GreaterGamingGood said:
I'd just like to address this issue. I've been thinking about it a lot and I've decided to speak up, mainly to find out how others feel about it.
I recently watched Jims "Dumbing Down for the Filthy Casuals" video and I'm a little concerned by his views, mostly that they could be the majority view. I'll be honest, I just don't understand them.
Not only do I believe that it's a shortsighted view, but it could in fact be (and probably is) hurting the gaming industry (and me). I'm going to try to put my thoughts across as clear as I can, so bare with me. Since Dark Souls was the main focus of the video, I'm going to use that as the example game. There will be others, but I'll use that as the primary focus too.
(I'd like to start by saying I have played/completed the game. These are my concerns over the industry as a whole, not just the Dark Souls issue, and reflective of my personal opinions.)
The main point was that there's no reason Dark Souls shouldn't have an easy mode because it's not hurting anyone to have one and it's allowing more gamers to play the game that may not have ordinarily done so.
My points against.
1. Learn the game. It's as simple as that, harsh maybe, but true. Dark Souls, to me, was a throw back to the classics, a game you had to learn by trial and error, forcing you to adapt and to play the game smartly in order to progress. That was the point of the game. I honestly can't stress this enough. One of the game's core mechanics was it's difficulty, if you remove that, if the option even exists, it's a detriment to the experience. The tag line is "You're going to die". Doesn't that say it all? I know it's an extreme example, but I don't remember anyone asking for an easy mode for Battletoads or Ghouls & Ghosts. Let's be honest with ourselves, those games were awesome /because/ they pushed us to the max.
2. It cheapens the game and gamers. By even giving gamers the option to make the game easier you're not only cheapening the experience within the game itself, but you're also making gamers reliant on these methods. Many people might think that adding the option of difficulty allows people to adapt their skills in order to play the higher difficulties. While this is true for /some/ I disagree almost all the time. It's my opinion that it actually hinders smart thinking and skill progression because nothing's pushing you to improve. If it's too easy there's nothing to think about.
People might also say that "That's not you're problem. Why do you care if some people play it on the easy setting." That leads to my next point.
3. It does affect me. One of the main points of Jim's video and perhaps many other people is "It doesn't affect you." Well I think it does. I like these games. I like innovation. I like new, unique, varied gameplay. If the concern of the developer (or publisher) is "Well, we need to make it easier for gamers, because last time it was too hard for them." how long is it gonna be before they say something like "Hey do you want to make Dark Souls 3?" "Nah, those games were too hard, remember? We should just make a generic game that everyone can play, it'll be less hassle for us in the long run and we'll make more money." You might be thinking that it'll never happen, but it /is/ happening. I can't help but think that this "pandering to the casuals" is going to break what little innovation the industry has left.
Side note. It's kinda sickening when I look at modern games and I see how they lead you by the
hand. Every. Step. Of. The. Way. It's tedious and often frustrating. This hand-holding gameply
spurs from this exact kind of thinking. Examples; Tomb Raider (2013) I haven't played it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. But my heart pretty much sank when I found out that you could get a map that showed the locations of all the treasures/artifacts. Shouldn't those be, you know, hidden? Assassins Creed III (Haven't played) - Same thing, items/treasures displayed on mini-map. Ni No Kuni is probably one of the worst examples I've seen in a while. While I enjoyed the game, I can't help but feel it would have been immensely better without the constant hand-holding >.>
(I'd like to see you get 100% on the original Tomb Raider. -Without a guide-)
4. Older gamers could do it, why can't you? Most games in the classic Megadrive/Snes era were difficult and still are even today. But, we persevered and kept playing them. We completed them (eventually). Imagine if Sega re-released Sonic the Hedgehog and added an easy mode. Yeah, less enemies, less obstacles, less danger, less gameplay action, yeah! That's awesome right? Wouldn't you be horrified to your f****** core? When is it going to stop? When Sonic just runs across a completely flat screen with no enemies? Is that what you want? Huh? Huh?!
I could probably go on, but what I'm trying to say is that, to me, this is a complete non-issue. It should never have been brought up in the first place and it should never have even /existed/ as a problem. I'm not saying I'm some kind of super, elite, gaming genius because I can play Dark Souls and you can't, you can too. I died a lot in that damn game (and Demon's Souls), but I learned how to play it and I enjoyed that experience. I felt like I'd accomplished something and honestly, I want more gamers to feel like that. I don't think I'm alone in saying that games have become really stale and almost insultingly easy lately. Experiences like this don't come around very often and attitudes like this hurt the chances of there ever being any more.
I'd like to know what others feel about this. Am I alone in my feelings?
I used to be like you, that I demanded my difficult games to be difficult and that was just the only way to play them. You use Dark Souls as an example--a game I don't consider that difficult--and I will use Fire Emblem: Awakening as mine. I'm not going to get into a discussion about Dark Souls being a lot easier than people give it credit, because that is pointless for this discussion.
When I first picked up Fire Emblem Awakening (FEA from now on) and started playing it, I started a new game on hard and saw that there was a setting called "casual mode". Alarm bells immediately went off in my head. This casual mode removed one of the key elements of Fire Emblem games: that when your units die, they stay dead for the rest of the game (unless they are integral to the story, they stay alive but you can't use them anymore). This part of Fire Emblem games has always made them really fucking hard at times. You play a mission for 40 minutes then because the enemy AI focusses on one of your characters that you thought was completely ok, you have to restart the level all over again. This has caused me to be completely stuck at certain points, and completely stop playing for weeks at a time at others. Half of the difficulty of Fire Emblem games has been that, "if you fuck up, you have to do everything over again" aspect. So I cringed at the thought of people playing a Fire Emblem game without that element of difficulty. I even made a thread here on The Escapist about it, lol.
So I skipped that option, selected "classic mode" and started playing. Well I got to the second mission, and because I wasn't using a unit of mine that I thought would soak up exp (there's always one of those guys in Fire Emblem games to help you in the earlier phases) I was getting absolutely owned. The second level! I restarted the game on normal-classic and have been enjoying the game ever since. There are still parts that frustrate me, but if I play cautious enough, I can get past them.
Anyways, I realized shortly after making that thread complaining about "casual mode" and on my 3rd/4th replay of the second mission on that Hard file, that the casual mode is actually a really great idea. You can mess up without completely ruining your game, can play much more aggressive, and you can try things out that you wouldn't have tried before. I'm definitely going to play the harder difficulties with the casual mode on, just because I don't want to go bald from frustration.
You talk about how older games are unrelentingly hard, well you are making one big error with your logic. Older games aren't hard because the developers decided, "Hey, lets make a game that doesn't have a map, the player has to memorize where they are in the facility and remember where they have been for the whole game!" or "Lets give them an item that they have no idea how to use so they spam every button and use it on every enemy they find so they can figure out it's uses". They could have done those things, but because they were limited by the technology of their time and because they were really inexperienced in making games, they didn't add those things. Playing a Metroid game without a map would make me break controllers. If I had to spend an hour of testing with every new upgrade and powerup I got while playing a Metroid game, I probably wouldn't play the game. Did you ever think that newer games are easier because they are better at teaching the player how to play? I'm not suggesting that games that hold your hand and show you how to do everything at a very slow pace (like Ni No Kuni is sometimes) are better games because they are better at teaching you how to play, I'm saying that a game that does more to show you how to play, is better than a game that doesn't. Try to imagine playing Sim City with no knowledge of previous games, and no guide that lets you know how to play. You'd spend your first 24 hours figuring out how to play, and that is no way to play a game. Yes, there is something to be said for games that teach you how to play in very clever ways like visual ques, Megaman X is a very good example of that. But there are some games where way too much teaching is a good thing. There were parts of Ni No Kuni that I had no idea what I was doing unless the game told me what to do and how to do it. I love it when games do this, because it lets me just play the game instead of playing Q&A for an hour.
On hand holding: there are a lot of games that let you turn off tutorials altogether and let you figure things out for yourself (or just play the game since you know how to play). I think more games should have this option to let "old school gamers" like you test things out and figure things out for yourself or to just breeze through the game. You are right for one thing, its annoying when a game is telling me how to look and aim when I already have that figured out or I've played the game before. The only advice I can give to you if you're frustrated by that, is to just ignore it or grin and bear it. If a game stops and tells you every 5 minutes how to do 'this' or what to press to do 'that', then that game is designed badly and will suffer for it. However, that doesn't mean the game is super easymode, I have played games that have in-game tutorials and detailed descriptions of every item, enemy and area, but are still really fucking hard. StarCraft 2 even has a "what units this unit is effective against/what units this unit is weak against" chart, which should mean that every game you play you should have figured out easily, but that is not the case, the game is still very challenging.
I get that this is all really TL;DR, but I really think that this way of thinking that "games should be the way they were back when I started gaming!" is really ignorant and stupid. Games will continue to evolve and change, thats just how things work. There will be games that "harken back to the old days" or "throwback games", but you'll just have to get used to games being different. You also have to--yes,
you--stop associating "the game doesn't tell you how to do anything" with "difficult" and "the game tells you how to do everything, even shows you at times" with "really easy". Game difficulty comes from your ability to do the correct thing at the correct moment of gameplay, not from your ability to
know what the correct thing is to do at the correct moment. The ability to
know what to do comes from practice, research, and trial and error.