Are games too difficult or too easy?

[ozymandias1994]

I recently completed another Tomb Raider game from the new trilogy, and I can tell that those puzzles in tombs are hilarious, it's too easy, like matching correct form of item to appropriate socket, just reminds me of that Idiocracy scene 😆. Comparing to old Tomb Raider games this new one is much more easy. Maybe it's just this one game issue, because there are some new titles that kicked my ass even on normal.

Edited April 21 by ozymandias1994

[AlchemistWer]

The fact is not whether they are difficult or easy, you just have internet.

[GUDGER666]

7 minutes ago, AlchemistWer said:

The fact is not whether they are difficult or easy, you just have internet.

I remember the days of reading game guides and you could ring people up when you were stuck on a level. 

[Lord_of_Ra]

2 hours ago, RedDevil757 said:

The latest Forza game does that. With assists the game basically plays itself 😂

They do that for disabled people, so it makes sense.

 

On-topic: There’s difficulty selectors for a lot of games out there, and some are downright infernal to do on the hardest difficulties.

 

See Doom, GoW and Ninja Gaiden for example. They make Dark Souls look like a mid game.

 

I think the problem these days is that if you take Indies out, there’s way less variety in AAA, meaning less ways of making a game hard.

Edited April 21 by Lord_of_Ra

[vanessaking2]

Second I play is Grandia II and this game allows to alter the difficulty level at the beginning of the game.

However you must play on hard at all times for one trophy. 

 

I hate trophies which are difficult-related. It reduces the fun of a game.

[SuperPatchZ7]

Answering the OP I have more easy games that hard ones, obviously most of my games fall under the forgotten category of medium difficulty.

 

I tend to play games less focus on offering a challenge.

[wolvieware]

Since having kids I now only ever play on easy (don’t have no time to get good) and need to be able to save at any point. I need these options now just to be able to play 🤣

[Jerry_Appleby]

I would definitely say games are easier than they used to be. Of course though, there are still difficult games out nowadays. But I'd say the best measure of difficulty changes is to look at similar games/genres over the years rather than gaming as a whole.

 

For example, think of a random action/adventure game or open world game. All of them nowadays hold your hand and tell you exactly where to go and what to do.

Even doing puzzles in said games, if you don't figure it out right away a character will almost always say something like "I wonder if this item fits in this area." 

 

I like to be challenged when I play games. If you expect everything to be handed to you with no effort you don't learn anything and you become too entitled for everything else.

 

Funny enough, the same can be said about trophies too 😂

[ELVIN_THE_LION]

Does anyone go into a game completely blind ? ( Personally i only look at the difficulty and what online trophies involve )

There are so many places you can go to get an average rating on difficulty of a game ! ( And make your choice )

Personally i like a challenge and if the trophy can be earned solo i will....and have done !  ( apart from a hand full including some COD Ghosts Dlc trophies)

Easy games are easy ( just push this button 1000 times ) middle rated difficulty games have there challenges ( beat the game on hardest setting ) Hard games are obviously very challenging and I'm just not interested !!

In the end the difficulty of a game will be determined by the players skill and nothing else !!

Happy Gaming

Peace

 

[StraightVege]

Neither, I think. On the whole, I'm pretty satisfied with the wide variety of difficulty options available today. There's stuff catering to all skill levels and tastes, particularly if one broadens their horizons to experience the indie scene, and it's becoming increasingly common for games to include accessibility settings, allowing the player to tweak the challenge to their exact preferences/abilities.

 

Furthermore, I actually appreciate how quality of life features and some degree of hand-holding have become almost ubiquitous, since I don't consider it a meaningful form of challenge to have my finite time among the living wasted. Perhaps getting lost for hours without a proper map/objective markers, or needing to replay an entire game because I ran out of lives was tolerable when I was a little tyke, but it sure as shit ain't now. The industry certainly has its problems, but I don't find difficulty to be a significant issue one way or the other, personally.

 

It does occasionally become obnoxious, however, when a game treats you like an absolute dullard. Whether it's by frequently popping up text hints on the screen, or worse, having yapping NPCs constantly harassing you to do things you've already figured out for yourself, it's insufferable. Thankfully, I don't often play games which make this misstep.

 

As for there being any hard games I'm working on currently, no, but several toughies await in my backlog, which I've postponed starting thus far. I'm rather disinclined to play anything above an 8/10 difficulty rating these days, unless it's special enough to be worth the stress (exceedingly rare).

[AlchemistWer]

On 4/21/2024 at 9:44 AM, GUDGER666 said:

I remember the days of reading game guides and you could ring people up when you were stuck on a level. 

Haha me too. Buy a guide and read/use it while playing a good experience. Still, a lot of people buy them in Japan. 

[jjaammeess84]

On 4/21/2024 at 5:09 PM, ELVIN_THE_LION said:

Does anyone go into a game completely blind ? ( Personally i only look at the difficulty and what online trophies involve )

There are so many places you can go to get an average rating on difficulty of a game ! ( And make your choice )

Personally i like a challenge and if the trophy can be earned solo i will....and have done !  ( apart from a hand full including some COD Ghosts Dlc trophies)

Easy games are easy ( just push this button 1000 times ) middle rated difficulty games have there challenges ( beat the game on hardest setting ) Hard games are obviously very challenging and I'm just not interested !!

In the end the difficulty of a game will be determined by the players skill and nothing else !!

Happy Gaming

Peace

 

Yes...I've been in a bit of a slump recently just playing mediocre stuff that I couldn't care about for the sake of it. 

 

However, I knew it was coming but it wasn't overly on my horizon, but I bought Dragons Dogma day one, just caught my eye at the supermarket and I would almost never buy a game day one unless its a FromSoft souls borne..... but played intentionally entirely blind - and it was fantastic! I  know what I like, I knew this was my bag from DD1 but yeah, great game.  I did have to do a bit of tidying up at the end with another account just to squeeze out the platinum but it did make gaming a that bit more fun again 

 

Right now...I'm playing rise of the Ronin in the same manner.....cause sometimes trophy hunting for the sake of it gets a little boring cause of at the end of the day....does it matter..debatable............ but could I sell a game without getting the platinum???   probably not... I'm tied into the system at this point I think.

 

 

 

However, another question from the topic..... Baldurs Gate 3  - - -  I obviously love a good RPG but I honestly don't give much of a shit about the "RP" - I like the game aspect ...  I could skip the text in a heartbeat, hence souls borne fan, you could play the games with as much or as little knowledge of the story as you like and that's for me....... is BG3 gonna be up my street????  I can't decide, I'm leaning towards probably not cause it seems to be all dice rolls and stuff but is there more going on that I' not aware of?

[HamiTosh]

On 4/20/2024 at 7:35 PM, vanessaking2 said:

I currently play Baldurs gate 3 and boy this game is really tough to play.

I love RPG's but this one is really a challenge.  Do you have hard or easy games?

I think easy or difficult is more or less dependent on individual skill and talent.

For example racing can be difficult if you don't know the tracks, shifting,fuel, tires etc.

I sucked bad on F1 games and Moto GP but I got better at it by playing and having the muscle memory for break points,steering.

I sucked in Rainbow Six Siege, in the beginning I was overwhelmed by all the strats,operators,time pressure etc, but I got better.

All that saying I don't claim to be a pro or anything but you can always improve if you want.

Now these days ofc. A lot of games got those "assists" and "accessibility" settings and made playing for casuals easier.

Regarding multiplayer games,if you ask me if COD is difficult for me, I will say yes,bcz I can't compete with veterans who spent the last decade honing their skills.

My theory is that games overall will get more easy in general because, the vast majority of players wouldn't play the game anymore if it is too hard or unrewarding,I think in FIFA it's called the "momentum" when all of the sudden u r team plays like snit when u got the lead....

[vsvpl1501]

The average talent of the players has simply risen dramatically. This is particularly extreme in MP games. In League of Legends, for example, every silver player today is mechanically better than the pros 7 years ago.

 

20 years ago, gaming was still a niche. In my class, I was almost the only one who played video games and nobody was really interested in them. 
Games were extremely difficult. No guides (maybe books), no internet, games almost exclusively in English or Japanese. Almost nobody had fast internet or a reasonably good PC. 

Just as advances in technology have made life easier for us humans, this is also the case in the gaming world. Today there are guides, internet, millions of people who have tips, but also the games themselves: auto save, fast travel point, patches and so on

 

[DrBloodmoney]

On 4/21/2024 at 2:03 PM, mega-tallica said:

You didn't have that in the past. Most games had one set difficulty and it was usually hard af. But that was required back then to keep people playing the games for an extended period of time to get better at the game. Otherwise if the game was too easy, you could beat it within a couple hours then it feels like you wasted your money. And if your game was on the easier side, you had to make sure your game had high replay ability. 

 

Well said - I'd also add that the further we get from the original gaming days of the arcades, the less brutal games tend to be, because the developer mindset has changed as the goal changed.

 

For quite a while into the home-console timeline, games were still developed with the old arcade model somewhat in mind - home consoles were the in-home extension of the arcades, and back in the arcade days, the aim was to get as many quarters from the player as possible, so difficulty was key to financial success.

 

Once games moved to home console, it took quite a few years for the developer mindset to fully divest from those old design models, as that was what games had originally been designed for - making the player die often was part of what games were - and it took a bit of time for the arcade model to be diluted out of games, as the design of them adapted fully to the "this is for home-console, we expect the player to finish this narrative" rather than "we expect them to die, and put another quarter in the machine"  type scenario.

[Heather342]

On 4/23/2024 at 1:00 AM, jjaammeess84 said:

 

However, another question from the topic..... Baldurs Gate 3  - - -  I obviously love a good RPG but I honestly don't give much of a shit about the "RP" - I like the game aspect ...  I could skip the text in a heartbeat, hence souls borne fan, you could play the games with as much or as little knowledge of the story as you like and that's for me....... is BG3 gonna be up my street????  I can't decide, I'm leaning towards probably not cause it seems to be all dice rolls and stuff but is there more going on that I' not aware of?

If the narrative and world building aren't your thing, then it might not be a game you would like. BG3 is a heavily story driven game, but what makes it stand out is the sheer number of ways to play it. Your choices in this game really influence how the story plays out, the side quests aren't linear, the number of branching pathways is astounding, and then you add the dice rolling element to it. No two playthroughs of this game are the same. In terms of what this game has achieved it absolutely deserved to win all of those awards.