a player observed. plausible because a typical Flash developer don't have so much skill to code an AI)

Also, do you think infinite retries (instead of a game over and restart of a large part) are good? Do you think the frustration of getting game overs and replaying a large part is beneficial to gaming experiences? or it is the lack of creativity?
Post some examples of artificial and non-artificial difficulty techniques in games and discuss.

[Quadcentruo]

I don't think it's games are getting easier, I think it's the more popular games you can find today are too easy. You have to really search and find some unknown game just to find a considerably difficult game. This will usually lead you to the indie section of video games. Games like VVVVVV and Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale are considerably difficult to a skilled gamer. To an average gamer, these games would be insane.

A reason why popular games (which I will be calling "mainstream" from now on) could be considered easier is because they walk you through everything. On older consoles, games would rarely tell you where to go or what to do. Some games try to teach players by simply adding in basic obstacles to teach players how to get around such obstacles, then those basic obstacles become more complex, but are still the same basic obstacle in the end. By teaching players basic movements early, you can make more difficult obstacles near the end, which I've always seen as the hardest part of the game.

In mainstream games now, I don't see much challenge. Not because I'm that good, but because these games are too easy. Increasing the difficulty back then meant trickier jumps, extra enemies placed in clever spots, and bosses that have extra attacks than in normal mode. Now, increasing the difficulty only means you take more damage, you give less damage, but that's really the only different part of increasing difficulty in modern games. And that's not just limited to modern shooter games; I've seen a wide range of genres include the "take more, do less" damage modifier for the increase in their video games - simply because it's the easiest to do in most games. But this doesn't necessarily lead to strategy (which developers aim for), it leads to players dodging attacks and hiding behind cover more often and trying to chip away at enemies whenever they can, rather than attempt to use strategy. Of course, in turn-based RPGs, this will force the use of strategy over dodging-and-chipping.

[TurtwigX]

I don't think all of them are getting easy, some have maintained its difficulty over the years, like Mega Man. But as more people start playing games, the companies have this strange feeling like they need to do more hand holding for new people. And instead of just watering things down and tacking on an easy mode, they make the entire game less of a challenge.

Example: Sonic Generations. A bright and flashy HD 20th anniversary game. The levels were short, you could get an S Rank even if you were an amateur, the plot felt unfinished, but the bosses were the worst part. 1: There were only 3 stage bosses, 3 sub-bosses, and then the Final Boss. All the bosses, except for the Final who is sort of hard, despite the annoying friends who tell you about every time it attacks, take about 3-4 hits before dying, and their weak spot is in your face and easy to reach. And there was a "Hard" mode, too, but that only added another hit or 2, and a tiny bit of smarter AI. Long story short, the battles did not feel much harder at all, and it was an easy mess. Except for the challenge stages, one of the only hard things about it.

Another good one: Master Quest vs. Hero Mode. Master Quest (Ocarina of Time/3D) was LEGIT hard. The world was flipped to make things more confusing, the enemies would attack more, they were ruthless, you took more damage, and ALL the temples had new, harder layouts.
Hero Mode (Skyward Sword) was fake hard. Enemies took more hits, you took more damage from a hit, and hearts couldn't be found in grass. The AI was practically the same, all the temples were unchanged, the enemies screamed out their weakness to you for about 5 seconds, and worst of all, they STILL try to hold your hand through everything, giving you tutorials on things you should know.

[PHANTOMxTRAINER]

WOw, I could never post paragraphs like that O_O but besides that.. I noticed my Prototype 2 got way easier.. I kill in that game so hard

[TurtwigX]

Hey, when you ask me to rant on something I feel I should rant about, I'm on it. And...I didn't really think I could've posted as much as Quad did XD

Me personally, I'm a fan of infinite retries and checkpoints scattered about. If they're far from each other, it gives you more of a reason to not die a lot, but never a reason to stop playing either. A good game that has this is Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom. While not being extremely hard (Because it's HARD) it uses the checkpoint system and infinite lives to make things feel better. Being a very open-world game with multiple missions in a level, like Super Mario 64, getting Game Overs would just be too frustrating to deal with. That makes me want to quit more often.

[Twiggy]

A game, in my opinion, should be accessible to anyone. It doesn't mean that we can compromise on the gameplay, though. Fake difficulty is a great way to tell otherpeople to not stay there and play the game for anything longer than a few hours, if people get frustrated. I know several games that seem to be only capable of making people waste hours trying to get through something and never succeed in doing so. That, I noticed when I was revisiting old games in their raw form. Growing up in the PlayStation era must have been a tough one when it comes to my tolerance of video game difficulty.

Infinite retries? If it's sort-of "reload save" type, I can get behind it. Especially when it's coupled with autosave and the game is supposed to be cinematic. Other games, not so much.

[PHANTOMxTRAINER]

Maybe its not that they're getting easier.. Maybe they don't change really but we just get a lot better. We play the old games so much that we have practice and are better at the newer games. Like in Halo, I wouldn't have been as good if I haven't started with the regular xbox games.

[TurtwigX]

Yes, but that only applies to games that always have the same exact mechanics throughout the series. Skyward Sword, if you haven't played Twilight Princess for the Wii, introduced an entirely new style of playing, while still acting like Ocarina of Time. But if you compare the two, then you can see OoT was built to be harder than SS. Ocarina of Time had about 9 different dungeons and involved a lot of traveling around the map. Skyward Sword had 6 or 7, with 3 side quests, most of them with pretty simplistic puzzles, and the game was "Get area, find temple, Skyloft, get area, find temple, Skyloft" over and over and over. Things started to get repetitive after a while, especially with Fi repeating literally every new quest related info you get about instantly because clearly you're too dumb to understand what you have to do yourself. Even in HERO MODE.
In OoT, enemies started off soft and then got freakishly creepy and hard to beat. In SS, they started off confusing, like those new Skulltulas, but each and EVERY enemy either had a gigantic glowing weak spot or simply had no defenses and allowed you to slash wildly on them until death.
And the magical instrument. In Ocarina of Time, it was like having an actual Ocarina. While there were songs that activated when you pressed the right buttons, it played actual notes and included sharps and flats. In Skyward Sword, in order to show off the Wii Motion Plus, you had a harp. How would you play a harp? Easy: you don't. You just swing your hand back and forth and things will happen. It's pretty dumb knowing that a baby could do just as well playing it.
I'm not saying Skyward Sword is a bad game, because it has a wonderful story with characters that actually feel alive, especially the lovely Zelda herself. It's very polished in that area, but not in the area of difficulty, except for the bosses, they actually did implement some sort of creative thinking over time. It's like the opposite of Sonic Generations: it had great gameplay but it was lacking in plot. SS had a great plot but lacks clever gameplay like OoT had. The similarity of them both? Pretty easy.

[The Spirit of Time]

Originally Posted by PHANTOMxTRAINER

Maybe its not that they're getting easier.. Maybe they don't change really but we just get a lot better. We play the old games so much that we have practice and are better at the newer games. Like in Halo, I wouldn't have been as good if I haven't started with the regular xbox games.

That is not totally true. I played the first two copies of Assassin's Creed, but when I started with Brotherhood, I quickly realised that it is harder and solving missions is taking more time. In terms of skills, mine are now way better than when I started, but when since they changed the game mechanics, things got harder.

So after all, it depends on the gaming company, whether it is improving its mechanics or not.

[BadboyUK]

I think that most of the FPS games out there have AI that is easy to kill ,please you kill some one with one shot in the new COD's ,But it takes the AI lets say 5 shots to kill you.Its just that people dont like losing ,every one wants to allways win .So to appeal to this they make AI really easy to kill ,thats what I have to say.

[SpaceMan++]

One reason I suck at a game (esp. 2D platformers) because I never bothered to dodge an enemy's bullet and I only care about targeting the enemy. Did this happen to you?

[Fubab_107]

I blame a fact most of these games have a tendency to have what I call a "Holding Hand" gesture to them. It's where through out the game, they will still give you hints and directions of what to do. I can see it being in the first couple of levels, but at the half way point, it gets a little redundant. Sure, the directions is actually something that helps, but I like it how it is in games like Portal, where it gives you no hints of what to do, but it's not impossible, and sometimes really simple. It gives me a sense of accomplishment instead of having something constantly tell me I'm going in the right direction.

Games are getting slightly easier. But I'm not complaining, I can still enjoy it either way.

[Shadow-lucario]

if i am honest i am not sure what it could be, it maybe that games are getting too easy, an example in my mind of this was the new sonic's where they give you about 6 lives and when you complete a level you have the auto save, (yes i know all games now incorporate the auto save) but cast your mind back to the sonic on the sega megadrive where you had 6 lives and about 3 continues, when those were up you were sent back to world 1-1 those were hard (well when i was a kid anywho =3) but it could be the gamers as well.

A good example of this for me has to be dark souls, all the websites like IGN said it is the hardest game to come to light in many a year, but once i started playing it yes it was great but i found it quite easy (probably having spent most of my gaming life playing rpg's), so really i dont think there is a definitive answer here there was only 2 games that i have had trouble completing which i find to be "Hard" and they are Final Fantasy 13 and 13-2 only because i have never played with a battle system like this (horrible in my opinion by the way lol) bring back the Final Fantasy 7 ATB system =3