Saturday Special: Games are too easy

Disclaimer: I don't believe there is any "wrong" or "right" with these Specials (or with anything really) -- essentially, only infinite speculations and possibilites. Debate and discussion are strongly encouraged in the comments for these!

Games are often easier now than they were years ago. I'm open, so feel free to debate that, but I have a hard time imagining otherwise. In this Special, I'll be exploring the how and why of this, and what the effect is on gamers themselves.

To start, I have a few games in mind when writing this: Fable (series), BioShock, Prince of Persia, and Mirror's Edge. Obviously I won't be covering all recent games, partly for reasons of time, and partly because I haven't come close to playing all of them, as anyone hasn't. So again, there is room for debate here. Oh, and keep in mind I love all these games – this is part of the reason I'm criticizing them.

So, Fable has its 'marker' system, which shows you always where you have to go next, who you have to talk to, etc. Rarely have I ever been stuck. What happened to that feeling of exploration we so love in RPGs?

BioShock – where to start? Vita Chambers render you essentially unkillable and everyone else very killable. Upon starting from a chamber after 'dying', enemies' health is the same as it was. Yours is reduced, too, but that's not very relevant – you can just keep trying to kill them over and over and eventually succeed, regardless of skill or any other factor. Big Daddies? Suddenly not so scary. We already have a quicksave/quickload system, jeez. There's also the quest arrow which tells you always in which direction to go for your next objective. It's not perfect of course so there are likely points at which you'll still be wondering, nevertheless, I found that largely this ruins a lot of the fun. Yes (thank god), all of these options can be turned off, but even there the game rewards you with achievements! Whatever. My advice to anyone that's been playing shooters and/or RPGs for any good amount of time: put it on hard, turn off the quest arrow and Vita Chambers, then you have a game that doesn't baby you.

Prince of Persia: oh boy. My copy is on its way, so I'll probably offer my real take on it next week in my blog, but this is a bit of a controversial one. Probably the only game I've considered not buying because of how easy it is. You cannot die in this game. Cannot. Die. Now I could just slag on this for a couple paragraphs, but as noted in this article, the game's producer Ben Matte says it wasn't just a choice to make it more accessible to non-hardcore gamers, it was also to escape the standard 'fail-die-frustration-fail-die-frustration-succeed-joy loop' we're so used to. Not sure if PoP is the first game to break this trend (at least within the action realm), but it'll be the first game I experience it in, so I'm interested to see if I'm annoyed by this change or not. In either case, a hard mode trainer is being attempted for the game, and there are achievements which some players find rewarding, so there's that. No hard mode included, though? Bizarre. Surely it couldn't have took much code to at least give enemies more health or...something.

Mirror's Edge. I know this game has the tendency to be very hard at times (I've only played the demo – getting my PC version in a couple of weeks), and I welcome this. But on the whole I find the game too accomodating. Click a button, you know where to go next; Runner Vision tells you what the best route is. Good god. Again, expect a blog entry up once I get my hands on this, cause I'm saying to heck with both these options. I know it will probably be very challenging, but that's what I'm counting on.

In short, it seems like walkthroughs are practically built into (some) games these days. As someone really into games, it's agonizing when I see people play a game with a walkthrough on hand at all times – now they don't even have to look one up, or go to the store and buy one! Augh!

Thankfully some games do still stick to the roots, like Contra 4 (I gave up on this within five minutes) and Ninja Gaiden. Both series' were always, as far as I can recollect, excruciatingly difficult, at least at points. While the latest iteration of Gaiden is quite a bit less punishing than its prequel, both are indeed very tough games, and I thank The Studio Known Formerly as Team Ninja for provoking me to throw the controller a good many times.

So why are some games so easy today? At first I'd thought it was due to the nature of the technology at the time. I mean, there's only two dimensions, so that would eliminate the possibility for a lot of the accommodating features, no? No, everything can be substituted in one way or another, or different kinds of devices can be used.

The simplicity of the code is probably a big factor, though. I imagine it was pretty easy to stick a hard and easy difficulty in there when appropriate -- these days there are many more factors working in tandem, each of which has tons more code built into them. Change one thing, you may have to change everything. This is what Matte says the trouble was, anyway, and his team certainly seemed intent on trying this, ultimately at a loss.

My other conclusion is it's due (largely) to money. The gaming industry is worth about $9.5 billion now, well tripling what it was in 1996, let alone '86. With that, it seems developers are inclined to account for, when developing difficulty in their title, more levels of skill. Which is understandable.

But my issue is it seems as though, unlike the days of old, games are set to 'easy' by default these days, no matter what the options menu tells you. The compound effect is our skills are lowered and eventually you turn into the guy in the photograph below. Would games actually sell less if they retained their difficulty as before? If you're not good enough – get better! This is a lot of the fun of games. I mean, there's always wussy games like Spyro and whatever else if you're not up for a real challenge – anyone interested in a game like BioShock I figure either knows their way around or will find their way around fairly quick.

So, in conclusion, accomodating is fine, just not by default. What say you?