Are modern games easier or simply designed better?
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Just some things I recall from really bad games in the 90s and early 00s:
-Only having one or a few lives for the entire game
-No saves/continues (usually combined with the above)
-Ridiculously short timers for getting through an area
-No health meter (one hit and you're dead)
-Having to go back through areas of the game you already beat to do some inane mission that's slightly different and feels like it was added to pad the difficulty/play time
-Spawning for the sake of having more fodder thrown at you (or spawning in ridiculous areas like the ledge you're about to jump to and the enemy was not there before jumping). I still hate spawning to this day in most cases. If you just left an area and destroyed everything in sight, it should not be totally rebuilt as soon as you turn around.
-Unfairly slanting difficulty towards enemies (like bullets that travel through objects, while yours do not)
-Dying and having to restart a huge level all the way from the beginning
-Poor clipping so your weapon passes through enemies unscathed or you get hit by an enemy when you shouldn't have. Also clipping that results in you missing a platform when you clearly didn't.
-Poor controls (still a problem now, but nowhere as bad as it was)
My list is nowhere complete though and I'm sure others have plenty of annoyances to amend it with.
Great for nostalgia. :)
> -No saves/continues (usually combined with the above)
Sometimes these mechanics define a genre, such as roguelikes. Permadeath and single saves makes games like Nethack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup nail-biting experiences that keep you striving to improve, even though these turn-based games give you all the time in the world to plan your next move.
Granted, the audience for this kind of game is self-limiting, and the games themselves are designed around replayability. But you see new games such as Demon's Souls/Dark Souls use similar negative-reinforcement techniques to create truly engaging experiences that some people find fun and addicting.
I can't tell you how many times I've lost a Nethack character in the Astral Planes, losing hundreds of thousands of turns and sometimes weeks of effort just before the end. But each time I died, I learned how to counter yet another combination of states that resulted in my death, and Nethack finally became boring when I could ascend in a few hours. This point took me 16 years to reach. Very, very few modern games can reach that level of engagement.
In fact, Dark Souls teaches you patience. You don't die a lot if you are sufficiently careful. There are a few unexpected traps but those are rare. Most of the time you will have to progress carefully, gauging the terrain, the aggro ranges of the monsters, carefully dodging and blocking their attacks until you understand their moveset enough to land counterattacks.
Dark Souls is a game of learning, but boy it is rewarding. You will find yourself storm easily through areas of the game that gave you a hard time once you have learned to take it slowly. But you could also die easily on very weak monster (like the torch Zombies when you return to the asylum) if you just think you can run and mash buttons without caution.
I have found it to be one of the most enjoyable gaming experience of these last years, and have poured much more hours into it that I would have liked to.
I personally ended up building some custom Markov Chain Monte Carlo models (because with the Steam API you can pull a lot of match data) with shared priors just to understand the farming/win relationship per hero (and you need hierarchical Bayesian models because with 100+ heroes, 10 heroes per game, and needing to account for between-hero relationships, you run into the curse of dimensionality quickly).
It's almost more fun to analyze DotA computationally and watch tournaments than to play it (I watch more than I play). That's a truly ridiculous skill space and I could probably do an entire PhD's worth of statistics mining just off DotA 2.
Have you played Brogue? That is really something special. It's a really stripped down game inspired by the original Rogue. There are no classes, so your build depends on the items you find. Rather than experience points, you'll find a finite number of scrolls of enchantment to spend on items. The tight food supply forces you to descend, which in turn prevents you from saving scrolls of enchantment for too long because you'll need to spend them on your items to survive. But the longer you can delay the better, because if possible you want to spend them on top-tier items.
Almost all of those things are examples of a game (DotA 2) being hard in a bad way/for the wrong reasons. The hallmark of game design is that it should be easy to learn but hard to master, but DotA games are notoriously hard to get into because of the steep learning curve, mostly because of all the dozens (almost 100?) heroes', their abilities and all the items (some of which have active/spell abilities) that you have to learn. I was useless in all of the initial games that I played in HoN, even though I had friends to help me. I still get bitten in the ass by not knowing all the abilities of some hero, or the fact that he has some item that totally negates one of my heroes strengths.
Strategy games of any interesting complexity usually have a steep initial learning curve, where you'll fuck up everything in the beginning and/or get killed by overlooking one single aspect of your base management or army control. But DotA is astonishing in that it was created in a game where you have to control up to three heroes, an army and base management, simplified it down to controlling only one hero - and made the initial learning curve of the game harder than the original game (Warcraft 3)! And this custom game with the higher barrier to entry in the end eclipsed Warcraft 3 itself when it comes to popularity!
The down side of this is that many argue the mechanical difficulty of SC1 helped make the game so competitive and the sequel is inferior in that sense, which I agree with but think there are numerous other reasons for that as well.
If any of you want me to expand on or explain anything just let me know. Starcraft is really the only thing I talk about on the internet.
Edit* This is what I mean by mechanical difficulty [1]. RTS games, especially the Stacraft series, are extremely difficult just by the nature of the game.
You could for example make larvae inject optionally auto-cast, as long you add some other mechanic that the zerg have to (or should) worry about (like more complicated creep spreading, for instance).
The best games are simple to play, hard to master.
Back in the day games like Zelda or Metal Gear on the NES were very hard without a Nintendo Power Mag and maps (they even used to have a Nintendo hotline for players stuck). Mega-man is freaking hard, pixel level mess ups. I played Mega man 9 with throwback sprite single buffer flicker and difficulty, it wasn't as fun.
Plus all this was pre-internet and pre-mobile with much less entertainment vying for our attention. Games should be fun, usually that means simple to get started, but deeper and harder to master still needs to be there.
I have always thought the mobile appstore type gaming handheld market we have now is closer to the experimentation of the arcades and back then it was all in-app purchasing only tied heavily to progression (via quarters/tokens). Now it is to deepen the experience and customize it for the most part. Customization was very minimal then. I really think this is the best age to be a game developer and game player. The console markets stopped many great game devs from entering and helping to propel that market, mobile and web gaming has no such limitation to their benefit.
Like many people, I got stuck at the water temple. I tried for weeks to figure that stupid level out. One of my friends linked me to a site (I think I had been complaining to him over AIM about how difficult it was) that had a walk through. I stared at that link for days, sitting in my internet explorer bookmarks, internally debating whether or not to use it, before finally giving in to just use the walk through...
I went on to beat the game shortly after, never able to fully accept that victory, as I had cheated my way through a major part of the game.
Not sure how I feel about this statement. Such games are certainly excellent examples of what a game is. Chess is a classic example. But I derive quite a lot of enjoyment from more complicated games that are also hard to master.
When I was able to get a hold of arcade/snes/nes games on emulators I replayed all of my hardest games. I beat all of my top twenty in a weekend.
How? Because all the emulators came with Quick Save & Quick Load. F5 and F6 are the major reasons why games are easy these days. It's a night and day difference. Playing some of the ultra-hard NES games became a walk in the park; really just repeat the last action until success. I even beat the arcade versions of Ghosts & Goblins, then Ghouls and Ghosts in about an hour for each.
I've been playing a ton of nethack lately and I really wish games like Skyrim and other open-world-games had a 'permadeath' difficulty setting. Sure, I can choose to play that way, but I like it incorporated into the game. I want a system where it difficulty is just a percentage of more guys & less ammo, rather difficulty should be a fundamental change to the game.
I feel quite similar with Hotline Miami. It's a tough game and you die a lot, but it's extremely satisfying plotting your strategy and executing it to success.
Super Hexagon is pretty much the 2nd worst thing one could discover in the middle of the night - number one being meth.
Games _should_ be designed that way.
For something where the overarching narrative is featured, like Braid / Journey, I think the quick restarts are just as important.
I actually got stuck early in the game by not remembering there is a run button. Such a simple function, but it's never actually shown to you until you need to use it. Presumably this was in the manual I neglected to read :)
I'm not sure 'easier' is the right word for it. I'd say that newer games just explain everything to you, and don't really leave much exploration or experimentation in controls or playstyle.
Also, I don't think it's really padded for length as some people here have mentioned. I started and completed it recently on the Wii U (albeit with a few sneak glances at an FAQ in parts), and it took me around 6 hours. Not very long by today's standards, though I'm a little young to say whether this applies to the older generation of games.
I know exactly the bit!
Super Metroid is a fantastic game. Perhaps requiring a bit more dedication than is common today, but it is still a fantastic experience.
I definitely think Super Metroid is pretty close to perfect.
It's also in the options screen. (On the original SNES version, I've never tried the Wii U one.)
For example the 8-bit and 16-bit era games are skill based, where you have to dodge multiple bullets, have good reactions to enemies and even the environment around you. And you are punished for your mistakes; which sometimes borders on cheap tactics.
Many modern games have reduced to button smashers with little to no need for any other than simple timing skills. Shooters have autoaim, and with normal difficulty levels you are a bullet sponge, even a rocket might not kill you. Of course there are a lot of exceptions, and higher difficulty level in some games can help.
The games can still be really enjoyable regardless of the design change. But the ongoing evolution to more cinematic gameplay is really worrying to me. For example, Ryse: Son of Rome, that was revelaed for XBox One an E3, looks really great visually, but the gameplay seems more or less like Simon Says. You as the player are included in amazing set pieces, by letting you press one button at a time, as soon as the game tells you to; and see how the game character and the world reacts to that.
It's a scary trend to me, that the stories cannot be told by the gameplay anymore, but with cutscenes where you have little or no effect on the result. There is a world of difference letting me as the protagonist struggle and get better, than having a non-player character tell me that in a cutscene.
really good games like portal doesn't do this, but i imagine the sort of effort required, and a lot of AAA publishers just aren't willing to take such a risk. So the root cause is the high producitno costs associated with games causing it to become liek this.
Only on consoles, though.
> For example, Ryse: Son of Rome, that was revelaed for XBox One an E3, looks really great visually, but the gameplay seems more or less like Simon Says. You as the player are included in amazing set pieces, by letting you press one button at a time, as soon as the game tells you to; and see how the game character and the world reacts to that.
Worse, the QTEs are actually automatic : http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/06/why-ryse-is-the-most-frustr...
In defiance of this trend, games like Dark Souls are coming out, which are wickedly hard, but extremely well-designed (for the most part). Or Monster Hunter 3. These games stress player skill to the max, but offer almost no 'cheap deaths'. This is my favourite kind of game.
I strongly hope that the skill-based system of gaming comes back to MMOGs (remember EQ? I do.), but I'm still waiting.
God of War was not easy at all for me on Hard.
The big thing on most modern games is the frequent auto-checkpointing. This is done to prevent the player from becoming frustrated and walking away, but it saps a critial element of difficulty from the game in that you have to execute a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence, and screwing up anything puts you back at the beginning.
Modern games are very guilty of the overuse of checkpointing, which can frequently mean that you never lose more than a few seconds of progress. The frustration of doing 98% of a boss fight, flubbing one guard, and having to replay the whole level again is mirrored in the reward you feel when you overcome the challenge; modern games frequently minimize frustration via checkpointing, overly-verbose tutorials, "look here!" neon signs, and the like, all of which reduce both frustration and satisfaction.
> The big thing on most modern games is the frequent auto-checkpointing. This is done to prevent the player from becoming frustrated and walking away, but it saps a critial element of difficulty from the game in that you have to execute a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence, and screwing up anything puts you back at the beginning.
"Executing a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence" is not a good design for a lot of games. It is good for those "match the button pressing to the prompts on the screen" (ala Guitar Hero) and classical platformers, but not for stealth and/or strategy games. It isn't very satisfying for me when it comes to hack-and-slash games, eiher, because it de-emphasizes reaction and adapting to novel situations.
Frequent check-pointing is often a crutch to mask poor gameplay design, but the tedium of having to do a series of perfectly executed actions is often a design that screams "we didn't bother to come up with something really satisfying".
> Modern games are very guilty of the overuse of checkpointing, which can frequently mean that you never lose more than a few seconds of progress. The frustration of doing 98% of a boss fight, flubbing one guard, and having to replay the whole level again is mirrored in the reward you feel when you overcome the challenge; modern games frequently minimize frustration via checkpointing, overly-verbose tutorials, "look here!" neon signs, and the like, all of which reduce both frustration and satisfaction.
No, the frustration is not nearly worth it. Using hours on one level - and the crushing boredom of having to repeat the first 25% of the same god damn level 50 times - does not culminate in some triumphant feeling when everything eventually falls into place. Maybe for something like 10 seconds, but that was hardly worth the frustration. Maybe that's just me, not being a masochist and all.
Games shouldn't try to hold your hand in order to frustrate you - it shouldn't try to hold your hand because it is satisfying to figure things out more by yourself. It will only frustrate you if you are too impatient or if the developers designed the game with poor hinting towards what you should do. And not holding your hands demands better design - or else the frustration is magnified. If you bang your head against the wall for hours, trying every reasonable way (within the confines of the game) to get further ahead, and you only find out about it through reading some FAQ (Or those Nintendo Magazines) that you should balance on the pixel-wide rope, make a jump on the night of the lunar moon and press square - or any other way that doesn't make reasonable intuitive sense within the games universe - that is a failure on the part of the designers, not some "hardcore" feature of the game.
I guess the hard games of old are kinds of badges of honor for some people (having completed them). I guess suburbanites who grew up during the nineties has to have their battle stories, too.
Games that are unfair just to be frustrating are just horribly designed, no doubt. But, modern games are frequently guilty of reducing the cost of failure in order to keep from frustrating players, sometimes at the cost of one of the biggest rushes in gaming - overcoming something that is genuinely hard-but-surmountable, which requires awareness and timing and cunning and careful use of resources.
I like easy games; I really enjoy the experience of traipsing through a story without too much impediment. But I also really enjoy the experience of getting my butt handed to me over and over because I got impatient or sloppy, and the feeling of accomplishment when I overcome that. Dark Souls is among the best modern examples of that sort of game - it's brutally uncompromising, but you're given all the tools you need. The combat design is extremely precise, but in return it asks for a lot of precision from the player, and it harshly punishes failure; in this way, it's very reminiscent of older games, rather than belonging to the new breed of games where falling off a ledge respawns you on that ledge, or fighting a boss has four different phases, with a checkpoint at each phase.
I'm not advocating for the game being a jerk to the player just to frustrate them. That's never fun. All I'm saying is that the difficulty difference between old games and new games is in how they punish failure, rather than where the HP and damage sliders are set.
My main gripe with this game, and others like it, is that even if the difficulty can be ratcheted up, the result is not engaging gameplay. It doesn't generally require more skill, or novel tactics, or using the right tool for the job, just better timing or more patience. This is the point I was trying to make, although sloppily.
Well-design hard games draw you in with the surprising complexity of thought or skill required to beat their challenges, hidden under a deceptively simple surface. For example Monster Hunter's weapons involve maybe 3 or 4 combos, whereas God of War's had more than I could easily memorise. But using combos in GoW didn't matter anyway because just mashing the buttons had the same effect. Using the wrong combo in MH will likely leave you exposed to a brutal attack, a quick death, and a long walk (or simple failure of the mission, goodbye 50 minutes of game time, you get nothing). Same story in Dark Souls, except you might be able to fight your way back to reclaim the stuff you lost. You really need to think about how you're attacking things, what your positioning is, what you're attacking etc etc. That is the complexity underneath the 'simple' combat systems that makes these games engagingly difficult.
As far as fighting in hack-and-slash games are concerned, I find the Onimusha series more interesting (you're a samurai in feudal Japan fighting demons). That's partly because they have the "issen" (critical strike) attack which is triggered either by blocking the attack of the enemy at the last second and countering (relatively easy to learn) or attacking (countering) the enemy at the last split second before his attack lands ("real" issen, more difficult more risky and does more damage). You also have the ability to chain issens by pressing the attack button at the exact time the first issen stops. This is pretty hard to do in Onimusha 3 (too easy in Onimusha Dawn of Dreams, though), because of the hard timing and maybe partly because the animations of the issens can take different amounts of time to complete. (The issen attack has been in the game since instalment one. But curiously the manual said nothing about issens, which meant that I got very confused when all of the sudden I got lucky and one-shot one of my enemies by cleaving them in half.
Issen will one-shot grunt enemies and do a lot of damage to other enemies, and give you more souls (similar to orbs in God of War). I found that this gameplay mechanic was very rewarding to learn to master, because it is very effective and it is satisfying to one-shot enemies (or maybe even take down three at a time) with those sleek animations. By contrast, God of War is much more, like you say, about button mashing since which combo you choose doesn't matter so much (it's mostly about whether you have time for the heavy attaks and if you want to do area of effect damage or single damage). When it comes to difficulty settings, one of the settings in Onimusha 3 involves playing through the game where the only damage that the enemies can suffer are through issens.
They are not hard games to beat, though.
Not only are there considerably more games today, being pushed out with considerably more marketing. We're living in the age of free to play, where the next free game is just a download away. To make any kind of money in F2P, the developers need to keep players playing, so that they'll eventually pay. Basically the same goes for selling DLC.
So I'd say the lack of difficulty is mostly caused by how games are monetised these days.
A game that is not fun still can be sold pretty well - you just need to make it look pretty, invest into advertising and make it easily accessible so people could assess its high production values. This works because most of the competition is not very fun either.
The reasons why the modern game design is not producing fun games in any significant numbers are up for debate. Personally I agree with the Richard Garriott's opinion [1] but I don't believe it's the only reason.
[1] http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-desi...