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Are games getting to easy?
Wolfenpride
Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 3,988
Interesting article I found, thought i'd share and hear your thoughts.
news.bigdownload.com/2009/02/04/big-ideas-are-games-too-easy/
For the most part i'd have to agree that games, including mmo's, have been softening up over time. i haven't played a game that ive really had trouble beating or getting through in years.
Same concept with mmo's I guess, dev's are designing "paths" that kind of hold players hands through their games, and over time mmo's have ditched penalties if you die, among other things to make the game easier.
Personally I would love to see some more challenging games put out on the market, sadly I don't see any titles like this in the near future. 
Thoughts?
Comments
Agree in their quest to make games accesable to all they have dumbed them down to the point that veteran players (those that started playing in the eighties to mid nineties) find them far too easy. The handholding linear path that our MMOs have devoled into are incredibly borning to me. Result I haven't subscribed to an MMO in almost a year now. The last real challenge that I enjoyed that made me think and adapt where Eve Online and SWG Pre-NGE (a prime example SOE dumbed the game down to make it more accesable to a wider audience). Both of those games where released in 2003. The Civilization series has not lost much over the years as well. Whats really sad is that in order to find a challenge I have to play other people so in my mid-thirties I took up FPS! Since the AI challenges aren't there anymore I get my challenge fix by plugging other live players. Sad really I would much rather play in a sandbox world where I can enjoy running my own virtual business, and having dieing hurt. You know like the original Ultima Online? When you died all your crap hit the ground and anyone could take it. See someone with a nice outfit? Kill them take it. Man I miss the thrill of just killing someone just because. This new generation of sissy MMOs can be left to the kiddies as far as I am concerned.
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Absolutely,
I bought and downloaded Super Mario Brother 3 for my Wii(After watching The Wizard heh) and that game kicks my ass. I can't believe I was ever able to cruise through it.
Yea..I agree, games have gotten to easy. All I play are FPS type games now and Mount and Blade set at the hardest level. Back in the day Asheron's Call on the Darktide server was a challenge and so was Planetside and the early days of Dark Age of Camelot(the first 6 months). Games have become so lame and everything is handed to you. It's a shame because I thought I'd be playing these games well into old age and it just doesn't look like it is going to happen.
Yeah unfortunatly, but hey what can we do about it? companies are gonna go with what makes them the most cash and i can't fault them for that, they aren't in this for charity.
Just gotta hope someone out there is making a challenging game..well someday lol...because god knows i can't code my way out of a paper bag.
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
- Lewis Thomas
Yeah games are way too easy. Its virtually impossible NOT to win these days.
It depends on what games you are playing. Mainstream games have gotten easier, but the main stream consumer also wants easier to play games. On the other hand niche games like Flight Simulators have gotten more complicated.
The amount of time money and difficulty associated with flight sim's is amazing. I had a friend that got into it after playing mmo's. It took it to a whole new level it seemed to me.
What flight sim would he be playing?
It was quite a while back and that picture is not from his setup. It looked just as complex but not nearly as polished. Like it was put together with duck tape and shoestrings. I believe he played falcon 4, but this was over 5 years ago. I tried it and crashed for a about 20 minutes, never tried it again. Don't know what he's up to now or even if he's still into it. As I recall, at the time, his wife looked at the whole thing with particularly evil eyes.
games and mmos are getting easy so as to encourage people of all ages to come together and play the game. its getting user friendly and noob friendly as well.
As long as Im having fun I dont care how easy or hard a game is.
Hold on Snow Leopard, imma let you finish, but Windows had one of the best operating systems of all time.
If the Powerball lottery was like Lotro, nobody would win for 2 years, and then everyone in Nebraska would win on the same day.
And then Nebraska would get nerfed.-pinkwood lotro fourms
AMD 4800 2.4ghz-3GB RAM 533mhz-EVGA 9500GT 512mb-320gb HD
Yeah... since fun is so subjective this is always going to happen. I too, don't find the latest crop of games particularly entertaining. The problem is that the companies are in it for the money and accomodating the average gamer makes them the money.
Lately I found that I'm just playing the games for the sake of the people I've met. I'm no longer playing them for the game and the people being a great bonus. It just turns into a pay per month chatroom and there are better and cheeper ways to stay in contact with people.
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
Another worthless blog with worthless ideas.
To start with, all of the ideas in the post are so utterly absurd that I can't even begin to fathom it. Nah, I'm exaggerating. I can understand it. It's a completely empty and meaningless idea designed to inflate the ego of the poster. Huzzah, I have transcended the now infantile gaming industry! Oops, not really.
For the purpose of argument, lets forget about the countless multiplayer games, MMORPG's included, with working ladder systems, where you could log in and _just through the basic matching service_ be completely and utterly destroyed by the top players. I'm not even talking about tournament-quality players. I'm just talking about the best people online at any given time, who can pretty easily lay waste to even the average player in their respective games. The only true difficulty in any video game is fighting other players, but lets forget about that, despite it showing that there's abundant difficulty in almost any genre if you want it.
I guess the blog poster isn't ready to make the big jump into fighting actual human beings, though. I'm guessing the OP is the same way, since he actually mentioned death penalties as a form of difficulty. Yep, that makes sense. Lets go back to the old school MMORPG's, where killing monsters was equally boring, brainless, and monotonous as today, but dying due to any kind of technical difficulty (we all know those old MMORPG's performed perfectly) added an extra ten hours of grind to advance. This is the usual wannabe vet attitude.
Gameplay + grind = MMORPG
Gameplay + grind + grind + grind = difficult, hardcore MMORPG for real men
Lets forget about that, though. Lets talk about single player games.
You want twitch difficulty? There are Japanese shooters (if you know what I mean by shooters, the old denotation of the word) which are ridiculously difficult. Probably 1% of players can actually beat them, and they require a level of concentration that is obscene. There are platformers and similar games which border on insanity. Go play Prinny. Nice game. Beat it and come back here, I dare you. That's one of the easier ones. Even some of the mass market single player RPG's are enormously difficult on the highest difficulty setting. There's a reason those genres are dying.
Want difficulty in a MMORPG? Go make a guild which can beat all of FFXI's raids. Seriously, try it. Lots of posters on this site talk about wanting grind-adding features like hefty XP penalties on death, but I have not met even one who could stomach a game like FFXI. Even if you made it to the highest level, good look getting a hundred of the best players on your server together to fight for hours. That's how the mega Asian MMORPG bosses are handled. When AQ40 was released in its original form, some of the best WoW guilds in the world said C'thun was nearly unbeatable. The very best one only got him down to a fraction of his life. He got nerfed. An Asian MMORPG developer would just say screw you.
Or do you want something really involved which requires a ton of skill? Go play Black Shark. It's a flight simulator, one of the actual hardcore ones. It's a flight simulator in which every switch in the cockpit is clickable which follows a painstakingly realistic flight model. In that game, you have to actually manipulate the cockpit like a real pilot would to do a lot of things. You have to flip like fifty switches to take off. It would probably take you no less than one hour to figure out how to take off properly, at which time you would crash into the ground. Oh wait, there's a reason that most of the players of a game like that are either fanatical flight sim fans who have played dozens of them or actual pilots IRL. It's because the "hardcore" gamers would find it too hard.
Here's the tl;dr of that blog post: there are plenty of super hard games out there, but I'm so awesome that I can't even find them. Yep, that definitely feels like somebody who stands above the pack in terms of individual skill and brains.
Theres one single player game on the PC that just pisses me off and yet I still play it- MIrrors Edge.
Its fun as hell once you start running and jumping smoothly, then theres just some parts that are REDICULOUS.... But, i'm still playing.
______________________________
What if Paul Revere was like the boy who cried wolf....?
Originally posted by Hazmal
What does he say when people ask what he did? "My mommy was irking me yo - I wanted to keep pwning nubs on my xbox, so I roughed her up with a hardshell. That is just how I roll."
for me, its getting easier. there seems to be little challenge that these games have against us. which is whi i always play games in its most difficult level, even with games that i am totally unfamiliar about.
When i just start to play the game, i prefer easy control system and quests .
however, with my lvl get higher, challenge is favoured
i do agree your ideas. the mmos are getting similar to each other. every game seems to follow one type. when you begin a game, you have only to get adjusted to the operation then you can go through the game. the failure is temporary and success is deemed to yours.
Played Dawn of War 2 with a friend today....got raped by two computers set to Normal.
Games aren't getting "too easy" as long as you can crank the AI up and the design of the game itself doesn't suffer as a result of the difficulty of the game (ie, games being really super hard and using that fact to distract you from poor level design etc)
You have 6 enemy Carnifexes in your base and tell me that the game is too easy =P
Your argument is like a two legged dog with an eating disorder...weak and unbalanced.
i disagree as well. i dont personally think games are becoming easier. i blame the cheats that are inputted into the games. i hate games with cheats in them it just ruins the experienced and also yeh like someone has said just before me, its not how hard you make the game but how hard u make the AI to play you.
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