Are modern games easier or simply designed better?

http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/13/difficulty-vs-design-are-games-now-easier-or-simply-designed-better/

by dmoney67 • 13 years ago

30 53 13 years ago

I've asked myself the same question after recently playing Battle Isle 1 again... Seems to me like the learning curve of modern games was so much shallower. But this is of course only one example and not representative as such.

drawkbox• 13 years ago

Limited time and a leaning towards mobile/casual has led to very simplistic intros to games.

The best games are simple to play, hard to master.

Back in the day games like Zelda or Metal Gear on the NES were very hard without a Nintendo Power Mag and maps (they even used to have a Nintendo hotline for players stuck). Mega-man is freaking hard, pixel level mess ups. I played Mega man 9 with throwback sprite single buffer flicker and difficulty, it wasn't as fun.

Plus all this was pre-internet and pre-mobile with much less entertainment vying for our attention. Games should be fun, usually that means simple to get started, but deeper and harder to master still needs to be there.

I have always thought the mobile appstore type gaming handheld market we have now is closer to the experimentation of the arcades and back then it was all in-app purchasing only tied heavily to progression (via quarters/tokens). Now it is to deepen the experience and customize it for the most part. Customization was very minimal then. I really think this is the best age to be a game developer and game player. The console markets stopped many great game devs from entering and helping to propel that market, mobile and web gaming has no such limitation to their benefit.

sharkweek• 13 years ago

I remember playing Ocarina of Time for N64 shortly after we got internet connection at my house in 7th grade.

Like many people, I got stuck at the water temple. I tried for weeks to figure that stupid level out. One of my friends linked me to a site (I think I had been complaining to him over AIM about how difficult it was) that had a walk through. I stared at that link for days, sitting in my internet explorer bookmarks, internally debating whether or not to use it, before finally giving in to just use the walk through...

I went on to beat the game shortly after, never able to fully accept that victory, as I had cheated my way through a major part of the game.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

The best games are simple to play, hard to master.

Not sure how I feel about this statement. Such games are certainly excellent examples of what a game is. Chess is a classic example. But I derive quite a lot of enjoyment from more complicated games that are also hard to master.

Zardoz84• 13 years ago

DooM for example

yareally• 13 years ago

A lot of older games abused "cheap" ways to make the game more difficult (though still sometimes happens today, but not as often). Games of today, in some cases I think have been watered down for the sake of letting a more casual game player beat them before getting overly frustrated. However, not all games are like that and some of the games I've played in recent years are as hard as they come if you're upping the difficulty. If you're playing on easy/normal, then that's the issue :)

Just some things I recall from really bad games in the 90s and early 00s:

-Only having one or a few lives for the entire game

-No saves/continues (usually combined with the above)

-Ridiculously short timers for getting through an area

-No health meter (one hit and you're dead)

-Having to go back through areas of the game you already beat to do some inane mission that's slightly different and feels like it was added to pad the difficulty/play time

-Spawning for the sake of having more fodder thrown at you (or spawning in ridiculous areas like the ledge you're about to jump to and the enemy was not there before jumping). I still hate spawning to this day in most cases. If you just left an area and destroyed everything in sight, it should not be totally rebuilt as soon as you turn around.

-Unfairly slanting difficulty towards enemies (like bullets that travel through objects, while yours do not)

-Dying and having to restart a huge level all the way from the beginning

-Poor clipping so your weapon passes through enemies unscathed or you get hit by an enemy when you shouldn't have. Also clipping that results in you missing a platform when you clearly didn't.

-Poor controls (still a problem now, but nowhere as bad as it was)

My list is nowhere complete though and I'm sure others have plenty of annoyances to amend it with.

ShirtlessRod• 13 years ago

TV Tropes has an endless supply of these: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard

Great for nostalgia. :)

galaktor• 13 years ago

see also Angry Video Game Nerd [1] for some examples of accidentally difficult game design in older games.

[1] http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/

tadfisher• 13 years ago

-Only having one or a few lives for the entire game
-No saves/continues (usually combined with the above)

Sometimes these mechanics define a genre, such as roguelikes. Permadeath and single saves makes games like Nethack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup nail-biting experiences that keep you striving to improve, even though these turn-based games give you all the time in the world to plan your next move.

Granted, the audience for this kind of game is self-limiting, and the games themselves are designed around replayability. But you see new games such as Demon's Souls/Dark Souls use similar negative-reinforcement techniques to create truly engaging experiences that some people find fun and addicting.

I can't tell you how many times I've lost a Nethack character in the Astral Planes, losing hundreds of thousands of turns and sometimes weeks of effort just before the end. But each time I died, I learned how to counter yet another combination of states that resulted in my death, and Nethack finally became boring when I could ascend in a few hours. This point took me 16 years to reach. Very, very few modern games can reach that level of engagement.

epsylon3• 13 years ago

But you see new games such as Demon's Souls/Dark Souls use similar negative-reinforcement techniques to create truly engaging experiences that some people find fun and addicting.

In fact, Dark Souls teaches you patience. You don't die a lot if you are sufficiently careful. There are a few unexpected traps but those are rare. Most of the time you will have to progress carefully, gauging the terrain, the aggro ranges of the monsters, carefully dodging and blocking their attacks until you understand their moveset enough to land counterattacks.

Dark Souls is a game of learning, but boy it is rewarding. You will find yourself storm easily through areas of the game that gave you a hard time once you have learned to take it slowly. But you could also die easily on very weak monster (like the torch Zombies when you return to the asylum) if you just think you can run and mash buttons without caution.

I have found it to be one of the most enjoyable gaming experience of these last years, and have poured much more hours into it that I would have liked to.

nextstep• 13 years ago

Some old games only had 50 or 100 levels and were intended for repeat play. So the developers made some games super hard so that people could get many hours of play out of them.

vacri• 13 years ago

These aren't mutually-exclusive qualities.

gegtik• 13 years ago

Here is a viewpoint I found fascinating, viewing the refinement as a net loss:

http://storify.com/gegtik/j-chastain-on-primitive-gaming

edias• 13 years ago

A interesting comparison I think is between Starcraft 1 (1998) and Stacraft 2 (2010). In the original Starcraft you were constantly fighting against the game engine. Unit pathing, spell casting and a several glitches which players could utilize (most notably mutalisk stacking) made the game incredibly challenging to do anything, let alone pull off complex strategies. The speed at which you could perform actions was crucial to being a top player. Stacraft 2 introduced several mechanics that made the game substantially easier. Multiple building selection allowing you to produce units from several buildings at once rather than selecting each individually. Increased unit selection from 12 to 255, the max you would realistically expect to hit. Better unit pathing so players need to focus less on army control and numerous other changes.

The down side of this is that many argue the mechanical difficulty of SC1 helped make the game so competitive and the sequel is inferior in that sense, which I agree with but think there are numerous other reasons for that as well.

If any of you want me to expand on or explain anything just let me know. Starcraft is really the only thing I talk about on the internet.

Edit* This is what I mean by mechanical difficulty [1]. RTS games, especially the Stacraft series, are extremely difficult just by the nature of the game.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4UTDudShDY

Dewie5• 13 years ago

The way to solve that is "just" to increase the skill ceiling in some other dimension. Warcraft 3 has easier macro mechanics than SC2 - five workers per gold mine, less expands, less unit-producing buildings, wood as a resource is often a non-issue - but makes up for it by having a higher skill-ceiling when it comes to micro mechanics.

You could for example make larvae inject optionally auto-cast, as long you add some other mechanic that the zerg have to (or should) worry about (like more complicated creep spreading, for instance).

_pmf_2• 13 years ago

Getting 3 "achievements" or "trophies" just for playing through the tutorial (or, in Mass Effect 2's case, sitting through the tedious opening sequence introducing the cheesy and badly written travesty EA seems to regard as a "plot") is a bit off-putting. Maybe targeting 13 year old suburban ADD patients requires constant cheap attention grabbing to prevent these people from playing one of their 47 other games if there is a tiny obstacle.

fhd2• 13 years ago

While I don't agree with your prejudices, I do believe you're on spot here by saying that choice is one of the major factors in games becoming ever friendlier.

Not only are there considerably more games today, being pushed out with considerably more marketing. We're living in the age of free to play, where the next free game is just a download away. To make any kind of money in F2P, the developers need to keep players playing, so that they'll eventually pay. Basically the same goes for selling DLC.

So I'd say the lack of difficulty is mostly caused by how games are monetised these days.

whateverfor• 13 years ago

Just so you know, those achievements are like tracking cookies: the video game companies can't just send home whatever data they want, but they can see achievement data. So that achievement was just to see how many of the people who bought the game actually started to play, to provide a baseline for how many (go halfway/beat the game/play the multiplayer/anything else they can jam in an achievement).

_pmf_2• 13 years ago

I never thought of this; it does make more sense now. Thanks!

Steko• 13 years ago

In Pac Man the endgame was that the ghosts moved faster and if you didn't get there you didn't miss much. Early hardware limitations meant "just make it harder" was often used to extend games. Today they just put in more content, which costs money and they want the player to experience.

columbo• 13 years ago

Eh... yes and no.. and in some cases oh-god-no (http://thelettervsixtim.es/)

When I was able to get a hold of arcade/snes/nes games on emulators I replayed all of my hardest games. I beat all of my top twenty in a weekend.

How? Because all the emulators came with Quick Save & Quick Load. F5 and F6 are the major reasons why games are easy these days. It's a night and day difference. Playing some of the ultra-hard NES games became a walk in the park; really just repeat the last action until success. I even beat the arcade versions of Ghosts & Goblins, then Ghouls and Ghosts in about an hour for each.

I've been playing a ton of nethack lately and I really wish games like Skyrim and other open-world-games had a 'permadeath' difficulty setting. Sure, I can choose to play that way, but I like it incorporated into the game. I want a system where it difficulty is just a percentage of more guys & less ammo, rather difficulty should be a fundamental change to the game.

joshschreuder4• 13 years ago

VVVVVV was great fun. I couldn't recommend it for everyone, but it was a challenge, and that challenge made it satisfying to complete. The best part was that it wasn't unclear what you had to do, it was just hard and skillful to achieve it, so I never had to turn to a guide.

I feel quite similar with Hotline Miami. It's a tough game and you die a lot, but it's extremely satisfying plotting your strategy and executing it to success.

daeken• 13 years ago

If you liked VVVVVV, go play Super Hexagon (preferably on a mobile device). It's the same designer, and oh god, it's the most amazing game I've ever played. It's brutally hard, but never frustrating, and it forces you to get better. Absolutely worth the $3.

chii2• 13 years ago

Speaking of the quick save/reload reminds me of why Braid is so good - its designed so that mistakes aren't costly, and the player is encouraged to explore and not fear making an error and loosing progress.

Games _should_ be designed that way.

joshschreuder4• 13 years ago

I think it depends on the game and the experience desired by the creator. For something like Day Z, you want the progress lost when dying to be part of the story and the experience.

For something where the overarching narrative is featured, like Braid / Journey, I think the quick restarts are just as important.

Kaali• 13 years ago

Older gamer used multple cheap techniques to prolong the otherwise short games. But I do think that many of the modern games are really easy by design, when compared to the old games.

For example the 8-bit and 16-bit era games are skill based, where you have to dodge multiple bullets, have good reactions to enemies and even the environment around you. And you are punished for your mistakes; which sometimes borders on cheap tactics.

Many modern games have reduced to button smashers with little to no need for any other than simple timing skills. Shooters have autoaim, and with normal difficulty levels you are a bullet sponge, even a rocket might not kill you. Of course there are a lot of exceptions, and higher difficulty level in some games can help.

The games can still be really enjoyable regardless of the design change. But the ongoing evolution to more cinematic gameplay is really worrying to me. For example, Ryse: Son of Rome, that was revelaed for XBox One an E3, looks really great visually, but the gameplay seems more or less like Simon Says. You as the player are included in amazing set pieces, by letting you press one button at a time, as soon as the game tells you to; and see how the game character and the world reacts to that.

It's a scary trend to me, that the stories cannot be told by the gameplay anymore, but with cutscenes where you have little or no effect on the result. There is a world of difference letting me as the protagonist struggle and get better, than having a non-player character tell me that in a cutscene.

chii2• 13 years ago

Its interesting you mention the cutscene style story telling - most games do employ this now, simply because its the easiest way to direct an experience.

really good games like portal doesn't do this, but i imagine the sort of effort required, and a lot of AAA publishers just aren't willing to take such a risk. So the root cause is the high producitno costs associated with games causing it to become liek this.

epsylon3• 13 years ago

Shooters have autoaim

Only on consoles, though.

For example, Ryse: Son of Rome, that was revelaed for XBox One an E3, looks really great visually, but the gameplay seems more or less like Simon Says. You as the player are included in amazing set pieces, by letting you press one button at a time, as soon as the game tells you to; and see how the game character and the world reacts to that.

Worse, the QTEs are actually automatic : http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/06/why-ryse-is-the-most-frustr...

keypusher• 13 years ago

Interesting premise, and a few years ago I might have agreed wholeheartedly that modern gaming is pandering to the masses and has become too easy. But then along came games like Dota 2, Day Z, Dwarf Fortress, Path Of Exile, and Dark Souls. The learning curve to not embarrass yourself in a public game of Dota 2 is probably around 100 hours. It has some fiendishly obtuse rules and requires split second reflexes as well as in depth knowledge of the metagame as well as deep domain knowledge of the item tree and hero skills. And it is by far the most popular game on Steam right now, with over 400,000 concurrent players online some days and over a million logging in each month, not to mention a very active competitive scene. Path Of Exile has proven to be a very successful action RPG where the most respect is earned by playing "hardcore mode", that is reaching the endgame without a single death. Speaking of permadeath and difficult games, look at DayZ. No instructions, no tutorial, permadeath, weird bugs and glitches, dropped in an open world military sim with zombies running around and the map is in Russian. That's pretty difficult, and it was a smash hit. It's similar to the resurgence of other roguelikes such as Angband which feature permadeath, arcane key mappings, minimal curses style GUI with primarily ASCII graphics, and successors such as Dwarf Fortress. Oh, the author wants to talk about difficult platforming games on the console? How about Super Meat Boy, which offers all the platform challenge of the yesteryear classics. Shmups? Check out Really Big Sky and Sine Mora. There's plenty of great, challenging games out there today if that is what you are looking for.

Kuiper• 13 years ago

I think that improved design has made it possible for many modern games to ramp up difficulty. One of the reasons that Super Meat Boy gets away with its fiendish difficulty is the incredible fidelity of control that the game offers. When you die in Super Meat Boy, it's never the fault of "awkward controls" or the "weird physics" (two complaints common for many primitive platformers); responsibility for Meat Boy's death lies solely with the player. The same is true of Dark Souls, where everything about the game from its combat mechanics to its level design affords an immense degree of player agency. Previously, some games had to be more forgiving to make up for shortcomings in game design.

arjunnarayan• 13 years ago

DotA 2 is somewhere between Crack Cocaine and Heroin on the addiction scale. The other side of DotA's learning curve is that apart from being steep, it is also very deep: you can STILL learn so much more at the top skill levels because the game space is so large and unexplored.

I personally ended up building some custom Markov Chain Monte Carlo models (because with the Steam API you can pull a lot of match data) with shared priors just to understand the farming/win relationship per hero (and you need hierarchical Bayesian models because with 100+ heroes, 10 heroes per game, and needing to account for between-hero relationships, you run into the curse of dimensionality quickly).

It's almost more fun to analyze DotA computationally and watch tournaments than to play it (I watch more than I play). That's a truly ridiculous skill space and I could probably do an entire PhD's worth of statistics mining just off DotA 2.

DanBC• 13 years ago

Roguelikes are even different: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is known to be hard to win but easy to play. It has tutorials and a hint system. They're aiming for zero need to read online guides. Compare that to Nethack, which is chock-full of weird stuff that you have no hope of discovering on your own.

foobarbazqux• 13 years ago

Having won both I think that the only real difference is DCSS takes such a ridiculous amount of time for a 15-rune win that you just don't care by the end. I felt like I had to go through the same amount of spoiler reading, overall. And both are easy once you have a solid build strategy.

Have you played Brogue? That is really something special. It's a really stripped down game inspired by the original Rogue. There are no classes, so your build depends on the items you find. Rather than experience points, you'll find a finite number of scrolls of enchantment to spend on items. The tight food supply forces you to descend, which in turn prevents you from saving scrolls of enchantment for too long because you'll need to spend them on your items to survive. But the longer you can delay the better, because if possible you want to spend them on top-tier items.

epsylon3• 13 years ago

Nitpick: DotA has existed for a while now, nearly 10 years. I remember playing the imbalanced 5.5x versions somewhere around 2004. The modern versions of DotA were the 6x, started in 2005, and they are basically the basis for all modern DotAs (Heroes of Newerth copied heavily the map layout and some of the heroes ; it was pretty successful until DotA 2 came out). DotA 2 is basically an engine overhaul of DotA.

Dewie5• 13 years ago

(I haven't played DotA 2 but I've played DotA and Heroes of Newerth

Almost all of those things are examples of a game (DotA 2) being hard in a bad way/for the wrong reasons. The hallmark of game design is that it should be easy to learn but hard to master, but DotA games are notoriously hard to get into because of the steep learning curve, mostly because of all the dozens (almost 100?) heroes', their abilities and all the items (some of which have active/spell abilities) that you have to learn. I was useless in all of the initial games that I played in HoN, even though I had friends to help me. I still get bitten in the ass by not knowing all the abilities of some hero, or the fact that he has some item that totally negates one of my heroes strengths.

Strategy games of any interesting complexity usually have a steep initial learning curve, where you'll fuck up everything in the beginning and/or get killed by overlooking one single aspect of your base management or army control. But DotA is astonishing in that it was created in a game where you have to control up to three heroes, an army and base management, simplified it down to controlling only one hero - and made the initial learning curve of the game harder than the original game (Warcraft 3)! And this custom game with the higher barrier to entry in the end eclipsed Warcraft 3 itself when it comes to popularity!

joshschreuder4• 13 years ago

I think Super Metroid is a really interesting game in that it doesn't rely on tutorials to tell you how to do things. It relies on you paying attention to the environment (the animals tell you how to perform tricks and do things easier), and requires you to experiment with equipment to find shortcuts and power ups.

I actually got stuck early in the game by not remembering there is a run button. Such a simple function, but it's never actually shown to you until you need to use it. Presumably this was in the manual I neglected to read :)

I'm not sure 'easier' is the right word for it. I'd say that newer games just explain everything to you, and don't really leave much exploration or experimentation in controls or playstyle.

Also, I don't think it's really padded for length as some people here have mentioned. I started and completed it recently on the Wii U (albeit with a few sneak glances at an FAQ in parts), and it took me around 6 hours. Not very long by today's standards, though I'm a little young to say whether this applies to the older generation of games.

beaumartinez• 13 years ago

"I actually got stuck early in the game by not remembering there is a run button."

I know exactly the bit!

Super Metroid is a fantastic game. Perhaps requiring a bit more dedication than is common today, but it is still a fantastic experience.

minikomi• 13 years ago

Indeed. Placing that super bomb on a whim in the water tunnel and having the effect it had after endless fruitless searching for the next place to go on the map is a very fond memory for me :)

JonnieCache• 13 years ago

Which bits do people think are padding? That game's basically perfect AFAIC.

joshschreuder4• 13 years ago

Maybe I misread what people were saying about older games being padded with difficulty to account for their short length / to add to their replayability.

I definitely think Super Metroid is pretty close to perfect.

csense2• 13 years ago

Presumably this was in the manual I neglected to read

It's also in the options screen. (On the original SNES version, I've never tried the Wii U one.)

aunty_helen• 13 years ago

Dammit Guybrush, push the cannon to get the gunpowder to blow the fort!

eru• 13 years ago

Funny enough, Super Metroid was seen as too easy back then.

csense2• 13 years ago

Yeah. I seem to remember Super Metroid as a fairly easy game. Unless you're trying to finish without dying, get all the items, or finish under the three hour mark for a slightly different ending.

dsuth2• 13 years ago

Both. Some are stupidly easy, eg. God of War "Load Game. Face Plant Controller. Finish Game. Get Star!".

In defiance of this trend, games like Dark Souls are coming out, which are wickedly hard, but extremely well-designed (for the most part). Or Monster Hunter 3. These games stress player skill to the max, but offer almost no 'cheap deaths'. This is my favourite kind of game.

I strongly hope that the skill-based system of gaming comes back to MMOGs (remember EQ? I do.), but I'm still waiting.

Dewie5• 13 years ago

Both. Some are stupidly easy, eg. God of War "Load Game. Face Plant Controller. Finish Game. Get Star!".

God of War was not easy at all for me on Hard.

cheald2• 13 years ago

There's "Hard" and there's "Megaman Hard". Today's "Hard" just doesn't even approach the brutality of games a few generations ago, with the exception of some games like Super Meat Boy and Dark Souls.

The big thing on most modern games is the frequent auto-checkpointing. This is done to prevent the player from becoming frustrated and walking away, but it saps a critial element of difficulty from the game in that you have to execute a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence, and screwing up anything puts you back at the beginning.

Modern games are very guilty of the overuse of checkpointing, which can frequently mean that you never lose more than a few seconds of progress. The frustration of doing 98% of a boss fight, flubbing one guard, and having to replay the whole level again is mirrored in the reward you feel when you overcome the challenge; modern games frequently minimize frustration via checkpointing, overly-verbose tutorials, "look here!" neon signs, and the like, all of which reduce both frustration and satisfaction.

dsuth2• 13 years ago

That's interesting. I'm fairly sure I played on Hard, although this was years ago so my memory may be rusty. Some parts of the game were definitely 'hard', but seemed artificially so. Like the last boss eschewing all of the tactics learned prior to it, or a generically drawn 'maze' level which was just confusing for the sake of filling in game time.

My main gripe with this game, and others like it, is that even if the difficulty can be ratcheted up, the result is not engaging gameplay. It doesn't generally require more skill, or novel tactics, or using the right tool for the job, just better timing or more patience. This is the point I was trying to make, although sloppily.

Well-design hard games draw you in with the surprising complexity of thought or skill required to beat their challenges, hidden under a deceptively simple surface. For example Monster Hunter's weapons involve maybe 3 or 4 combos, whereas God of War's had more than I could easily memorise. But using combos in GoW didn't matter anyway because just mashing the buttons had the same effect. Using the wrong combo in MH will likely leave you exposed to a brutal attack, a quick death, and a long walk (or simple failure of the mission, goodbye 50 minutes of game time, you get nothing). Same story in Dark Souls, except you might be able to fight your way back to reclaim the stuff you lost. You really need to think about how you're attacking things, what your positioning is, what you're attacking etc etc. That is the complexity underneath the 'simple' combat systems that makes these games engagingly difficult.

pandaman• 13 years ago

Modern games are not better designed. Quite the opposite. It's very easy to make a hard game. Making a fun game, on the other hand, requires talent. When you have a fun game you can sell it no matter how hard it is.

A game that is not fun still can be sold pretty well - you just need to make it look pretty, invest into advertising and make it easily accessible so people could assess its high production values. This works because most of the competition is not very fun either.

The reasons why the modern game design is not producing fun games in any significant numbers are up for debate. Personally I agree with the Richard Garriott's opinion [1] but I don't believe it's the only reason.

[1] http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-desi...

Are modern games easier or simply designed better?

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