Do you feel gamers have become "soft?"

I have always thought that if you die in a game that it is poor game design. They did not provide the player the tools (gear, skills, etc.) that were needed.
 
I have always thought that if you die in a game that it is poor game design. They did not provide the player the tools (gear, skills, etc.) that were needed.

I do remember some "hard" games that were mainly hard due to the dodgy controls (something like alex kidd in miracle world or chuck rock comes to mind)
 
I do think that games have gotten easier over the years but I think it's a good thing. I've gone back and played some games from my childhood and they were hard as shit but then I remember I had near limitless time to beat said games. Now there are games for nearly everyone. I don't have a lot time to play so I enjoy being able to set the difficulty setting down so I can move forward with the story and not spend hours being stuck at a certain part.

Two other big things have also changed:

1) There is more storage space for more game. One of the reason a lot of early games were hard or grindy or whatnot is they have to be to pad gameplay. There was such a small amount of memory on the carts of old you couldn't have that much content. So you needed to do something to keep people playing and one way to do that was to make it so you died and restarted a lot. That's not the only track games used, and some of the others are still used in games to this day, but it was a big one.

2) The bigger reason though is just that games came from arcades, with that mentality. An arcade game had to get you to plunk in quarters regularly to make money, and that meant it needed to make you lose a lot. Well, home games took their cues from arcades, and indeed sometimes the games were ports, so you got the same idea. It took time for developers to realize that wait, we don't need to make games like that just because that is how we always have.

Games weren't difficult ack in the day to be hardcore or some bullshit like that, it was other things influencing the design. We should be happy that isn't the case now, and also happy that they are more inclusive and more people can play.
 
I don't think that gamers are soft, it's more complex.
The gaming change itself and provide very more options and everyone found it's own style and games.
Some people prefer to just play something casual, other something fast, hard etc...

Before games was really little and options too but now we have so much games and some of them are really crap. So some people become bored from testing "just next game".
 
It is actually nice to have enough games, types of games, levels of difficulty, etc. to suit any situation. I do agree with some of the above posts that sometimes, it's nice to just sit down and play something and relax. I love things like Terraria, No Man's Sky, and will also even put something like Doom on Easy sometimes, and go on spree, just for fun. On the other hand though, I still love something like Dead Cells where I have to squeeze just one more run in at 2:30AM on a work-night because the challenge and good design have me hooked. I have a lot of different gaming moods, and sometimes an easier one is nice. Sometimes I want to *almost* throw my controllers. :D There does seem to be something for everyone these days. I still like a little hardcore challenge once in a while though. Keeps me "frosty" to quote Apone.
 
Why, back in my day you had to use Himem & bootsys and run a menu on boot to setup for for each game. After doing that, you had to actually make it through the game for the payoff for all the work up front to run the damn thing in the first place. Gamers today have it easy. And don't get me started on consoles. Bah, get off my lawn!!!!!

/edit: Or, in a modern gripe, using mods in FO4, making it most of the way through the main questline, then getting ctd's. Removing a mod, seeing if that fixed it, then adding that mod back and removing another one, lather, rinse, repeat. I don't think I have made it all the way through since I started using mods. I think it's my masochistic streak. But I really like the idea of Sim Settlements. And Insane Ivy, I really don't want to give her up as a companion.
 
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Why, back in my day you had to use Himem & bootsys and run a menu on boot to setup for for each game. After doing that, you had to actually make it through the game for the payoff for all the work up front to run the damn thing in the first place. Gamers today have it easy. And don't get me started on consoles. Bah, get off my lawn!!!!!

/edit: Or, in a modern gripe, using mods in FO4, making it most of the way through the main questline, then getting ctd's. Removing a mod, seeing if that fixed it, then adding that mod back and removing another one, lather, rinse, repeat. I don't think I have made it all the way through since I started using mods. I think it's my masochistic streak. But I really like the idea of Sim Settlements. And Insane Ivy, I really don't want to give her up as a companion.

Hehehe... Remember when you couldn't even do that? DOS 3.2 is where I started on PCs. (the menu part) :D I remember packing an EXPANDED memory board full of chips (that I pulled from another board) in my first XT. Now that is [H] :D
 
I'm a 50+ gamer .. Ghost & Goblins was the only game I couldn't beat the end boss in (2nd time around being forced to use a crap weapon ..*sniff* :cry: )
I only really play one game now and that's Hunt:Showdown .. and I only play solo.
Go on the Hunt steam community forums and talk about your Crysacks™ .. "Why so many zombies?!! .. Dogs are too tuff! .. Why am I being matched with players that are pwn'ing me!? .. I got headshott'd ..HAXORZ!!! .. my random partner team killed me because I don't know how to play the game! ..howcome nobody will play with me?!!.. Game is too hard, make it easier so I don't die so much!"
A lot of whiney female dogs to say the least ..
 
I wouldn't say I became "soft" but generally "busy." So, I have to be more conscience of my time. Anyone who thinks old games were "easy" are lying. However, I will also say, anyone who thinks things are "easier" are wrong too. It's just different eras of design. All with their own style and difficulties.

What I will say is, I can't stand the era of "speedruns." I find nothing thrilling about that stuff.
I'd agree with this. Times change with gaming like anything else in life. People are busier, older, but still want to put time into a game with some challenges. But to spend countless hours trying to figure things out for one boss fight is just a disrespect of a person's time in today's world. At least it was pre-covid19. :) I played Dark Souls 1 and it was fun, for example. But there was no way I was going to play that a second time. I threw Souls 2 out as it was just too much of a time suck. I don't know about you but as much as I'm a gamer and enjoy playing, I do other things in this life too.
 
I thought the same for a while, and where things like tool-assist are concerned, I feel like "what's the point?". However, if you watch some of the actually good players, that just know their paths through the game, and know how to play well, it's actually pretty impressive. I can't watch them to any great extent, but when I see a game I like being played by someone really good it's kinda cool. Almost like standing and watching someone that was really good at an arcade game in the 80s.
Speedrunners are not "good," they just look like they are on one particular game due to grinding it endlessly for thousands of hours. Watch a stream of a speedrunner play a game they never have before. I swear they are some of the most incompetent actual gamers on the planet.
I have always thought that if you die in a game that it is poor game design. They did not provide the player the tools (gear, skills, etc.) that were needed.
Counter-point: The tools are there, but the player is dying because they have not learned yet how to use all the tools available to them properly.
 
Speedrunners are not "good," they just look like they are on one particular game due to grinding it endlessly for thousands of hours. Watch a stream of a speedrunner play a game they never have before. I swear they are some of the most incompetent actual gamers on the planet.

Counter-point: The tools are there, but the player is dying because they have not learned yet how to use all the tools available to them properly.
Counter-Counter-point?: the game did a poor job preparing the player so that they effectively learned how to use all of the tools properly
 
Counter-Counter-point?: the game did a poor job preparing the player so that they effectively learned how to use all of the tools properly

I'm not a fan of many games that only have one way to do things. Even back in the NES days, you could play things like Megaman or Wizards and Warriors using the weapons that you preferred, and play the game how it suited you (the player). Even Mario gives the player a decent palette of tools to approach the game in various ways that the player can choose.

It's simply not as simple as the player not learning to use the tools to do well at the game. Some games don't give me tools that I enjoy playing with. Emphasis on "PLAYING". If a game feels like work, with little entertainment value for me subjectively, then I have zero motivation to learn those tools. It doesn't mean that I couldn't do it. It means that I don't like the game. It also doesn't make me less of a good player, because I may be an absolute expert at another game. (which is fun to me)

My two cents on the tool thing.
 
I was an extremely hardcore PC gamer from the mid 90's through about 2003 when my business started getting really busy and I had no time. I've gotten way back into gaming the last couple of years and I do notice that the games seem easier than they used to be but that's just fine with me since I'm a lot older now. As long as the game offers higher difficulty levels for those of greater skill, I think all good.
 
I come from an era when gamers would keep coming back for more. If the game was too hard, we kept picking at it till we mastered it. If we played against better players, we kept playing against them until we were just as good or better. We never cried about difficultly and never called a game unbalanced.

I sometimes feel a certain portion of today's gamers whine too much about difficulty. People crying about no proper matchmaking, they feel some games are"unbalanced," a patch comes out making a game harder and people start with their "It's too hard now. I'll wait till the next patch" causing them to rage quit, etc.

Do you think some gamers have become too soft? Or is it that I never simply noticed the soft gamers before?

Lol if you ever need the end all proof that gamers are soft just know that a bunch of fps games now give aim assist to players with controllers and no intelligent human can even argue with you after that.
 
I used to think this, but then those Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne-style games became really popular.

I'm not sure if gamers became soft or if developers made their games softer in an attempt to make them more accessible.
Well those are sort of the same, but yes the name of the game for 20 years straight has been lower the skill to get more money from people who invest less and less and want easier feel goods.
 
When I was growing up, I had a C64, Amiga, and PC (for computers) and various consoles here or there, that I really didn't play much. My friends had NESes and SNESes (I didn't start getting more into these consoles until a little later in their cycles.)

Games on the C64 and Amiga particularly were absolutely brutal where difficulty was concerned. I think I have a good theory of why this is, that's backed up by the opinion of a couple of game designer/programmer friends that I have.

On those computer platforms, the dev teams were generally smaller (not always, but usually). They didn't have teams of testers a lot of the time. The devs themselves would play the games over and over and over, and since THEY could do it, they assumed other people could as well. Anything from just raw difficulty (which they would often increase before release due to their own improving skills with the game) to overlooked bad design decisions because they were already used to them. There were many games that were nearly impossible without a cheat on older computer platforms. (Shadow of the Beast II comes to mind...) Some of the games I used to play and beat on the C64, I can't even believe I had the patience to keep at it. :D Yet my brother and I beat many of them on multiple occasions.

On the consoles (NES, SMS and beyond) I think things were tested more rigorously. Probably in part due to the games going onto ROM instead of disks for one, and a wider audience for another. They could also catch things as they went from Japan to the US since they had to burn the localized version anyway, and fix them.

Just some thoughts on some of the early computer games in comparison to console games. Arcade games... That's another one to explore. :D
 
When I was growing up, I had a C64, Amiga, and PC (for computers) and various consoles here or there, that I really didn't play much. My friends had NESes and SNESes (I didn't start getting more into these consoles until a little later in their cycles.)

Games on the C64 and Amiga particularly were absolutely brutal where difficulty was concerned. I think I have a good theory of why this is, that's backed up by the opinion of a couple of game designer/programmer friends that I have.

On those computer platforms, the dev teams were generally smaller (not always, but usually). They didn't have teams of testers a lot of the time. The devs themselves would play the games over and over and over, and since THEY could do it, they assumed other people could as well. Anything from just raw difficulty (which they would often increase before release due to their own improving skills with the game) to overlooked bad design decisions because they were already used to them. There were many games that were nearly impossible without a cheat on older computer platforms. (Shadow of the Beast II comes to mind...) Some of the games I used to play and beat on the C64, I can't even believe I had the patience to keep at it. :D Yet my brother and I beat many of them on multiple occasions.

On the consoles (NES, SMS and beyond) I think things were tested more rigorously. Probably in part due to the games going onto ROM instead of disks for one, and a wider audience for another. They could also catch things as they went from Japan to the US since they had to burn the localized version anyway, and fix them.

Just some thoughts on some of the early computer games in comparison to console games. Arcade games... That's another one to explore. :D
I think the more probable explanation is that game design as a concept was still in its infancy back then and everyone was still trying to figure it out. Game developers were all mostly computer science graduates. As time went on you had people from more diverse education backgrounds getting involved, along with a better understanding of what kinds of game mechanics and structures work. Technology was also a limiting factor that improved with time. It's actually a multifaceted issue with an interesting history.
 
When I was growing up, I had a C64, Amiga, and PC (for computers) and various consoles here or there, that I really didn't play much. My friends had NESes and SNESes (I didn't start getting more into these consoles until a little later in their cycles.)

Games on the C64 and Amiga particularly were absolutely brutal where difficulty was concerned. I think I have a good theory of why this is, that's backed up by the opinion of a couple of game designer/programmer friends that I have.

On those computer platforms, the dev teams were generally smaller (not always, but usually). They didn't have teams of testers a lot of the time. The devs themselves would play the games over and over and over, and since THEY could do it, they assumed other people could as well. Anything from just raw difficulty (which they would often increase before release due to their own improving skills with the game) to overlooked bad design decisions because they were already used to them. There were many games that were nearly impossible without a cheat on older computer platforms. (Shadow of the Beast II comes to mind...) Some of the games I used to play and beat on the C64, I can't even believe I had the patience to keep at it. :D Yet my brother and I beat many of them on multiple occasions.

On the consoles (NES, SMS and beyond) I think things were tested more rigorously. Probably in part due to the games going onto ROM instead of disks for one, and a wider audience for another. They could also catch things as they went from Japan to the US since they had to burn the localized version anyway, and fix them.

Just some thoughts on some of the early computer games in comparison to console games. Arcade games... That's another one to explore. :D

Another thing to think about is that back in those days most devs were probably pretty hardcore gamers themselves that were good at using computers and people who enjoyed a good challenge. Thats the type of people that would go into programming back then before it became the next job associated with the pay of a doctor or lawyer with half the schooling.
 
to overlooked bad design decisions because they were already used to them.
That isn't just true for games, but every kind of programmer. If you design the program you automatically know how it should work and instinctively use it that way. That's why outside testing is a must.

As for gamers, I don't think they become soft, but there is a certain group among them who have become obsessed with nostalgia. And another subgroup who have become spoiled. And of course there is overlap between the two groups.
 
I think the more probable explanation is that game design as a concept was still in its infancy back then and everyone was still trying to figure it out. Game developers were all mostly computer science graduates. As time went on you had people from more diverse education backgrounds getting involved, along with a better understanding of what kinds of game mechanics and structures work. Technology was also a limiting factor that improved with time. It's actually a multifaceted issue with an interesting history.

That is definitely a factor. I agree with that. Except I have direct evidence for a particular game (on the TurboGrafx) programmed by a friend (and his company) where the game became nearly impossible by release due to them increasing difficulty as they got used to playing the game. ;)

I won’t mention the game because it’s a horrible game anyway, and kind of embarrassing to associate anyone with its creation. :D (it was the first commercial game my friend worked on) Later he went on to work on some great ones though. (Secret of Evermore, Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege, and others...)

He is no longer a game dev. Crunch times pretty much destroyed his life for a while.

The truth is there are so many factors in what many of us perceive as modern soft gamers, that we can’t actually attribute just one or even a small number of factors to it. Many of them have been discussed here though.

I find it kind of fun to talk about though.

Side note: Do you know how many little-baby-pansy gamers who call themselves gamers refuse to play some of the best games of all time because the controls are too hard? :p (specifically thinking System Shock and some of its contemporaries...)
 
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Ninja Gaiden, TMNT, Ghosts and Goblins, Mystical Ninja, Noid, Karati Kid, mega man, some double dragons, battle toads, silver surfer, blaster master. just to name a few.

Remember and played a few of these back in the day.. Blaster Master hold a special place in my heart when I was a young cat. Kid Icarus, and Elevator Action were some of my favs.
 
yeah people are a little soft now, heck I’m soft now. I played like halfway through Cuphead and said ”life’s too short for this” and gave up. Never picked it up again despite owning on Xbox AND Steam. I think it’s a great game but I was having to die like 50 times to get through some of the bosses.
 
yeah people are a little soft now, heck I’m soft now. I played like halfway through Cuphead and said ”life’s too short for this” and gave up. Never picked it up again despite owning on Xbox AND Steam. I think it’s a great game but I was having to die like 50 times to get through some of the bosses.
When I was younger (51yrs old now) I was all over games like Cuphead , etc .. bound and determined to figure it out/beat it .. and it was rewarding when I did (except for Super Ghouls'nGhosts .. never did beat the boss on the 2nd play through :mad: ).

Now I only play Hunt:Showdown .. and the reason I like it so much is that I pretty much dictate how hard a match is going to be .. I can choose to engage other hunters if I want a more challenging experience .. or I can just lay low and farm away on zombies and the like.. I can leave a match whenever I want .. I'm in control (pretty much anyways) of how the match plays out in regards to easy or hard .. either way I'm still enjoying myself though... hard platformers though, I just can't get into anymore.

I did have fun playing 2 player with my daughter and wife on Rayman and Unravel games on Xbox One though .. of which aren't really that hard, so maybe that's why I enjoyed them.
 
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