I have just finished playing Dead Money for Fallout: New Vegas, and I HATED that DLC. I just couldn't wait for it to be done. Then I got thinking why I hated it. It was a trial and error type game. I had to die alot of times before I figure it out. For me it was not much fun, I even put the difficulty level down for 1) I hate bullet sponeges, and here we go again that DLC are bullet sponges enimies, and 2) found the game too hard so wanted to finish the game as soon as possible.

I love Morrowind. I know it was a very hard game to play sometimes, but when I finally figured it out, I was very happy. Yes I had to come to the forums for help when I was stumped. So now after playing Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, have I got to use to the hand holding, and I can't think for myself anymore. Am I so use to that Arrow indicator, I don't know how to live without it anymore? I know in DM, I used it all the time so I can get the heck out of there when normally I have like the Nirn Root quest on in Oblivon or something else in Fallout 3 or NV that I am not using.

After playing DM, I feel so stupid now. I don't play many games except for Bethesda titles so now I am wondering if Bethesda has dumbed me down, or Streamlined me too much now. I can't seem to function without the quest indicator now, well at least for DM wich seems to be a game made for us to think, but being so use to Oblivon, Fallout 3, and New Vegas without DLC, it seems I don't know how to think anymore.

So have I become just a "common gamer" now? I am in my 40s now, and games have changed so much when I first played eons ago . It seems I don't want to really think or work really hard when playing a vido game now.

I wonder now, am I alone here, or has this happend to other people as well now? I guess for the younglings, they will not know what playing video games 20 years was like so this is normal for them, but how about the more seaoned gamers, or vetrans gamers. Do you feel you have been dumbed down and can't think as much anymore or be bothered to play harder type games anymore?

Just curisous if I am alone in this or not.

:fallout: :tes:

The day of hard games that take a lot to figure out and get into are over, sadly. Casual gamers just don't like it. It's why they streamlined WoWs starting zones, they are a joke now, the most absurd hand holding you can imagine, you hit level 15 in 10 minutes.

Developers need to make money, and the biggest users of games these days are teenagers who have an Xbox 360. CoD fans, twitchy FPS junkies. So devs, even RPG devs, design around this so that they will reach a bigger audience.

I don't blame them, since piracy and gaming resells kill the market for their profits. They need to make as much money as possible. It's the same thing as when an artist makes an album, artist don't get rich anymore. Artist "make it", but artist do not get absurdly rich like they used to in the 80's off an album. It just doesn't happen anymore because of piracy.

Take Lil Waynes Carter IV for example. The Carter IV doesn't come out until the 29th of this month. But the album was leaked, and is now available for download just about anywhere, and everyone knows it. Guess who's buying the Carter IV? A lot less people.

It's a shame that sales has a higher priority than quality these days.


Piracy is not a new phenomenon, nor is it an excuse.

I don't understand the obsession with hard = fun. I want to play a game, not spend 4 hours dying. Sure, a game needs challenge to be fun, but making something frustrating doesn't make it a supperior experience.

P.S. Fallout NV is by Obsidian

Artists don't get rich from album sales, they get rich from tours and merchandise. It's the label that makes it big off albums.

Piracy is relatively new in our society, as is the internet. Unless you're 13 years old. Then the internet is life. But most advlts can verify that the internet is "new", it hasn't been around forever, and it has crippled artist in terms of sales because of piracy.
The internet didn't invent piracy, either. It just opened up an entirely new option that made the problem worse 10 fold.

http://www.blujay.com/1/385/3005008_s1_i1.jpg

"The DLC was too hard so I lowered the difficulty and now it's too easy."

Right...

True. I keep thinking of the alarmist "home taping is killing music" campaign in the late '70s, whereas in reality it was probably a very effective free marketing campaign.

Edit: indeed that's what Lady Nerevar linked to - I should've checked first! :facepalm:


I've never really understood that either: in fact to take it further, you'd be forgiven for thinking that something mustn't be fun in order to be fun. :unsure:

It depends on what game it is. NES games were hard because that was the point, overcoming the difficulty was the goal of the game.

Story based games don't really need to be hard, but a little challenge is better than the cakewalk some of these modern games are.

Yeah, FO:NV was made by Obsidian.... I would assume that the DLC would also be made by them.

I guess I'm one of the low-brow casual gamers that hates chasing my tail for an hour trying to figure out some minor thing that totally stalls the quest's progression until I unlock it. After the waste of time I finally look up a cheat on the internet, do the minor hokey-pokey that was holding me up and move on. Then I feel bad and stop playing altogether.

Yeah, I hate overly esoteric games. It doesn't make me feel smarter, it just frustrates me (and that isn't fun).

DM wasn't made by bethesda.. right? Am I missing something?


I might as well put my statement here:
(I thought of doing a separate thread at some time, but I'll post it here instead)

Statement: Old School RPG's that rely on character skill instead on player skill were popular because at the time, players weren't skilled.

True or false? :vaultboy:

What time period are we talking about?

I'm gonna go with false though.

Well I'm not talking about morrowind, that's a little bit too new. even daggerfall might be too new, not sure. But older RPG's than those

Simpliefied is something that every company did to appeal the "new masses"



Exactly,

I just want the gameplay to have some depth, regardless of difficulty.



Hey, you can laugh, but cassettes will be the death of the music industry, just like LPs, wax cylinders and smoke pens were!

Even in the 1970's/1980's they had arcade cabinets with games like Space Invaders, Galaga, Pac-Man. They may be simple, but those games required skill.

The NES era probably had some of the hardest games in video game history. In those days if you didn't have skill, you simply couldn't finish the game; not like now where almost every game is beatable by a chimp.

As for early PC games, there was Wolfenstein and Doom and a slew of difficult shareware titles.

Everyone have a different definition of what is "fun"

Some people dont want to die and just grab a weapon and shoot everything on sight with gore, lasers, explosions, more explosions, more gore, gorexplosions, ects

Others find the challenge, "fun", if not challengin, then its not fun,

This me, If a game is too hard, its not fun, if is too easy, not fun either, it must be challenging. Im not going to pass at first time, neither the second, ot third time, maybe after some tries I will, whats the point of not dying for commiting an error in you gameplay? you will not be alive forever

Yes but I'm talking about those RPG's where knowledge is power and skill doesn't count. Where you as a player, no matter how hard you try, can affect if your character hits the enemy or not. :biggrin:

But that statement is purely philosophical and hypotetical, truth be told. :spotted owl:

Yes I know that. That is what I mean. I played a DLC that wasn't made from Bethesda, and now I feel stupid for playing it. I played something that is non Bethesda, and I had trouble playing and needed my hand held to play it.

I wouldn't blame Bethesda for it; that's just where the market goes. People like to think that their favorite companies are somehow "above" what the rest of them do, but...they're not. Accessibility and mass-appeal are the name of the game today, and high difficulty tends not to do much for either.

The problem isn't whether an especially hard game is "fun". Look at puzzle games, what exactly is the point if they're not, you know, puzzling? Puzzle games don't appeal to everyone, and so, not every game is a puzzle game. It's pointless to wonder how a hard game is supposed to be fun and not frustrating if you don't like that type of game in the first place. The problem is that the size of the industry takes these specialized games as a casualty. The extremely complex, oldschool RPG's are basically not made anymore. A company could make two different games and please both audiences, but no, a game costs millions of dollars now and needs to reach millions of people; you make the more popular one, only. Make an easier game, and people complain that it's not hard enough. Make it harder, and others complain that it's too hard. You can't please everybody, and with the way the industry works now, the majority are the only ones ever catered to and the minorities (in this case, those who like especially hard games) go insane and appear obsessed to the majority, who don't understand that they may not have had a game released that's targeted at them for ten years. They see all the big yearly blockbusters and just wonder what people complain about.

Also worth noting is that people inevitably prefer what they're used to, or grew up with, or whatever. In olden tymes a lot of games were based on their arcade brethren, which were obviously meant to be insanely hard for the sake of quarter-eating. They were also a lot shorter than they are now (have you seen how many people complain about the 4-6 hour singleplayer campaign of a Call of Duty game? How many non-RPG NES games were half that length?). Many didn't even have a save function, and being expected to be beaten in one shot, were pretty short. They were also pretty HARD to compensate, so that you couldn't just play it through once and be done with it forever. Numerous retries expanded their life. I don't know how many times I replayed Blaster Master, hoping that THIS time my adventures would continue past that abominable crab. For the generations of gamers who grew up with these games, it's no wonder that many modern games strike them as boringly easy.

But on those notes, yes, it's entirely possible you were "spoiled" on modern games. You get used to things. When you're used to hard, it doesn't seem so hard. When you get used to easy, hard gets annoying inordinately fast.

I find that there's a fine line between what's a challenge and what constitutes a chore, and it varies according to my mood, so it's a hard thing to pin down. It's a personal matter, really, but I think it becomes a problem when you see some people trying to impose their idea of fun on someone else, to the point where they actively interfere with their game such as by giving them bad advice (their excuse being that it's more "challenging", e.g. the infamous "give the Skeleton Key to Martin" in Oblivion) as well as not being entirely honest about their own gaming style (e.g. the person who claimed "Oblivion is easy on the hardest difficulty" and shortly afterwards posted their config for a spot of debugging, which revealed that they had the difficulty set to about 20%). I'm not sure what conclusion to draw, if any, but it's a subject where there's a lot of posturing.

I resent your claim that us FPS junkies don't like high skill requiring games. My favorite Elder Scroll's game is Daggerfall.

Average gamer. Average. The "average" FPS Call of Duty FPS junky does not like games that require skill..they like..call of duty.