So, this isn't a 'games today are for BABIES!' post, but rather something of my own experiences.

I just recently got finished playing some Sega games from the late 1980s and early 1990s and oh man those games, for me, are SO much more difficult than today's games.

I mean, maybe it's just because AI reflexes and game structuring has gotten more fluid, but it does feel, in comparison, like modern games are MUCH easier than Sega and NES games of yore.

Anyway, do you think gaming has become easier as the years have progressed?

I'm a youngin' and only just started gaming a few years ago. The old people are going to have to answer this.

I'm 23. It's not hard, all you have to do is be willing to dig around for older games.

Gaming has becoming easier, but TBH it's a good thing. Games have advanced to more of a storytelling medium than they used to be, and it's not very fun being told a story that you're not allowed hear the end of because you're not good enough to surpass the level. It's also because, with the addition of more storytelling, the games don't have to be lengthened with the grindfest of difficulty anymore.

TL;DR Yes, modern games are easier, but it's for a reason.

Yes, and I say it's about freakin' time. I don't mean easy as in difficulty but I mean easier as in intuitive. For example, I loved the difficulty factor in Daggerfall but the UI and keyboard scheme was definitely in the clunky 90s style. And I don't mean that as a compliment.

UIs are much better now than before. And with GTA V, being able to advance in a mission after failing a certain number of times is a blessing for me. So yeah, I'm glad things are easier.

Perhaps.

But then, as you mentioned, some of that is due to more primitive programming/game mechanics/controls. Another factor was designing games (or porting games) from the arcades, where they were designed to kill you off right quick so you could keep shoving in quarters for continues. (Or making up for the fact your game was short by making it damned hard to get all the way through.)

Of course, another part of it is that the hobby is no longer as niche a thing, and games that cost huge $$$ to make need to be playable by huge audiences - so yeah, there's probably also a bit of "accessibility" involved. (Not that I have much problem with that - as I get older, I find myself less interested in banging my head against a particular fight or game mechanic dozens of times. Less time for all these games, too, leads to less patience with games that just obnoxiously force you to do things over and over and over to pad out their playtime and/or appeal to masochists. )

It's all relative I think, if you're a long-term gamer and you like, for instance, shooters then ultimately you will progressively find shooters easier the longer you play them due to repeated techniques/controls and judgement. It's obvious a long-time gamer will find a certain themed game getting easier as they grow (or level up in RL)

A good example is my own with my gf - she could kick my [censored] at tekken 3 but it's taking ages to introduce her to TES4 and get her accustomed to the controls and features to the point she doesn't get pasted by low-level bandit

The difficulty of classic games are called "false difficulty" as they often presented obsticles that were completely illogical ( like being touched once by any thing will kill you) or hazards you could only know about after they kill you. The purpose of false difficulty was to extend the amount of time it takes to play all the games content via forcing the player to start over several times.

Games now days have way more content and no one could ever see all of which if they were diliberatly so hard that you had to play each half hour piece several times just to memorize it well enough to progress.

Coddled, no, but definitely easier overall. Mainly because you don't have a bunch of instant death mechanics in every game.

There are still hard games being made today but they're usually indie and retro-style:

http://megaphilx.com/?page_id=26

http://store.steampowered.com/app/247240/

http://store.steampowered.com/app/239350/

Yes. Other things that contributed to "false difficulty": lack of saves; infrequent checkpoints; inflexible control due to technological limitation (ie. inability to "abort" character actions midway, because the animations needed to play out). And of course, fairly notoriously, the computer opponent having abilities/resources that were unavailable to the player.

I suspect talking about "difficulty" here as some sort of unified concept is pretty misleading here. Probably what has happened is that gamers now expect different sorts of challenges, and risk/reward structures in their games. It may be true that older games caused more frustration, and progress through the game was slower for beginners. But as Mirglof points out, that may have been created somewhat artificially.

For the most part, I think games have gotten easier.
But there are still games being made that cater to an audience specifically looking for a challenge.

Games have gotten way too easy nowadays.

I don't need any BS about it being because of story. They can have an amazing story while still providing a challenge.

Indie games I don't exactly count as they're not exactly what's out there being the "big thing." I'm happy with the direction that lots of indie games take, but I want my AAA games to be just as challenging.

Health regen, for example. Few if any games have a logical reason to have it there that ties in to the "story/character/whatever-bullcr@p-the-say" but all it is is a crutch for people who can't game.

I'm aware there are games that cater to "difficulty lovers" but I don't get games because they cater to difficulty, I get games that cater to my taste as a whole. It'd sure be nice to see games I like leaving behind the easiness of this generation.

Bottom Line: There is a reason "Easy Mode" was made. For people who can't game. The industry then turned "Veteran" to easy so these people wouldn't feel so bad; pathetic. Making the low end feel like heroes.

-Short pointless rant over

On the whole, I'd agree. I still encounter quite challenging games from time to time, and even in a number of relatively easy games there are certain levels or combat encounters that are incredibly tough to get through without dialing down the difficulty. Unfortunately the "challenge" is sometimes due to an annoying QTE, unskippable cutscene or minigame.

Dude. You're talking about playing video games.

Gaming is serious business. If you haven't (mis)spent your youth sitting in front of your computer beating every game ever made, you aren't allowed to expect to have fun playing contemporary video games.

One word. Casuals

Yes, a pastime for enjoyment. Playing an easy video game is like playing a sport against someone who completely svcks compared to you. It is boring as hell and makes you wish you could play against someone much better.

Pastimes are a part of life meant to enjoy, are they not?

_____

I don't blame "casuals" for any of this though, I'll say that. They've always been there, it's strictly the industry's fault for deciding to make them the priority. It's not like the casual gamers were out there protesting for easier games.

It's not always a good thing. The danger of total failure tends to make stories much more compelling than they would be if you always felt confident that you could just blow the end boss away. For example, the last boss of Cave Story is very, very hard, but when you manage to beat it you really do feel like a hero, at least more than you would if it was trivial as most modern game bosses are.

Actually, something that I also miss in modern games is the after-boss escape sequence. Some really nerve-wracking and tension building escape sequences that I can remember include the one from Super Metroid, Metal Gear Solid, and even the one from Ocarina of Time. Hardly any games do that anymore, which is kind of sad in my honest opinion because they tend to do such a great job at sustaining the tension a person feels after defeating the big bad boss.

I think it's more of a pendulum swing. Video games started out really easy. Think Pong, Space Invaders, Pac Man. They were simple controls that literally anyone could pick up and figure out what to do within 30 seconds, and so anyone and everyone played (and payed for) them. Then through the 80's and 90's games got more complex, controls got more complicated. If you had been gaming the whole time you might not notice it. The relative challenge stayed the same. But if you were new to it, there was a hell of a lot bigger learning curve, sometimes way too steep for too many people, and that kept gaming a niche industry. Now I think developers have a sense that they can expand their market to more people (and make more $$$) by making their games more accessible. I don't think that's a bad thing, personally.

Yeah for sure games are easier. Just in shooters for example, almost all shooters back before halo 2 had health, that didn't regenerate so you had to conserve over the entire level. Then add in harder controls, bad clipping and crappier animations and the games were way harder. But if you take out the hard control aspects, the games were still made to be more difficult overall.

It's gotten easier since the days that inspired the trope "Nintendo Hard", but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. First, early on there was a lot of games games which were, one might say, hard for all the wrong reason (poor controls, poor mechanics, poor design, that sort of thing), since it was a lot cheaper to make a game than it is now. Second, in a lot of these old games, even the good ones, there was no save feature- you had to beat it in one sitting, and if you got a game over, you had to start from the beginning.

I don't think they've necessarily got any easier than they've ever been. I was tempted to say they're more accessible, but I'm not sure that's even true. Personally I've always been a bit crap at the combat side of things whether it was some platformer 30-odd years ago or the latest super-duper 3D photo realistic malarky, so I quite like easy mode, but it seems that there's been ways of finding unnecessary difficulty right throughout that time that still exists today. I'm not even sure I understand the fascination with difficulty anyway, I prefer exploring a new world rather than spending all my time being shot at!

Personally? I feel like... hmm.... how to put this.

Back in the day, you had the arcade. Now, there was a very kind of niche home-brew market for PC games back in the early parts of the 70's, but arguably you wouldn't have the videogame industry as it is now without the economic impulse of the arcade boom. Those machines made a lot of money, and the early experiments with home-based gaming was essentially an attempt to cash in on the arcade game craze.

Now, when you're making an arcade game that makes a lot money, you're trying to design a game that makes you run through quarters rapidly, and on a regular basis. And on top of that, you want the player to have fun while they're doing it. You want people to want to put their quarters into those slots, and you want people lining up for a turn to put their quarters in. A player that can last fifteen minutes on one quarter is a good player, but they're not making you as much money as five players that can only last three minutes, obviously.

So early games were designed to be pretty difficult. You wanted a bit of a difficulty curve so that it didn't start out too tough, and you wanted just enough of a challenge that players could feel like they were getting better and improving their high scores. But basically if you were a game designer at that time, you were trying to make a game with the difficulty particularly balanced so that your average player was paying in at a pretty regular rate. I'm sure some of these guys had charts and graphs worked out and an ideal "quarter to play time" ratio they were going for.

So when the home systems start coming out, not only are a lot of them ports of popular arcade games, but the majority of the games were still largely influenced by this game design paradigm. People liked playing those arcade games, so those sorts of games were going to be more popular. Look back at most of your NES or Sega Master System collection, even, and you can see that clear influence in pretty much all of their games. Limited lives, pattern recognition, difficulty ramping, when you die you start back at the very beginning of the game, etc.

But economically, what works for an arcade game isn't necessarily best for a home system (and I'm lumping PC games in with "home system" at this point - by the mid-80's you have somewhat different markets, but my basic points still apply equally I feel.)

What you really want with selling a videogame for a console or PC is you want to build brand loyalty. You're making a one-time profit off of each game sale - it no longer matters how long the player plays your game, how often they will die, etc. Ideally, you want to make a game where the player is playing that game and not someone else's. You want each game to maintain that player's interest just long enough for your next game to come out, or to leave enough of an impression that when you do release your new game that they drop everything else and spend their money on that instead of a competitor.

So, naturally, some measure of playing into your target audience's power fantasies and ego is going to go a long way, here. Do you want the game that makes you feel like you're not very good at it, or do you want to play the game that makes you feel instantly powerful? (That's rhetorical, by the way.)

... And I'm kind of going off on a tangent, and it's actually really late and I've just come off a 13-hour shift. So before I lose my thought, here: THe thing to remember is that (barring DLC and micro-transactions,) unlike an arcade game, you're only making a one-time profit off modern games. You want to make a lasting impression, and there's no innate upside to killing the player (unless that's the niche you're trying to fill of course.) So you see things like checkpoints and game saves, etc - now instead of wanting to keep the player from "beating" the game, the impetus is more along the lines of... well, you put all this effort into making all these levels and characters and plot points and wouldn't it be nice if people could actually see all the work you put into it?

In short - yeah, games have become easier in many ways, and more user friendly. But I do feel like there's some pretty compelling reasons for why things are the way they are. And I also think it's important to keep in mind that if games are becoming easier for more mass appeal (though mass appeal has always been the driving force of the industry - where would we be now if everyone didn't get Pac-Man fever after all.) Anyways... it's also important to remember that back in the day games were difficult basically just for the sake of being difficult. And to make more money off you.