Did you ever notice: Games don't need to be difficult anymore?

Do games now even need to be difficult at all anymore? If you are from the NES generation I can see why you would think games should be confined to such a handicap, but if you think outside of the box for a second, what are games really? The cop-out answer would be to say that they are entertainment meant to stimulate the senses and challenge the user, hence the name 'video game'. I don't think games need to stimulate you at all, or at least not in the way they did in Contra or Street Fighter. I say you should look to films for a parallel, (and there's a difference between being a parallel to films in their historical progression and just trying to imitate feature films in content and structure) sure in the early days they needed to have some kind of real catch as to why people see them, like the fact that there was a faraway country with beautiful scenery or cutting-edge special effect for the time, but now those coexist with others meant more for your mind, and the medium is accepted as something that can feature content smarter than just eye candy. I think games should be able to stimulate your mind just as well as films can, in fact they have the potential to do it a lot better. The satisfaction you get from doing something in Half-Life 2 is seriously rewarding, and in the way that most games (note that most games besides HL2 use cutscenes- a handicap left over from trying to copy movies) can't replicate. The pure way of telling a story through this medium, one in which the user has at least a little bit of control over what happens, makes all the difference. Any part of Half-Life 2 could have played out in a passive medium such as films, but instead the fact that when a setpiece happens you affected it or when characters are talking, you, not a camera, are looking at them makes it so much more engaging. I have gone on record going so far as to say that games can't be successfully translated to film because film is an inferior form of storytelling. Of course stories made from the ground up as a film or even expertly adapted to one can be and are extremely effective, but games still haven't stopped trying to be half film, half interactive story. Half-Life 2 won't make a bad film because its story isn't good enough, it's because the amount of story gained from it is completely up to the user. Making this a static, and therefore boring sequence of images ruins the way the story in Half-Life 2 pans out. I stick to this statement.

I have also gone on record saying that our entire industry needs to change its name, since developers and people arguing about 'games as art' subjects have used the term 'video game' as a crutch to make their games hang onto bits and pieces of the 8-bit coin-ops of our past. The day when we wake up and realize that we don't need to make players pay by the death anymore is truly the day video games transcend their restrained roots.

Do games now even need to be difficult at all anymore? If you are from the NES generation I can see why you would think games should be confined to such a handicap, but if you think outside of the box for a second, what are games really? The cop-out answer would be to say that they are entertainment meant to stimulate the senses and challenge the user, hence the name 'video game'. I don't think games need to stimulate you at all, or at least not in the way they did in Contra or Street Fighter. I say you should look to films for a parallel, (and there's a difference between being a parallel to films in their historical progression and just trying to imitate feature films in content and structure) sure in the early days they needed to have some kind of real catch as to why people see them, like the fact that there was a faraway country with beautiful scenery or cutting-edge special effect for the time, but now those coexist with others meant more for your mind, and the medium is accepted as something that can feature content smarter than just eye candy. I think games should be able to stimulate your mind just as well as films can, in fact they have the potential to do it a lot better. The satisfaction you get from doing something in Half-Life 2 is seriously rewarding, and in the way that most games (note that most games besides HL2 use cutscenes- a handicap left over from trying to copy movies) can't replicate. The pure way of telling a story through this medium, one in which the user has at least a little bit of control over what happens, makes all the difference. Any part of Half-Life 2 could have played out in a passive medium such as films, but instead the fact that when a setpiece happens you affected it or when characters are talking, you, not a camera, are looking at them makes it so much more engaging. I have gone on record going so far as to say that games can't be successfully translated to film because film is an inferior form of storytelling. Of course stories made from the ground up as a film or even expertly adapted to one can be and are extremely effective, but games still haven't stopped trying to be half film, half interactive story. Half-Life 2 won't make a bad film because its story isn't good enough, it's because the amount of story gained from it is completely up to the user. Making this a static, and therefore boring sequence of images ruins the way the story in Half-Life 2 pans out. I stick to this statement.

I have also gone on record saying that our entire industry needs to change its name, since developers and people arguing about 'games as art' subjects have used the term 'video game' as a crutch to make their games hang onto bits and pieces of the 8-bit coin-ops of our past. The day when we wake up and realize that we don't need to make players pay by the death anymore is truly the day video games transcend their restrained roots.

Surely Resident Evil, Postal, Max Payne, and all the other shitty game to movies were shitty because the story was too sophisticated for a simple movie lmao.

Oh and we are getting beyond the arcade >.>.

Also why must stimulate/change my life.  Why can I not just seek pleasure from challenge?  Why are pure fun video games a lesser game then one that is "artsy?"  >______________________________>

I didn't say that games shouldn't ever be challenging, I just said they don't need to be. This post was actually a response to another post which would probably put it in context better, but I'm saying that not all games need to be hard anymore. It's stupid when a game makes a certain part really hard just to be hard and I think they should accept the idea that it can ease up on the difficulty a bit, if not completely if it's story-driven. The post I commented this no was about the Star Destroyer in Force Unleashed. That was obviously supposed to be a cool part of the game just because you're pulling it out of the sky, so why did they put in the TIE Fighters? For added difficulty. They didn't need to do that, they just thought gamers wouldn't accept something that didn't have difficulty injected. And no about the adaptations that have already been made, if you noticed they were all really old games that had hardly any semblance of story anyway. These are old enough not to count as ones like Half-Life 2 where the story is unique to video games as a medium. They all had cutsenes that revealed most of the story and might as well have been films anyway, they just weren't adapted well because Hollywood gets thier D-list to adapt the games to film and then woonder why they're bad. It's a vicious cycle, really.

I enjoy difficulty in games to a certain extent - I like having my puzzler puzzled by games like Myst or adventure game solutions.  However, I completely agree with your point.  A game doesn't need a high amount of difficulty to be entertaining, and sometimes, it's even beneficial to a game to be played on an easier mode, especially if I'm playing a game primarily for a story.

I highly enjoyed Prince of Persia, even though there was NO way to lose. I think a game has to have some sort of challenge (in this case it was getting timing on acrobatic sequences and battles right), but I feel that losing games in a time where you're not forced to pay more on game over is just an annoyance, because all that's going to happen then is restarting from a recent save point. It's basically quicksave/quickload done for you.

The only thing beating an extremely difficult game is really good for these days is bragging rights, and maybe those who find some satisfaction in finding tricks and strategies to beat difficult games. I myself prefer fun to frustration, and don't really have anybody I can brag to, so I don't care as much to do games on uber-hard.

That said, I do still enjoy some games that are difficult in the classic sense, like Half-Life/HL2, STALKER, Quake 2, etc.

While the challenge should never dissapear completely from games, I just can't understand why people outright dismiss games like Prince of Persia or Fable 2 because you can't die in it. Just because you can't die doesn't mean there's absolutely no challenge to it. I for one still hated it when a boss in PoP bested me--or when I missed a jump--and Elika had to save my butt. I might not have to suffer through the frustration of doing a large part all over again, but even so the sting of failure was still there. And I think once people stop focussing on the whole "you can't die" aspect of the game, they'll realize that there Prince of Persia is actually quite a challenging and satisfying game.

Yeah I think there should be some kind of challenge in some sense, whether it be a puzzle or just getting the timing on a sequence of events right, it's just that games shouldn't be difficult if it's not appropriate. I think the perfect example is PoP vs. Mirror's Edge. The mechanics in Mirror's Edge make it so that you die almost every time you go to a new area and you only learn by failing, but in PoP the difficulty is in getting timing right and there still are things that are hard but they're just not frustrating. I think the reason why people reject the way Mirror's Edge presents itself is because of this difficulty. I think in a free-running game people want to be a badass doing all these cool things, they don't want to have to do trial and error like it's Dragon's Lair.

I hate it when games offer no way to lose, and that's where the "lack of difficulty" argument has come from.  I come from back in the days where you had 3 lives, and if you died four times (because of that all important '0' life), then it was game over and start from scratch.  At the same time, back then, games were GAMES and not interactive experiences like they are today.

There should definitely be a middle ground. Ninja Gaiden just felt like a brick wall to me which made me give up before i'd even really tried, meanwhile the new Prince of Persia is so easy makes me feel like I have the same mental illness that Sonic Unleashed fans have.

And when I say difficulty I'm referring to it the way most people understand it, judging by the way most people misjudge Prince of Persia. Difficulty the way I'm talking about it means frustration. I don't think there shouldn't be any sort of challenge, whether it be mental or physical. That's not to say parts of a game with little to no challenge can't be fun as well, but at the risk of contradicting myself I'll touch on that subject in later posts. Difficulty still exists in Prince of Persia, and probably more so than in other games. The difference between it and other games is the fact that it doesn't bring you to a menu screen and make you watch it load every time you die. Tell me, how many times did you actually fall off the edge or get into the 'kill move' by an enemy and need Elika to come save you? Probably a lot of times. Probably about the same amount of times as, if not more than in Mirror's Edge. But Mirror's Edge is considered by many to be difficult, partly because of the way it treats death. It's very 1990's and they failed to come up with a good reason to allow you not to break the immersion. The trial-and-error gameplay, as many people like to call it isn't actually trial-and-error, it just seems that way because you usually can't think fast enough to get out of a certain situation or jump to a certain building while doing the right move. That's the same way Prince of Persia is, you don't die because of unfair camera angles or anything like real trial-and-error gameplay would be, you just misjudge a jump or press the wrong button when doing acrobatics. The difference is Prince of Persia has adapted for a more modern age of gameplay and realizes it's a game for your home where it doesn't matter how many times you die, while Mirror's Edge just feels like an arcade port.

Multiple difficulties.  Just because you opt for the easiest one (because you're a wuss, admit it), doesn't mean you can claim that it's easy.

"Multiple difficulties.  Just because you opt for the easiest one (because you're a wuss, admit it), doesn't mean you can claim that it's easy."

"Shadow said:

"Multiple difficulties.  Just because you opt for the easiest one (because you're a wuss, admit it), doesn't mean you can claim that it's easy."

Do you mean in Mirror's Edge how you can go off the beaten path? First off, I admit I'm immensely underqualified to discuss this subject further as I've played nothing more than the demo and have seen many reviews and impressions of it. My point still stands however, because most people who talk about how hard or unsatisfying it is for making you constantly die are basing this off of opinions of their first playthrough. You usually don't go for the non-red parts when it's your first time and even if you do, it's immensely unsatisfying to have to retry levels for having broken your chain. I think part of the problem is the fact that you get such a feeling of really doing parkour by being in the first person, that having such a visceral feeling constantly ripped from your eager hands by dying makes you mad inside, not only for having to do the part over again, but because now it's no longer on a whim, dodging and weaving through things for the first time. It's just a routine now, pieces of the level constantly layering on top of each other until the next checkpoint is reached, just so you can repeat the process. From what I've played it feels like the game was made for the time trials first, and then for the story. This would explain the death screen, as in a time trial you expect to be dying a lot, learning a level's ins and outs, but in a single player narrative, we all die a little inside every time we do learn the ins and outs of a level, having tainted the first impression of everything it contains that we can never get back."

I mean basically any game.  People play something other than the hardest difficulty level available to them and deem the game too easy based on that.  That's what difficulty choices are for.  That also does go for optional hard stuff in otherwise easier gamess.  This gets even worse when those same people rely on guides to beat a game the first time and base their judgement as though that guide was supposed to be a part of the experience."