Thursday, 19 November 2009

• Casual Gamers Don't Like Hard Games

  

  A few edits made for clarity.
  
  I read a post on fighters being primitive recently in terms of the evolution of game design, and they are (I don't want that to change; vi is just about the perfect text editor, and the fighting game format is good for what it does). One of the things that it listed as being a primitive design was the execution-heavy emphasis of the games. By this I mean performing a simple combo like Athena's 2A, 2A, A, 623C combo in KOFXII requires a good bit of practice and skill, and you have to be able to do it on the fly in a heated context. The author was absolutely right. This simple combo requires practice and skill to get its execution up that almost no genre today really requires. Let me rephrase that, "no genre requires".
  
  The author didn't complain about it but rather states that he likes fighting games as they stand. I tend to agree. What it brings to my mind is whether this is good or bad design in general. There is no question that it is primitive. We have moved away from it in general.
  
  There are several signs of this. First, as an example, a couple of years back I was playing Halo 2 with my little brother. It was on Legendary co-op, and naturally, we were mopping the floor with everything. I made the off-hand remark that games now are generally substantially easier than they used to be. He boasted that they aren't, and that he could beat anything I put in front of him. So, I hooked him up with Mega Man X. He failed to pass the opening level (the one where Zero rescues you). I had made my case. That was a ridiculously easy level.
  
  If this were isolated, I could chalk it up to the fact that he is used to 3D games, but in general, I find the same thing happens over and over. People who play more contemporary games simply cannot play the older difficulties. One friend of mine coped with the decrease in difficulty by adding his own checks: He made a point of going through the aforementioned Halo games without dying. If he did, he restarted.
  
  

  

  However, there's been a resurgence of old-school difficulty in games. First, we have Ninja Gaiden. When it came out on the Xbox, it didn't even include an "easy" difficulty. When they released the Black version, it taunted anyone who played it on Easy for not being a real ninja, and Easy could only be unlocked by failing over and over on Normal. Its bosses were old-school pattern bosses. You play the boss, watch the boss, die, rinse, repeat.
  
  It's not alone, however, on the current gen, we have Ninja Gaiden 2, and a whole slew of games. Bionic Commando: Rearmed makes you work for what you wanted, even if it isn't as punishing as the original BC was. Mega Man 9 deliberately played up the old school difficulty all the way down to the moving blocks...dju dju dju. I've played newer RPGs pretty mindlessly, but when I loaded Dragon Age on my PC, I got killed for doing it. It doesn't drop much. I can kill a couple of dozen enemies without a drop, and I didn't get a healer right off. It's not super difficult, but it will kill you if you aren't careful. I've heard that, aside from the ridiculous "let the game play for you" feature, New Super Mario Bros. Wii retains some of the old school difficulty.
  
  

  

  It does seem difficulty is coming back a little. Those aren't the only games that go in that direction, but I think it reflects a trend. I think the games got easier on average, because of the casual gamer. The same ones that tell me in Street Fighter that it isn't fair that I can beat them soundly with 6-hit combos that I end FADCing into a super or ultra, because he can't do it. When I say, "Sure you can. You just don't practice", and he responds to the effect that he has a life, the message is clear to companies. They have a whole class of gamer that wants to be rewarded instantly, and in an entertainment medium this is always a pressure.
  
  

  

  The ease of difficulty also cheapens the games. "I just beat ODST on Legendary" just doesn't feel like "Heck yeah, I just beat BlazBlue on the highest difficulty." You feel good about yourself after the latter. After the former, it's a "Who cares" thing. In ODST Bungie gave you immortal soldiers. I just gave one a sniper rifle the other a rocket launcher, and I had no trouble with the last fight. In BlazBlue it took me a long time to figure out how to get past Nu's offense since my main was Arakune. I felt like I did something there, and I had no cheap tricks to make it easier (I'm still working periodically at score attack and don't want to cheat it; that's tough). ODST left me with a good story and a desire to collect video tapes, but no point of pride or accomplishment. BB left me feeling good about myself, even if I know I'm nowhere near the top. Difficulty adds value to the experience.
  
  Truth be told, there's a place for the casual gamer. Not everyone plays the same or has the same tastes. What has hurt difficulty is that rather than playing games designed for a casual gamer, they want the same accomplishments as those who worked for it, so they whined about the difficulty. Companies listened for a while. That appears to be changing, and more of the older ways of doing things are coming back.
  
  This doesn't mean that more casual and easy games are going to go away. They won't; there's a market for them. Nor does it mean that they should. As I said, not everyone plays the same way. I enjoy being punished. I'll work for long periods of time in a training room or trying to master one particular boss (I'm not particularly skilled at execution, so I get waxed a lot...and enjoy it). Not everyone finds that fun, and these are games. It isn't much better when experienced gamers mouth on the scrubs either. No, this just means that companies may be starting to balance out the niches more, and that it is a good thing to see old design making a resurgence. I, for one, am more excited about this sort of thing than I am about gimmicks like the Wii Nunchuck or Project Natal.
  
  Do you think difficulty really repels casual players? Do you think the current standard of difficulty in video games has truly decreased in the past few years? Is it good that recent games are trying to present a more old-school challenge?

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