Before I really get into the problem though, I've got to talk about where I come into a disagreement with the series as well. Some of the guys who have been complaining about "easier" games are trying to bring gaming into a comparison of much older styles and execution. People who will tell you about how mario and contra were tougher than Knack and Call of duty. Well they're right, but maybe not for the right reasons. Back in the NES era you had a quite some challenge from the inferior designs. You didn't have saves, you didn't have much for checkpoints, lives were done just to throw you back to a game over screen and frustrate you into spending hours over again, and lets face it: it was too simple to control your fate but so well under how pressure. If you wanted a game with shooting enemies, it was probably on a 2D plane. It probably had some space ship, or laser gun scrolling along the side of the screen firing little laser balls at you. This can be done simple, and pretty easily, but what happens when you expect the game to get more difficult. Faster gunning? You can only do that but so much before your screen is just a bunch of fireworks and you made it into a bullet hell, and that's not "difficult" as much as it is an annoyance and just trying your patience. Especially if your options to fight this lie within moving, A, B, and select. It was mostly do or die, fast paced moving or death out of not dancing the right tune. You can't outsmart it, you can't train yourself against it, you remember its shooting pattern or find the only safe zone on the screen and get there as fast as you can. It's a fast paced memorization, or even just an outright reflex contest.... kind of like a certain casual multiplayer shooter that's popular now that is criticized for being for kids. Ok fine that's a bit of a stretch to make, but you can't deny some similarities between the difficulties here. In call of duty's multiplayer you can die because someone pulled the trigger first on you, in old games with certain ranged attack enemies you can die by the same exact principle of shooting speed. But to be fair, that's also the same thrill of it that people like. Speed masters, memorizing and doing that perfect run, and that joy of just not being shot on your one and only chance. Criticizing the defficulty, or lack of "true" difficulty, in call of duty or battletoads wont really change the fact that both games thrill players when they hit that perfect adrenaline and get a nuke killstreak or to the end of the stage.
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| Memorizing and reflex is all you can do to avoid the walls. How is that much of a challenge? |
Over time as games got more complex, they got easier out of just giving you more freedom and responsibility. For simply opening up another dimension to move in, you've made it harder for the player to die by just ranged attacks, or heck even if you put the enemy right up in someone's face you have more space to distance yourself, more buttons to tie attacks and defenses to, and more dynamic levels and bits of it that might help the player. However this complexity is a new opportunity for difficulty as well. Now if you want enemies with guns, you can go make a first or third person shooter with a full list of enemy AIs, quite a few gun types, there are a variety of health systems you can choose from with their own pros and cons, and your own character might be able to just do more to interact with the world and their enemy. For example, maybe it was "harder" to go down a strict hallway, but it is more advanced and entertaining to blow a hole in the wall and your enemy at the same time in some games with destruction. Maybe it was harder without cover, but now if you can take cover that's a better player option to add more options and thus keep the player from repeating gun fights with less options. This doesn't stop the challenge though, for everything you make you can do something to counter it. Have cover? How about AI that throws grenades. Have a large pool of health for the player? Well make it a static number that relies on resupplying at health packs that are distantly spaced, or placed in risky optional pieces. This is how you properly keep challenge through deeper gaming. You no longer have to go relying on a dumbed down binary difficulty that means you have to be perfect or die, and have that on a repeat until you get the player frustrated out of the game or gasping with relief at the finish line that everything is over with. Letting the player discover tactics, using them to overcome their obstacles, and letting them figure out pieces of how to achieve their victor and work successfully or fail and rethink their plans is far more rewarding than overcoming outright frustrating difficulty for many people. Don't get me wrong, you still have those guys out there that love time consuming rage inducing challenging arcadey simple games. You also have games meeting a very strange middle ground now, often in the form of rogue likes where they're built to kill you and put you back in the start of the game... yet also built to give you interesting new toys and features that open up player discovery and interactions. But for the most part, challenge through depth has came out of gaming since the older days. We went 3D, and it might not be as "hard" as a bullet hell shooter but it doesn't have to be.
However since then we still see gaming getting a bit easier. That cover mechanic for example is a bit abused in 3rd person shooters and now it's basically mandatory for the player as you have small regenerating health making it the obvious winner in any fire fight, and you also have waist high walls conveniently placed all over any battlefield for you. This takes an opportunity for tactics, intelligence, and knowing the battlefield... and dumbs it down into a very binary experience of running to any of the obvious cover spots #1-5, taking and receiving pot shots, hiding long enough for your health to go back up, and moving to the next room. Or your other option (used loosely) was sit in the open watching the color of your screen drain (as a health indicator) and die until you use the other plan. A pretty dumb experience there honestly, and unlike the older games full of cheap deaths and poor reaction times this style is often too easy and too telegraphed. What good is it to have depth if your going to drive it into a corner and make the player use all those things rather than giving them a real freedom with it and letting them figure out how to overcome the enemy? Even something as simple as making an old 100 point health system would make it much better, meaning you could only pop out of cover if you were SURE you wouldn't lose your health, only able to take risks if it was high enough or you knew a health pack was near. But... no, no game really has used that old system in a while, especially a 3rd person cover shooter (I can't name a single one right now honestly). Now don't get me wrong, I'm going to say that these games can still be entertaining. Uncharted is pretty big on this mentioned easy cover style, and it goes beyond that. Like the platforming that is basically down to just mashing the jump button to the next obvious climbing piece. Or melee combat which is mashing square unless the triangle "block" function pops up. Yet the series is still fantastic amounts of fun, and is an amazing example for the best and worst of triple A gaming yet it seems like the good is way more noticeable than the worst. Also a lot of these easy problems are solved in the competitive online world, where people are more unpredictable and cover and climbing has more strategy to it.
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| Hiding and shooting wont be quite as easy online |
Honestly I think I've pretty much covered all I wanted to say. The comparisons could continue quite a bit really, but it doesn't change much from my main point. I love difficulty by depth, and I think that's where games are losing it a bit and the "golden" age never honestly had much of it either as much as some want to say. I wish games would stop going in the route of making things "easier" by removing the depth. Health regen isn't exactly deep, nor is making your character glass on elite difficulty a better challenge. It's just annoying. You get a real challenge out of the need to learn your weapons or tools, your enemies, and having mechanics that work with or against you based on how you use them. Sometimes this may not lead to the most tough games... Serious sam is a good game for depth yet it isn't exactly as tough as battletoads, or ghosts and goblins, and honestly I think putting Call of duty or battlefield 3's campaigns up on the highest difficulty would be tougher than Serious sam's easier difficulties. Yet people who want a true challenge, or get their head working towards thought for risk and reward success would probably prefer it more. Instead of giving you low health that forces you into hiding or a very quick death, it gives you a lot of health but asks that you stay in charge of it and look out for refills. The game wont do that for you. Serious sam gives you a full set of guns, but if you go firing off your rocket launcher all the time you wont have ammo when it really counts. I could go on. Honestly even games that do strip mechanics and depth can also give it back in surprising areas. Take the original bad company for example. It has one main gun slot, infinite resupply of health, and can rip apart the battlefield at your will. But the one gun rule makes you think hard about how you'll be fighting. If you are doing good at close quarters, shotguns will be great and yet when you need a ranged gun it's your own fault and an honest mistake that adds to the challenge. You may also find that assault rifles are all around amazing guns, but when it forces you to choose a grenade launcher over throwing them you'll find that one really irritating enemy that you know could be fixed by a grenade toss you don't have. That infinite health bit is a recharging tool you have, and in order to use it you need to stop your own fight, get to a safe zone, put down your gun and inject yourself with health. This means you'll have to think about your recoveries or if you can risk holding onto your gun for the fight a bit longer. Destruction is a powerful tool, but the enemy can use it to and you can end up destroying too much and finding yourself lacking cover. I feel like uncharted multiplayer also follows a similar idea of giving you usual dumbed down rules, and then turning them on their head in a weird way that keeps the player conscious and on edge over their decisions on how they use them. Games like this that cleverly change up the pace from the usual deep game choices, or very simple and dumb ones, are quite interesting and are worth playing for their own weird little way of being difficult.
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| This isn't as simple and dumb as it looks |
Games like Serious sam, Dragon's dogma, Duke nukem, Space marines, Dishonored, and a few others are quite interesting as a challenge, not because they're a dark souls or battle toads game that stresses you with constant deaths, but because they are deep and allow you to stay on top of your choices for the big victory. I don't think this style is exactly dying, but it is sad whenever I hear people cheer on a multiplayer shooter with low reflex health, or an action title that is filled with button mashing themed gameplay and these are becoming quite common to see. But we still have games with depth, and games that try to turn the usual easy bits on their heads in weird ways that get us thinking. We're also always going to have some form of the old school style of difficulty, rage quite inducing platformers and simplistic games that make you do it their way or die. They're simple to make, simple to pick up, and yet have a bizare unique drive that gives it an audience. So I can't say difficulty in any form is going to go dying, so no matter how you find your challenge... don't worry. But I do think the mass marketing and simplistic easy depth lacking games are becoming a little too common for some people to be comfortable.
