Oh, well I'm a TF2 man myself.

It really depends on how easy you give up. Some gamers these days, regardless of age, give up on first sign of defeat.

The word casual has been really twisted to an unspeakable angle these days. few years ago, casual games can be really really hard, but they got many "save points" for you to try to complete them while on the bus, on the train, while waiting for friends or lunch break. Casual in no way means easy, it only means you got only little time, and need to have fun for say 10 minutes or possibly less. NDS was the icon of casual games portable and with adequate to hardcoe difficulties. No casual and hardcoe weren't opposite, I have no idea who brought this up and turned defination of casual into such brainless excuse of making lazy games.

Don't blame Bethesda for making you dumb. That's all on you.

I have no idea, either, how casual came to mean "brainless". I still go by the old definition: a casual player is someone with limited play time. One of the reasons I tend to stay away from mmo's is because of the too often required massive timesinks (EQ2 being one of the worst offenders, imo).

I think a better way to put it, instead of casuals, is "players with extremely short attention spans". And even then I'm not so sure that covers it. I assume by casual, people mean those who can't be bothered to read, explore, or do anything on their own and need constant in your face action.

Well I can blame Bethesda. In Arena, I had to think, same for Daggerfall and Morrowind. It all started in Oblivion, when Bethesda "streamlining" the game and continued it with Fallout 3. Well maybe what is my fault is that I only play Bethesda RPG games and no others.

So I can say Bethesda has "conditioned" me to the current level of Oblivion/Fallout 3. So now when something like Dead Money comes along, I can't do it no more.

Same way "oldschool" came to mean "elitist". People enjoy taking sides and then declaring the opposing side to be everything wrong with the world.

I'm totally with the OP. Forgive me if "Casual" and "RPG" in the same sentence doesn't make any sense to me, I'm an old timer who started his role playing career with Ultima I.

Agreed I'm a young gamer (Age 15) But my Dad kept talking about Mario and Pacman so thats where I started.

I disagree, and I'm an old gamer: I started playing in the 1970s, but I find the "more awesome than thou" thing to be a bit tedious.

I'm glad that we've got back on topic, and please let's stick to it!


I think you answered your own question: you're in your 40s now.

The average gamer, which you so disparage, is now aged over 30. That means a number of things - including, of course, that your synapses don't fire as fast as they did when you were 18, and you can't pick up new skills as quickly - but mostly that your life is completely different.

Lessee ... I'm your average 30-something gamer. I get up at 6.15 every morning, and am dressed and ready and in the kitchen by 6.30 every morning to make breakfast. I'm at work for 7.30 and don't get home until after 6pm, after which I have to make dinner, wash up, do any chores around the house and finally slump on the sofa for 7pm to watch TV with my husband. From 8pm-9pm is the time I'll put in moderating, flipping between screens as I research and write things for my blog or anything I contribute to. After that, there's maybe half an hour to fit in a few minutes' gaming before I'm just too exhausted to concentrate and thinking about going to bed. I spend 99% of my gaming-time playing Bejeweled Blitz and Torchlight because that's about all I can cope with by that point.

So if by some miracle I find myself playing an RPG, the very last thing I want to be doing is wasting those precious few minutes' gaming time wondering where the [censored] that puzzle box is.

To me, games like Morrowind were just frustrating. I found "the temple is to the left, over a bridge, over another bridge, past a sign and then through some trees" to be pretty stupid, and the beautiful "you missed" combat system until you got into the higher levels, along with names you couldn't pronounce and aggravating quest dialogue where you'd end up looking on the internet to figure out why this NPC won't give you the information you need even after you've bribed them 1000 gold.

You should avoid most of the older RPG then

That's so weird, I didn't have those problems.

I have no intention of playing older RPGs

That's the way it is for everyone these days. Every game company is more concerned about, "how little can we give them for the most price and biggest sales?" That was one reason they went against the trend of previous TES games and went for the Teen rating on Morrowind. They wanted a larger audience, and were willing to sacrifice a few long-time loyal customers for the gain of a few extra customers. Of course by the time Oblivion rolled around, they had the sense to realize that teens end up with mature games anyway, so why limit yourself to the restrictive ESRB teen rating. But they didn't go with Mature just because of the customers; they did it because they knew going for Teen wouldn't make enough extra sales to warrant all the demands they'd have to meet for that Teen rating.

And all games have gone the path of "easy" because gamers are no longer the small exclusive group that they used to be. A large part of that can probably be linked to the video game crash of 1983. Nintendo had to market themselves as a toy and a children's game in order to even get the companies in America to sell their products, there was so much distrust of the video game market at that time. And the games Nintendo released were much in keeping with that concept. The games were all very cartoonish and appropriate for all ages.

A whole new generation of kids was now playing games that were simple, addictive and fun, while the previous generation was still playing (and enjoying) games that had no hints, no walk-throughs, no HUD with pointers, and very few with difficulty settings. With trial-and-error games like "Out of This World" you were gonna die dozens upon dozens of times before you solved the puzzles and could proceed - no way around it. The challenge was enjoyable back then, but the successive generations got used to very simple games. Don't get me wrong, there were still many niche games and difficult games, and as difficulty settings became the norm, people could have their fill of anything from easy to insane - whatever they wanted. But the hardcoe gamers were a minority, and targeting a minority group for sales is just a bad business move.

I don't always like it, but I have to agree that the companies do need to follow certain patterns to make sales, especially as game-development costs continue to skyrocket. You aren't dealing with games that take a few weeks and a handful of people to design anymore. Games are becoming like movies now, with dozens and even hundreds of people involved in the process from start to finish, astronomical development costs, and years of production. It's just too dangerous of a business model to take risks with such huge investments riding on the line.

Like I said, I don't always like the results of that, but in this age of games, that's just what we have to accept. Most companies do try to play a balancing act of meeting as much of the wishes of as many of their customers as possible, but in the end they are going to have to make compromises. And as everybody knows, the simple fact of the matter is that you can't please all of the people all of the time.

I'd like to see today's typical gamer try to get through one of the old Infocom text adventures from the 80s. It would be sheer torture. And those cabinet games like Pac Man and Centipede were brain dead in comparison to even the most basic FPS today.