Well, yeah, but they aren't triple A titles, like most EA and Activision titles, with huge production and marketing values. The ones you refer to, like STALKER aren't for everybody. OTOH, the ones that try to be are usually much more forgiving.

I find this to be more of the exception than the rule; Halo 3, Gears of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Ico - these are some of the big names of the last few years, and I finished all of them in less than 6 hours. It's not that they had a breadth of content, and thus needed to be easier to allow you to see it all reasonably - it's that it was so easy that getting through their content took so little time. Games are becoming shorter and shorter, is this because of their difficulty level?

Games of yester-year had to do more, with less. They had to be addictive to play to make you want to finish it despite it's punishing difficulty, all with catchy 8-bit tunes that had to be catchy because they couldn't fit too many into the game. Today's games don't have to be addictive to play, they don't have to make you want to finish them, because anyone can finish them without really putting much effort into it. I recently purchased the Ultimate Mega Drive Collection for the Xbox 360, and the games of yester-year still pack that addictive "must finish" quality. Especially Sonic the Hedgehog, there's magic in that game.

I also feel that difficulty levels are great, however this only adjusts the difficulty of the comabt - damage dealt, and received, and miss the opportunity to really expand the game for all customers. The greatest difficulty levels of all time rest in two games in my opinion; Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark. Depending on the difficulty level you were playing, the game would actually change what it was that you had to do to make it harder or easier, as well as adjusting the comabt difficulty. One level in Perfect Dark had you as sniper cover for an undercover agent being led into a Villa; protecting them became difficult. The hardest difficulty level actually had you being the undercover agent, and with no cover. This is how difficultly levels should be done - not just adding 50 extra damage to your enemies and expecting you to find the added 'challenge' to be fun.

I can understand making games easier for the casual crowd.  OK, I can deal with that.  That's what the difficulty slider is for, god-forbid I buy a game that doesn't have one!  What annoys me about most games today is that they are mind-numbingly short.  Hell even some Western RPGs are heading this way.  The other issue is most games have almost no replayability.  The reasons above are why my main genres for gaming are 4X and RPGs. At least they tend to be long, in a good way!, and have replayability.  FPSs are on my 'shit list' for almost always being too short, too easy and so not worth the money they charge for 'em.  RTSs seem to focusing more on MP than SP.  Too much twitch in them now.  Too much 'make everything faster!!!11!'.  RTSs also try too hard to balance the sides.  As support for an RTS game goes on, all factions in that game look more and more similar, all for appeasing the balance gods.  I can't stand RTS games that have factions that are completely different (ie, various alien species) and yet play exactly the same as the other factions. (Edit, this was not a slight against Sins.  Though, I fear it's getting there)  How utterly boring.

/my $0.02 and/or rant.  Which ever comes first. 

But do hard games sell? Don't forget, what the market wants, the market gets. Face it, most people want to be entertained, and not challenged.

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (Online or play the cheating AI)

Arma II (Any part)

Farcry (Aircraft Carrier <shudder>)

Stalker (especially when you've run out of ammo)

The old Alien vs Predator

Reaching max level on Runescape (Not really hard persay just very very time consuming)

Grand Prix Legends (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prix_Legends)

 

Hard games do exist just sometimes people dont want a challenge, they want fun

This topic peaked my interest and I've posted a moderately lengthy response on my blog. I tip my hat to ZehDOn for his insight and perspective of modern game difficulty.

 

http://www.alexkaltsas.com/blog/2009/9/25/are-we-as-gamers-getting-soft.html

Two things about this statement: first, not everybody finds challenge fun, and second, challenge is relative.  Just take a look at GC2's difficulty levels, with some people easily destroying Suicidal while others struggle with Tough (if not lower).

AI is getting better all the time, but there's still a limit on what you can do with it.  When you reach that limit, the only way remaining to increase difficulty is to let the AI cheat

As I said before, Killzone 2 has actually managed to do this. In every difficulty level, the health and damage of you, your enemies, and your allies remains the same. What does change, is the tactics and accuracy of the enemies. On easy it takes them a while to line up a shot, but if one manages to hit you in the head then your back to your last checkpoint. Higher difficulties show the enemies not only being better shots, but also using cover more and flanking you, suppresive fire etc.

New gamers are getting "soft" due to type of games they are being served these days...

Old school gamers are just getting fed up with everything and giving up entirely...

 

I have been playing computer and video games for more than 25 years and situation has never been so bad and shallow as it is now...

 

Only game I play for the last couple of years is Sins... Rest is not even worth a mention unfortunately

It was worth the money just to hear the title screen theme

I read through your article and find it to be a well written post that takes the opposite position to myself and is well justified. While it's true that games like Bioshock are remembered more for their inventive setting and story than their punishing difficulty, I feel that we're being robbed of some truly memorable experiences simply because we walk through them at a brisk pace, stopping only to smell the roses if we get bored. Instead of feeling like we're in danger, that something is at risk or there is something we need to over-come and thus achieve something, we're being treated to basically virtual walks through prettier and prettier environments that cost more and more money and take less and less time to finish. The fact that so many games of today are forgotten while we talk about 'the classics' of yester-year should be some evidence to this point.

I understand your point about gamers now being older, and having the commitments of their lives to place before their video game hobby and as such when they do have a moment to spare, they don't want to sit down and have to grind away at a game for hours. In my opinion, the difficult games I'm talking about were the ones I never felt that I was grinding away on - it was fun to try and beat the game, and defeat was simply another opportunity to play again. If a game is designed that it's difficult without being fun, then it's a bad game because there is no fun to be had - a good game is fun without challenging you, but a great game is challenging and fun at the same time and in equal measures and never enters the realm of the frustrating. As I said, this is my opinion, and obviously isn't based on some survey I've conducted.


Half-life 2 used a similar method of difficulty, it marginally adjusted damage while removing several health packs from the levels to force the player into more strategic combat. However, this doesn't overally change the level of difficulty of the game - only the combat. The difficulty I'm refering to is more in the game itself - the puzzles, the level design, etc. Despite all the wonderous advances in game technology, we're walking down even more linear paths shooting at enemies still the credits role, and the 'challenge' comes from how many you have to shoot and how many bullets you have to use. This isn't difficult, in my opinion.

It's not difficult, that's my point. Adjusting combat difficulty only makes the game frustrating for players who can't keep up, and annoying for everyone else as the game isn't harder, it just takes longer. Almost all FPSs utilise similar combat mechanics and as such the old strafe-dodge-and-fire method is flawless. Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 require you to spend more time hiding than fighting thanks to their over-used health systems - I won't punish Halo 3 for using it though since the system is explained within the lore of the Halo Universe, and it was one of the major features of the original Halo. I finished Unreal and Unreal II without dying - both at their maximum difficultly levels - and yet Unreal was infinitly more challenging and a much, much better game as a result.

I don't define difficulty as how hard it is to finish the game - several games are simply just long and take a really, really long time to complete; if you have limited time, they hard to finish and thus are they difficult games? Fallout 3, for example, isn't difficult in any stretch of the imagination - however it's hard to finish the entire game, especially if you have a limited time frame. Mind bending puzzles, level design that requires you to think - these make games difficult. Metroid Prime, for example, almost perfected the use of level design as a difficulty mechanic. The PS1 era Resident Evil games had great puzzles - with a little too much back tracking. Collecting all the hearts in the The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was difficult - how many people got the one in the 7th Dark World Dungeon that required warping back to the Light World at just the right place? - and was fun. My point is, games aren't hard to finish any more. At all. They're built so any one can pick it up and see the end of it with only the combat serving as a difficultly mechanic, and if you're good at that - which most older gamer would be - then you're pretty much out of luck.

I have to disagree here. I feel puzzles are an intricate piece of the FPS, games like Half-Life and Half-Life 2 used basic puzzle solving to great effect and provide a break from the onslaught - although, the see-saw 'puzzles' run a little thin by the end. Correct implementation of puzzles ensures that the puzzles are not out of place and flow into the game; this is what I'm talking about - good games that are challenging and difficult as opposed to the bad games which are difficult because of poor level design, horribly implemented puzzles and frustrating segments which ruin the game. There is a very big difference.


I doubt 'hardcore' players are the only ones with enough patience to finish the game and thus playing multiplayer. Infinity Ward released statistics on Call of Duty 4 some time ago, where by only a very small percentage of players had actually finished the first level - most of them had purchased the game exclusively for it's multiplayer component and didn't even bother with the single player campaign. You raise an interesting point, though - I've been talking about single player games exclusively as you can't discuss the difficulty level of multiplayer gaming due to the human factor - does the fact that most games are being designed with multiplayer in mind, like Call of Duty 4, have an impact on the overall difficulty level of it's single player component? Will Bioshock 2 be easier still than the original due to the fact that it has a multiplayer section this time around?