For nearly the past two decades, many people have been noticing that video games have gotten easier with each console generation, to the point where they’re becoming ridiculously easy. Sure, much of the difficulty of older games can be attributed to the lack of immediate check points, save points, and/or continue points.
Take a look at the Guitar Hero series. GH3 was what really made the series famous, along with the artists that it featured. Most people of our generation are well aware that songs like “Through The Fire and Flames” and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” were some of the most grueling in any rhythm game back in the day. Here’s an honorary mention for “The Legend of Max” before you DDR players murder me. Moving on, Neversoft decided to make the following GH games much more casual-friendly (with the exception of Guitar Hero: Metallica). Of course, there’s no problem with making games more accessible, but the problem lies with the route they went with: nerfing Expert note charts. Since when were casuals experts?
A long time ago, a Score Hero thread raised the issue of the steep difficulty of GH3, specifically tiers 7 and 8 on hard and expert. Many of those songs were charted by former Score Hero members, so the difficulty wasn’t surprising. A Neversoft developer did state that he wanted his daughter to at least be able to complete these songs on hard; fair enough.
Guitar Hero: World Tour came along, and it was an absolute joke. Many songs were sightread full-comboed on expert by veteran players (I’ve sightread FCed a few so far), and the more difficult songs such as “Hot for Teacher” and “Satch Boogie” were easily sightread. To give you an idea of my skill level, I’m only ranked 2,358 as of June 30, 2009, so I still have a long way to go.
Let’s take a look at Guitar Hero: Smash Hits. Bark at the Moon’s solo was slightly nerfed. Bridge 1 and and the “red snake” on Through the Fire and Flames were heavily nerfed. Was there a need for this? These songs were meant to be completed by only the very best players on expert. Try anchoring green and flailing your fingers through the intro now. You’ll probably get past it.
Super Smash Brother Brawl went this route too. Sakurai did not want a competitive environment, even in Super Smash Brothers Melee. Though Melee’s meta-game was a complete accident from his point of view, Sakurai succeeded in his goals with Brawl. For all of you nay-sayers that keep saying, “Give it a chance; new advance techniques will be discovered!” please note that it’s been over a year. Brawl is still slower with no recent discovery of major adv. techs, and Meta Knight is the god with no true counter.
If you’re an avid gamer, then you already know that there are very few games out there that are even remotely difficult on even the very hardest difficulties. Some exceptions recently are Devil May Cry 4, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, and Resident Evil 5: Hell and Hell mode, Master Ninja, and Professional respectively. However, even such games will lose their challenge upon mastery (speedruns are a great exhibition of skill mastery and luck manipulation). That’s when gimping ourselves as players comes in.
Ever played Halo 2 or Halo 3 with skulls on Legendary? How about straight-character challenges or low-level runs in RPGs? Am I the only one who finds it ridiculous that we gamers have to gimp ourselves because our games are inherently too easy? Everybody and his mother seems to have the Complete Campaign: Legendary achievement. Games shouldn’t be losing their replay value after a few days or a week.
The last thing I want to mention about this subject is World of WarCraft. There is nothing challenging about it except for PvP (player versus player), though the bigger problem there is composition and class balance. As for PvE (player versus environment), all a competent player needs to do his put in time to learn fights and gear up. The fights are always the same, and unlike many other games, the encounters are the same every single time. Let’s face it, many players aren’t competent enough to learn the encounters, or they don’t have enough time to earn their gear. 10-man raids for these types of people are fine and all, but leave them out of hard modes, and don’t make current gear ridiculously easy to obtain with every following patch. I believe the true difficulty here lies with being able to find competent players and not a fail group, being lucky enough for an upgrade to drop, and having further luck with winning aforementioned upgrade.
On an equally random note, happy belated birthday Paige; my apologies.