Modern Game Difficulty

If you watched the last Saturn Month showcase that I did then you are probably aware that I mentioned that the difficulty of the Saturn version, was way harder than the difficulty of the Xbox Live Arcade version, well this got me thinking about difficulty in games and I'm going to share with you my thoughts.

Let's start by making a very simple and general statement, games are a lot easier now than they were a long long time ago.

Now, before anyone starts frothing at the mouth over that, I will say that this doesn't mean that games today are all cakewalks, it also doesn't mean that modern games don't have frustrating or difficult moments and I'm not saying modern games are bad in any way, shape or form.  It's all simply a case of the technology getting better and the gaming audience expanding.

Games today have become a damn sight easier, probably because there is just more people playing them now.  Not every "gamer" in 2012 has time to sit there for hours and get good at a game just to experience the story, so developers want to make stuff a bit more accessible to your every day guy or gal who just wants to experience the medium.  Also, with the fact that most people play online, the need to develop super difficult AI's is pretty much gone, you can deliver and experience with the single player and then leave the challenge up to the multiplayer.  After all, a human opponent will be way harder to figure out than a computer one ever will.

Also, games now are longer and this is a big factor when thinking about difficulty as well.  You had to pay £30-£40 for a new game on the Sega Megadrive back in the day, and the games aren't that long because of the technological limitations, so of course you'd have to make it super hard, just to get your moneys worth!

Now that's me being fair

While it's true that a lot of old games were "bullshit" hard, mainly because of bad design, modern game devs make games "bullshit" hard now just because they don't have a fucking clue how to make an actual challenge.  Let's take Darksiders as an example.  If you put the game on hard, all it means is that you take more damage, and the enemies have more health.  This is NOT challenge, dodging attacks is not a difficult thing to get good at after an hour or two of play, so it just makes things frustrating as you have to wail on a guy for longer.  Game developers today seem to have this bad habit of making games hard in the "bullshit" way, or just flat out way too easy at all times on any mode.

Old games were bullshit hard too, in a different way of course, but a well developed retro game feels fair in its difficulty whereas a well developed modern game, still feels bullshit in it's difficulty.  This isn't true for every game of course, but it's pretty commonplace.

So yeah, there's a little bit of an insight into what I think about difficulty in games.  Games I would breeze through as a kid now kick my ass, so it could be a case of me being bitter and wanting something to blame, but whatever, I'm still having fun with the medium anyway.

ADDITIONAL BIT:  A lot of games today also lock out the hard mode until you beat the normal mode, this needs to fuck off right now.  I like a challenge, so I like to put my games on hard, so don't fucking lock me out of it just because I haven't played your piece of shit game all the way to completion on normal, goddamnit