

Are modern games easier or simply designed better? - dmoney67
http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/13/difficulty-vs-design-are-games-now-easier-or-simply-designed-better/

======
yareally
A lot of older games abused "cheap" ways to make the game more difficult
(though still sometimes happens today, but not as often). Games of today, in
some cases I think have been watered down for the sake of letting a more
casual game player beat them before getting overly frustrated. However, not
all games are like that and some of the games I've played in recent years are
as hard as they come if you're upping the difficulty. If you're playing on
easy/normal, then that's the issue :)

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.

~~~
tadfisher
> -Only having one or a few lives for the entire game

> -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.

~~~
epsylon
> 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.

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.

------
keypusher
Interesting premise, and a few years ago I might have agreed wholeheartedly
that modern gaming is pandering to the masses and has become too easy. But
then along came games like Dota 2, Day Z, Dwarf Fortress, Path Of Exile, and
Dark Souls. The learning curve to not embarrass yourself in a public game of
Dota 2 is probably around 100 hours. It has some fiendishly obtuse rules and
requires split second reflexes as well as in depth knowledge of the metagame
as well as deep domain knowledge of the item tree and hero skills. And it is
by far the most popular game on Steam right now, with over 400,000 concurrent
players online some days and over a million logging in each month, not to
mention a very active competitive scene. Path Of Exile has proven to be a very
successful action RPG where the most respect is earned by playing "hardcore
mode", that is reaching the endgame without a single death. Speaking of
permadeath and difficult games, look at DayZ. No instructions, no tutorial,
permadeath, weird bugs and glitches, dropped in an open world military sim
with zombies running around and the map is in Russian. That's pretty
difficult, and it was a smash hit. It's similar to the resurgence of other
roguelikes such as Angband which feature permadeath, arcane key mappings,
minimal curses style GUI with primarily ASCII graphics, and successors such as
Dwarf Fortress. Oh, the author wants to talk about difficult platforming games
on the console? How about Super Meat Boy, which offers all the platform
challenge of the yesteryear classics. Shmups? Check out Really Big Sky and
Sine Mora. There's plenty of great, challenging games out there today if that
is what you are looking for.

~~~
DanBC
Roguelikes are even different: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is known to be hard to
win but easy to play. It has tutorials and a hint system. They're aiming for
zero need to read online guides. Compare that to Nethack, which is chock-full
of weird stuff that you have no hope of discovering on your own.

~~~
foobarbazqux
Having won both I think that the only real difference is DCSS takes such a
ridiculous amount of time for a 15-rune win that you just don't care by the
end. I felt like I had to go through the same amount of spoiler reading,
overall. And both are easy once you have a solid build strategy.

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.

------
edias
A interesting comparison I think is between Starcraft 1 (1998) and Stacraft 2
(2010). In the original Starcraft you were constantly fighting against the
game engine. Unit pathing, spell casting and a several glitches which players
could utilize (most notably mutalisk stacking) made the game incredibly
challenging to do anything, let alone pull off complex strategies. The speed
at which you could perform actions was crucial to being a top player. Stacraft
2 introduced several mechanics that made the game substantially easier.
Multiple building selection allowing you to produce units from several
buildings at once rather than selecting each individually. Increased unit
selection from 12 to 255, the max you would realistically expect to hit.
Better unit pathing so players need to focus less on army control and numerous
other changes.

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.

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4UTDudShDY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4UTDudShDY)

~~~
Dewie
The way to solve that is "just" to increase the skill ceiling in some other
dimension. Warcraft 3 has easier macro mechanics than SC2 - five workers per
gold mine, less expands, less unit-producing buildings, wood as a resource is
often a non-issue - but makes up for it by having a higher skill-ceiling when
it comes to micro mechanics.

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).

------
drawkbox
Limited time and a leaning towards mobile/casual has led to very simplistic
intros to games.

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.

~~~
sliverstorm
_The best games are simple to play, hard to master._

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.

~~~
Zardoz84
DooM for example

------
columbo
Eh... yes and no.. and in some cases oh-god-no
([http://thelettervsixtim.es/](http://thelettervsixtim.es/))

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.

~~~
joshschreuder
VVVVVV was great fun. I couldn't recommend it for everyone, but it was a
challenge, and that challenge made it satisfying to complete. The best part
was that it wasn't unclear what you had to do, it was just hard and skillful
to achieve it, so I never had to turn to a guide.

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.

~~~
daeken
If you liked VVVVVV, go play Super Hexagon (preferably on a mobile device).
It's the same designer, and oh god, it's the most amazing game I've ever
played. It's brutally hard, but never frustrating, and it forces you to get
better. _Absolutely_ worth the $3.

~~~
mh-
well, thanks for that.

Super Hexagon is pretty much the 2nd worst thing one could discover in the
middle of the night - number one being meth.

------
joshschreuder
I think Super Metroid is a really interesting game in that it doesn't rely on
tutorials to tell you how to do things. It relies on you paying attention to
the environment (the animals tell you how to perform tricks and do things
easier), and requires you to experiment with equipment to find shortcuts and
power ups.

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.

~~~
beaumartinez
> "I actually got stuck early in the game by not remembering there is a run
> button."

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.

~~~
minikomi
Indeed. Placing that super bomb on a whim in the water tunnel and having the
effect it had after endless fruitless searching for the next place to go on
the map is a very fond memory for me :)

------
Kaali
Older gamer used multple cheap techniques to prolong the otherwise short
games. But I do think that many of the modern games are really easy by design,
when compared to the old games.

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.

~~~
epsylon
> Shooters have autoaim

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...](http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/06/why-ryse-is-the-most-frustrating-
game-of-e3/)

------
dsuth
Both. Some are stupidly easy, eg. God of War "Load Game. Face Plant
Controller. Finish Game. Get Star!".

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.

~~~
Dewie
> Both. Some are stupidly easy, eg. God of War "Load Game. Face Plant
> Controller. Finish Game. Get Star!".

God of War was not easy at all for me on Hard.

~~~
dsuth
That's interesting. I'm fairly sure I played on Hard, although this was years
ago so my memory may be rusty. Some parts of the game were definitely 'hard',
but seemed artificially so. Like the last boss eschewing all of the tactics
learned prior to it, or a generically drawn 'maze' level which was just
confusing for the sake of filling in game time.

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_.

~~~
Dewie
You're right that the different difficulties is implemented in quite a lazy
way - usually with just boosting the attack and health of your enemies, and
vice versa for yourself. The hardest difficulty is often something like only
having one HP. The next level is having more enemies spawn, but it often
doesn't go further than that.

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.

------
_pmf_
Getting 3 "achievements" or "trophies" just for playing through the tutorial
(or, in Mass Effect 2's case, sitting through the tedious opening sequence
introducing the cheesy and badly written travesty EA seems to regard as a
"plot") is a bit off-putting. Maybe targeting 13 year old suburban ADD
patients requires constant cheap attention grabbing to prevent these people
from playing one of their 47 other games if there is a tiny obstacle.

~~~
whateverfor
Just so you know, those achievements are like tracking cookies: the video game
companies can't just send home whatever data they want, but they can see
achievement data. So that achievement was just to see how many of the people
who bought the game actually started to play, to provide a baseline for how
many (go halfway/beat the game/play the multiplayer/anything else they can jam
in an achievement).

~~~
_pmf_
I never thought of this; it does make more sense now. Thanks!

------
pandaman
Modern games are not better designed. Quite the opposite. It's very easy to
make a hard game. Making a fun game, on the other hand, requires talent. When
you have a fun game you can sell it no matter how hard it is.

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...](http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-designers-
suck/)

------
gegtik
Here is a viewpoint I found fascinating, viewing the refinement as a net loss:

[http://storify.com/gegtik/j-chastain-on-primitive-
gaming](http://storify.com/gegtik/j-chastain-on-primitive-gaming)

------
kapuzineralex
I've asked myself the same question after recently playing Battle Isle 1
again... Seems to me like the learning curve of modern games was so much
shallower. But this is of course only one example and not representative as
such.

------
aunty_helen
Dammit Guybrush, push the cannon to get the gunpowder to blow the fort!

------
nextstep
Some old games only had 50 or 100 levels and were intended for repeat play. So
the developers made some games super hard so that people could get many hours
of play out of them.

------
Steko
In Pac Man the endgame was that the ghosts moved faster and if you didn't get
there you didn't miss much. Early hardware limitations meant "just make it
harder" was often used to extend games. Today they just put in more content,
which costs money and they want the player to experience.

------
eru
Funny enough, Super Metroid was seen as too easy back then.

~~~
csense
Yeah. I seem to remember Super Metroid as a fairly easy game. Unless you're
trying to finish without dying, get all the items, or finish under the three
hour mark for a slightly different ending.

------
vacri
These aren't mutually-exclusive qualities.

