Death of difficulty in games.

[Eve Charm]

TES suffers from level scaling but it's not really the games fault that through countless play time you know a formula that makes you stronger then the enemies would logically be. Your not gonna give bandits super equipment because 1 it wouldn't make sense and 2 it would destroy the flow of the game because now you'll have all this super equipment to sell and get money quickly.

Difficulty just shouldn't be the AI anymore, especially now that players can do more and more to make the game easier for themselves. You have so many more choices now then a game like the old ninja gaidens where the developers knew the path you had to take to get somewhere, Where all enemies already knew some ninja was running around and basically the only factor a player could change is what sub weapon they had at the time.

Today's games you have just so many more tools at your disposal. You come across a castle in an modern game with rpg elements... is it better or worse that guards don't know your coming, better right? now you can be stealthy most of the way when back then that would never be an option. A 3d world, back then you had to walk through the front door, now maybe you can find a back door, or scale the side of a wall, or use magic to jump over or go through. Hell you can even see that castle and say " screw that" and come back much stronger, or hell never come back. Just controls in general are just so much better and offer so much more option to the player, remember when you could only whip in front of your character in Castlevaina? How insane would a modern shooter be with Resident Evil's 1-3 and CV's control style of you can't move while you aim and can only shoot in front of your character or at an 45 degree angle up or down? Hell back in the day you were lucky if the controls worked most of the time correctly, something that would never fly by today's standards.

 

[TAGM]

I dunno, being one of those boring sods that wants to win more then he wants a challenge (I play games to relax, so what?) I do wish that two things were done everywhere:

1) Let me pick my difficulty
Yes, even the Dark Souls thing, I'd like that ability. Even if it's just between "Hard" and "Nut-Bustingly Hard", I'd like the choice. Or better still, just let me make the choice on the fly, without even going to the option screen!
One game I really liked about 4 or 5 years ago was Wario Land Shake It. It's a fun little platformer, and if you play just trying to get to the end, it's pretty damn easy. But there's a bunch of little challenges in every level - collect this many coins, don't touch water, don't kill an enemy - and in some cases, completing them is almost annoyingly difficult. But hey, it's my choice. If I feel like breezing through the level, I breeze through it. If I feel like getting that 100% completion more? Well, the nut-kicking awaits.

2) Don't make anything impossible in the wrong circumstances, PLEASE.

Borderlands 2 is an absolute BASTARD for this. I refuse to belive that the Badass Pyre Threshers can be killed as anyone other then Gaige and maybe Axton. In case you don't know: They're able to burrow. When they unburrow, they releace a fire nova AoE attack around them that hits pretty much instantly. They won't unburrow until you're in range, and you can't actualy hit them while they're burrowing. So, in other words, if they burrow, you're taking a hit. End of. And it's a LARGE hit, and if it sets you on fire, you're basically dead. And yes, you CAN get a second wind off of his tentacles, but if the massive fucker decides to get in the way of your aim, you're buggered and have to reset.
And those FUCKING Skeleton Sears, with their ability to just say "No, fuck you, you're not hitting me right now." Which they do. A. LOT.
And I literally spent around 10 minutes fighting ONE enemy, an enemy that had the ability to level itself up FIVE TIMES. Which, in Borderlands 2, basically takes an enemy to "a fairly hard fight," to "You may as well just run around this area for ages getting potshots, because he's going to one shot you." The ONLY reason I managed to beat him at all was because he had only Melee attacks, and even then it was a crapshoot, because his jumping attack became basically undodgeable at a short enough range, and his attacks in general seemed to hit you about 10 foot further then they should. So if you get hit when you shouldn't have, and then get the jumping attack, too bad, you're dead, start again from square 1 of 10,000. And whoever made Treeants produce electrical homing spores on death that can easily send a character who just came up from Fight For Your Life right back again deserves a swift kick up the ass for being an absolute dick-ward.
Playing Borderlands 2 with those enemies inside it is like bashing my head against a brick wall for fun. It just causes pain and a headache. And that isn't fun. I refuse to believe that someone actually play-tested it properly - no-one could go through the crap I did and say "Nope, this is good, release it."

 

[zefichan]

Fact: Most modern games use ridiculous handholding, older games taught you during play, new games treat you like a five year old.

Fact: A few games thankfully don't do this nonsense. Thank god.

Games as a whole aren't too easy, most devs just think their players are idiots.

 

[Eve Charm]

Hehe I don't know, maybe instead of quest markers and npc's that actually explained what have to do they rather have unhelpful npcs and down right stupid puzzles like knee down next to a rock with the red crystal equipped ala Castlevaina 2. Stupid stuff like that died for a reason in games.

 

[Mr Dizazta]

I am sick and tired of the bullshit argument about games begin too easy now of days or why games even have difficultly settings in the first place. What I feel is that gamers complaining about some features fail to realize that not everybody who plays a game is a harden veteran since the glory days of the NES era or before. What they need to realize is that every game ever made or will be made is some poor youngster's first game. Now, are we going to scare new gamers from trying a game they heard about by ramping up a game's difficulty just because a vocal minority of gamers complain about the lack of difficulty in games? That is why difficulty settings were created in the first place: to give a new player a chance to experience something new and possible try other experiences as well. Jesus, the only reason why older games were harder in the first place was because of the arcade game design philosophy. I am sick and tired of this bitching and moaning because all it reminds me is of my parents and any other parent or grandparent complaining about how their kids have it better off than they did and how they didn't have the internet or other modern conveniences. To me this argument is just petty.

 

[babinro]

I don't consider it the death of difficulty as much as the death of limitations.

Back in the NES days you frequently had games without a difficulty selection. You'd have to master the game and endure it's faults. Some games would limit your actions to a silly degree to make the game artificially difficult.
- Pits everywhere and hits knock you back
- Can't attack while crouching or while in the air or while on stairs
- Games designed to be extra difficult to extend game play time rather than offer more levels

These days, most games try and remove the BS within reason and let you do what you think the player should be able to do. This added freedom of control inherently makes the game easier. Combine this with games that frequently give multiple difficulty settings and you can scale your gameplay experience considerably.

Diablo 3 is one of the prime examples of this right now.
You have normal, nightmare, hell and inferno difficulties that can then be scaled further using an monster power 0 through 10 system. Add to this other elements like opting to play without the optional Auction House or Crafting or the means to play on Hardcore where death is permanent and you have one of the best diverse challenge experiences on the market.

It sounds to me like Madden 25 is just an example of a poorly made game. Either that or you're so amazing at those game from years/decades of playing them that what would normally challenge the typical player is no longer hard for you. For every 50 people who feel Ninja Gaiden (Nes), Battletoads (Nes), Dark Souls etc are difficult games. You'll have those select few who claim they were easy from start to finish without even bragging. They were just naturally good at something others weren't.

 

[Piorn]

"Real" difficulty is hard to do, and everyone defines it differently.
For some, it might be a short but complicated platforming segment like Super Meat Boy.
For others it might be a test of endurance or resiliance, like DkS.
Some people just like to find the exploits and cheese everything to death, like in Skyrim.

And bad design is no excuse for difficulty. I played Dishonored completely without hints and had no problem at all, but had to turn them on at one point, because to save some guy, you had to drop him in a very specific dumpster without any in-universe hints whatsoever. I hid him in several places, failing the mission each time, before finally resigning and using the hints.
That's not dificulty or my stupidity, that's just bad design.

 

[TehCookie]

Older games were much more difficult, if you beat the game you wouldn't throw in more quarters. Then you have games with bad controls which makes it harder to play. There were also less in game tutorials and if you wanted hints you had to read the manual. Then there have always been harder games and easier games, AAA games tend to be easy since they're for the mass market.

As for AI getting smarter when you turn the difficulty up most of Platinum/Clover games do that and DMC (with a capital M). In Persona 3 and I think 4 enemies are more likely to target your weakpoints and I'm pretty sure later Tales of games also change the AI.

 

[Seydaman]

I must just suck at everything because games don't seem easier to me.

Maybe the tutorials got irritating.

 

[white_wolf]

I agree with you there OP but I just don't think the modern gaming kids can deal with the tough games. They don't want to have to work at it for months or longer to get past a single mission, they want their skills to be handed to them not work on them, be bribed to stay/rewarded with golden stars, it's very disappointing to watch, I've got a young gamer who is an extreme flake he when the going gets tough he doesn't buckle down and push on he just finds a new game and gets playing it instead. Most games out now are so easy I can beat them in 1 -2 days without trying and that's not a game that's a detraction and that sucks.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

We are actually moving forward on this issue. And hopefully new consoles will improve this aspect of games with more RAM and better processing power that can be used for AI.

This is largely a pipe dream. The problem with AI isn't really the lack of processing power or access to memory but rather that building good AI is really quite hard. This is why most shooters only feature rudimentary AI in the various NPCs and rely scripting in order to generate the illusion of AI. Worse still, while AI has progressed enormously in the decades since Doom, most games simply rely on a very simple FSM and, if they're really slick about it, a tiny bit of fuzziness to move characters around.

Beyond the problem of difficulty, there are secondary concerns. The most notable is simply that the more power the AI has to take action the programmer couldnt' predict, the harder it is to construct a game around it. Topping it all off there is the simple fact that AI simply isn't a sexy feature that you can easily convey with a short video or a screenshot.

 

[NuclearPenguin]

I prefer the CPU to be fair, not rubberbanded or breaking game mechanics.
Its the same thing as increasing the difficulty in a shooting game should in my opinion disable auto aim.

 

[Aeshi]

Most of that old "difficulty" usually consisted of either working out what to spam the hell out of to insta-win or trying the same jump 1000 times until you finally get a pixel-perfect one anyway.

 

[V TheSystem V]

I started to notice the gradual decline in difficulty in gaming when playing Super Mario Galaxy nearly 6 years ago (Jesus, that came out 6 years ago? I feel a bit older). I remember it being touted as a game easy enough for casual gamers to enjoy and enough of a challenge for Mario veterans.

Guess what? I found it too easy. It was never the game being too difficult that would make me die, it was me making stupid errors that resulted in me losing my last ounce of health or falling off the edge of the map. It was a beautiful game, and my favourite Mario game at that, but it wasn't a challenge. Nintendo then stated that Mario Galaxy 2 would be more challenging, and that was an outright lie also. Sure, it was fun, but it wasn't challenging.

BioShock Infinite falls foul of being too easy, also. 1999 Mode, once again touted as being a proper hardcore challenge for people who have completed the game, was easy. You'd have to pay $100 every time you died, and there was less ammo, but I found it really easy for the most part, only having problems with:

Spoiler

Lady Comstock's ghost (really, really unfair fight. Especially as you had to fight her TWICE), and the airship tower defence at the end, though that was surprisingly manageable one you figured out that it was easier to down the big air balloons rather than those carrying troops)

There are exceptions to this decrease in difficulty in gaming, however. Dark Souls (as already mentioned by other members), Gears of War on Insane difficulty, Dead Space 2 on Hardcore, Fire Emblem: Awakening on Classic mode...there are some games that make you feel like you've accomplished something when completing them on a high difficulty, but they are few and far between this console generation.