What happened to all the hard games?

just wanna add that i agree with everyone who said Demons Souls, since its the first game ive played in a while that presents a challenge
 
Mega Man 10 is required playing for those looking for a challenge. It's definitely harder than 9. I'm not at Wily's castle yet and I've heard that it is insanely difficult; it may pass that border of being too difficult, though.
 
Challenges aren't fun for most gamers, I myself only find RTS games fun when it is really, really easy for me to win. I am not saying there is anything wrong with hardcore gamers wanting hardcore games but demographics don't allow for publishers to make hard games economically feasible.
 
The arcade heritage is definitely obvious in most games from 15+ years ago, whether they were an arcade port or not. Concepts like 'Lives', 'Game Over', 'Continues' and progressive difficulty are all built around that idea of making a game capable of being beaten, but not guaranteed. With the modern save system it's pretty much like having a Pro Action Replay attached to every game you play. What I miss is the feeling of accomplishment having beaten a game. It used to be a point of pride to say you had completed X game. Now it's an expectation.

For all the time I've spent playing games like Battletoads, it always blows my mind seeing the speed run videos and realizing how small of a piece of the game I'd actually seen, lol.
 
Beat God of War... unlock & play "Challenge of the Gods"..see if THAT shit doesn't piss you off. Same thing goes for God of War II and "Challenge of the Titans"... First time I EVER almost broke a controller.


Oh yeah.. Dino Crisis on PS1. That was some BULLshit.
 
I like hard games that have user controlledsave point functionality. I played far cry through on the hardest difficulty, and I played Crysis most of the way through on the hardest difficulty (until the stupid alien ship). I enjoy a good challenge with good AI, but I want to control the save point, so I can save as often as I need and not play the same exact part 15 times - that's when the fun of a harder difficulty ends for me.
 
Yeah... I've beaten Final Fantasy XIII already. It's easy mode... linear, auto-battle button mashing. There's no point to saving your game at every save point anymore either, since when you die you're back to where you were right before the battle.
 
Maybe it's just us, but me and my brother both beat Demon's Souls relatively easy. It was hard for the first 2 hours or so, but once you learn how to fight it's a cakewalk.
 
polonyc2 said:
turning the difficulty level up to 'Extreme' levels does not make a game hard...that is making it artificially hard...more enemies, less health, more damage etc...that's not a legit way of judging the difficulty level of a game
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I don't understand your argument at all. How is that not legit? Is it less legit than some of the ridiculously hard games of the past? One hit kills, segments in games like Battletoads that require insane reflexes and perfect memorization of a level, that's much less legit than a hard difficulty on a modern game.

Demon's Souls has been mentioned several times. That's a great modern game that's damned difficult. I also just beat God of War 3 on hard and I died nearly 200 times. There are a few sections of that game that are silly hard.
 
Why not just play "hardcore" and stop playing after a death or RTS defeat? Die in Dragon Age, uninstall and sell.

Most gamers don't do the "speed" aspect, either.

Or play RPGs with the crap items and tickle monsters.
 
I think a lot of people here are right, no one wants a challage, you add everyone complaining about how hard a game is instead of learning to beat the tar out of the Ai. it is sad that gaming has come to this. I picked up Supreme commander 2, what a joke of a game, now they are making RTS really easy, no more tech trees, OH WAIT there is something hard, getting a loggin name to the forum web site. gaming has become a joke.
 
I kind of agree about Supreme Commander 2. Me and my brother bought it the day it came out. I was disappointed, because there is no variety in the game really. The only thing I don't like is it's mandatory to build an air factory right when you start a game and get a super fast scout plane. There are like 3 strategies, and if you don't figure out which one your enemy is going for within the first 3 minutes of the game, you lose. If they nuke rush, the only counter is to rush nuke defense and ignore everything else. If they gunship rush, you better hope you're cybran and can rush a bomb bouncer or 2. If they ACU rush, you just have to spam upgrade your acu so you win the fight when he gets to your base.

I'm really hoping Starcraft II is very close to the original in the style of play (limited resources, worker management, all the units can be used viably, expansion bases, etc.) I got disappointed with Starcraft after it turned into the only game you could get was unlimited money where they stacked 500 mineral piles of 50k hugging your command center and gave you 10 vespene geysers equally close. The original Big Game Hunters was a good map for making more epic gameplay, without removing all the base/resource management of the game.
 
Couldn't beat battletoads as a kid but my first winter home from college I spent 3 obsessive days on it and did it. Had to pause/start the level where you are holding on to that orb though (lvl 9 or so).

If there was ever a game that had the perfect difficulty it was probably Super Mario Bros 3. Fun for everyone but could be challenging if you went for speed runs and/or didn't skip levels and stuff.

Challenge is mostly in the multi-player these days. A lot of single player games are like running 3D mark now. (Or they literally are 3D mark AKA Shattered Horizons. Ok yea that's multi-player but you get my point)

EDIT~ I'm starting to wonder how much harder it would be to play some of those games on an LCD heheh
 
LeninGHOLA said:
^ or some folks require a challenge to even capture their interests. I rarely see the fun in playing a game where it might as well have a permanent god-mode.
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Exactly!


I can't believe there's so much hate towards skilled players who need to be challenged in order to truly find a game compelling.

Unless I feel I can die if I don't try hard then I don't feel there's a challenge and thus the game instantly becomes boring. As you said LeninGHOLA, where's the fun in playing a game in god mode? That's what some games feel like to me these days.


I don't ask for games to be impossibly difficult; all I ask is that "Hard mode" means exactly that.
Let all the casual gamers play on easy/normal and have their fun as they like it, and let the hardcore players have the hardcore challenge as they like it.


Oh, and there's a major difference between liking hard games, and being a obsessive/compulsive Jap kid who spends months mastering a speed run through an old Mario game. These ARE NOT the same people we're talking about here! :p
 
Haven't you heard the news, yet? The entire film and entertainment industry has sold itself out. :)
 
Well one today's kids are too soft for hard games. ;)

Seriously, I think gamers that want a challenge focus on MP games. It's more interesting to pit yourself against other humans rather than game design that is made punishing due to old school game conventions.
 
I think two things changed that made gaming "easy"

First, the industry was built around home "arcade" machines. So if you wanted to play video games in the 80s you generally had to spend coins to do so. Games weren't meant to be easy, if they were, you wouldn't have spent as much money as possible. So when home consoles began popping up they still ran on the same formula of lives and continues.

Second, there is the internet. Whenever I'm stuck in a game nowadays, I turn right to the internet for advice and a walk through. If there was such a thing back during the Sierra adventure games I could have finished California Gold Rush, or Freddy Pharkus Frontier Pharmacist in a day, but there wasn't such a thing. So simple games such as Kings Quest, or Day of the Tentacle could take FOREVER.

I know this may sound like blasphemous but sometimes it's nice to play games that are "easy". Especially when you're grown up, and a few hours here and there is all you get.
 
I think one of the biggest shifts we've seen is that games have alot more depth in terms of story and characters.

Games are rapidly heading towards becoming more like interactive movies and when you have a game like that it becomes too distracting from the plot to be dying frequently. For those games you definitely don't want to be spending ages battling away at a certain hard level or whatever; you'll literally lose the plot and thus lose interest in the game.

A challenge is still nice though, if done right. Left 4 Dead is a shining example of how you can make a game accessible to everyone and give all players the option to choose a difficulty they like without making them feel necessarily small about picking a lower setting. I just resent the idea of making an 'insane' mode not that hard because it might upset the audience. That's how it seems to be these days.
 
Simple economics. Developers are beginning to understand that they cannot afford to appeal to just the hardcore gamers any longer. They see the opportunity to draw in the masses with more user friendly gaming with richer textures and better themes = more users = more profit.
 
theNoid said:
Most people play games to have fun, not want to break controllers. Hard games are best left in the past where developers didn't understand the average consumer.
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You know how many SNES controllers I went through when I was young? It was a staggering amount...
 
MajorDomo said:
Simple economics. Developers are beginning to understand that they cannot afford to appeal to just the hardcore gamers any longer. They see the opportunity to draw in the masses with more user friendly gaming with richer textures and better themes = more users = more profit.
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that makes sense to me. more money, i also think there is a lack of creativy
 
It just strikes me as odd, as if some people have a weird quirk in their brain that defies all logic and reason and causes them to like things that are provably unpleasant. For instance: I am watching a stream on Justin.tv of a guy playing GoW3 on chaos (very hard) difficulty. From the start, you have to finish the game once to simply unlock this difficulty. For another, he's been on this relatively minor miniboss fight for the last three hours. He has died in excess of 50 times to one sequence that should last less than 5 minutes. Where's the fun in doing something you've already done before over and over and over again for the sake of "overcoming a challenge"? At which point is the line drawn between "this is rewarding!" and "this is a fucking waste of my time"?

But then again I do live in a world where some people get off on being tortured, so what do I know.
 
It is one of those things. I recently got dragons age. Never really been one for party based RPG's so playing on easy. Still didn't stop me getting my ass kicked in one area again, and again. The satisfaction of going back there with a different party arrangement and finally beating that damn revenant was good though.

It is that which I assume drives people to play on harder and harder difficulty. You don't want to lose but you get some satisfaction scraping through by the skin of your teeth.
 
Not sure is this is talk about. There is a hard game. I want to be the guy.
 
polonyc2 said:
turning the difficulty level up to 'Extreme' levels does not make a game hard...that is making it artificially hard...more enemies, less health, more damage etc...that's not a legit way of judging the difficulty level of a game
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If the factors that compose the game play are "enemies, health, damage, etc" you have to judge the difficulty based on those components that are being modified when altering the "difficulty" of the game.

So following your statement, how then to judge difficulty? "Extreme" is not harder, as opposed to judging the difficulty of the game on any other settings? How is normal considered "normal" difficulty then? Different games have to adjust a lot of factors, because sometimes, increasing the number of enemies can be outright overwhelming to the resources available to a player(Say on a timer as in Mass Effect 2), just as reducing player health can create a propensity for near guaranteed instant death where taking damage at some point will be unavoidable. Or what I've seen sometimes is increasing enemy health, damage, and speed, but reducing the number of enemies because they now hit so hard as to significantly threaten playability. Or the inverse, weaken the enemies but add more numbers in a bid to force a player to maintain MORE awareness of all enemies, but receive individually less damage, but a greater likelihood of being overrun.

Now, I'm actually enjoying Mass Effect 2 on Insanity. In fact, I have a defense for games that have you play them once before unlocking later difficulty levels. It's called "challenge awareness." Sometimes a game is structured in such a way that players being unaware of significant readiness changing events could end up forcing players into a corner. in ME2, there are a couple milestone missions that If I were not thinking about them and how hard they would be, I wouldn't have put extra effort into getting enough minerals to upgrade my equipment, or buying exactly the right upgrades for my weapons and armor from merchants to maximize effect while ignoring the upgrades I can afford to grab later; or having put precise effort into getting Loyalty with the two most important allies for the best success.


If you look at the Insanity difficulty of ME2, mainly you do see a HP increase on enemies, as well as accuracy, damage, etc, but also more layers of defenses. As in Biotic shields, Tech shields, and Armor shields. These in various forms create different "elements" you must learn to disable effectively while juggling your abilities where needed, but not all just in dealing damage. Some of it can be distraction, knockdown, stuns, and "OMFG I need to retreat" abilities that don't deal direct damage, but significantly alter the play field to your advantage when used correctly, and sometimes screw you badly because it was the wrong choice.
 
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krameriffic said:
It just strikes me as odd, as if some people have a weird quirk in their brain that defies all logic and reason and causes them to like things that are provably unpleasant. For instance: I am watching a stream on Justin.tv of a guy playing GoW3 on chaos (very hard) difficulty. From the start, you have to finish the game once to simply unlock this difficulty. For another, he's been on this relatively minor miniboss fight for the last three hours. He has died in excess of 50 times to one sequence that should last less than 5 minutes. Where's the fun in doing something you've already done before over and over and over again for the sake of "overcoming a challenge"? At which point is the line drawn between "this is rewarding!" and "this is a fucking waste of my time"?

But then again I do live in a world where some people get off on being tortured, so what do I know.
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Ahahaha 2 hours later and he still hasn't passed this boss. Zeus should be fun.
 
TIckle torture!!!!!

WOw... Tell him that he should sleep on it. It is proven that sleep will utilize what he's gained from the effort. He'll probably beat it shortly after starting up again. :_)
 
its because everyone is a noob nowdays without skill... its all about being a "casual" gamer
 
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