Yes, without a doubt.

80's and 90's arcade games were brutally hard (intentionally so, to suck down quarters). Console games were as well to a degree.

Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing.

Games often tended to be punishing back then just because screw you, and not for any "good" reason.  Battletoads, for example.  A lot of people think (and I'd probably agree) that the only real reason these games were often so punishing is that they were super expensive to buy and also tended to be super short content-wise, so the only way for developers to make you think you were getting your money's worth was to make them really, really hard so it took you forever to get through it - "man, I spent 12 hours trying to beat that last level!  Totally worth the 80 bucks I paid for it," even if a speed run might only take you 15 minutes for the entire damn game.  Nowadays games have enough meat on them that they don't have to pad themselves with crushing difficulties.

That doesn't mean that many new games aren't dumbed down (corridor shooters  ), but I just think that you can't judge a game based purely on it's difficulty level when deciding if it's dumbed down or not.  A lot of games today are far more complicated and have more systems to manage than those old games but are technically "easier" in that you don't necessarily die quite as often.

Also, I like more choices whenever I can get it, so I don't see a problem with having easier modes as long as the harder modes still exist.

ETA:  Mak0 is absolutely right too - the harder you make the game in the arcade the more money the kiddies spend trying to rack up that high score.  A lot of the early games were copies of the arcade variants and kept the difficulty level.

To me, games today are a lot harder than back in the NES days. Or maybe I'm just older and slower. NES, SNES and Genesis era games were pretty much on rails (linear) with simple controls and games today are more complex. They may be easier because they have infinite lives and fairly short checkpoints, but they are still more challenging than 80-90's games.

Just look at KSP compared to Flight Simulator in the late 90's. For FS, you needed a manual just for all the macro commands and some procedural events. Today, in KSP you (I) need a manual just to get to Mun. Like I said, maybe I'm just old and slow.

I look at games like The Witcher 1 & 2 as games that can be almost as punishing as many of those old games, while also being far more complex.  TW2 on the hardest setting, especially at the beginning, is absolutely brutal.  Many of those old games were very timing focused - jump at exactly this time, dodge at exactly that time, etc.  Games like the Witcher series retain a lot of that on the harder difficulties, while also adding a heavy layer of strategy as far as how you are going to approach a battle or sequence.  Not to mention that new games have stories and depth to their universe that usually blow older games out of the water.

The big difference is that new games will usually have different options for difficulty.  But I actually appreciate that.  I was never a very competitive gamer - I don't play much online, don't go for the high score, am not into games for the "challenge" etc.  I'm much more interested in the plot and universe that games can tell, and I tend to play games to unwind.  I play a lot more story or world focused games, like western RPGs and open world shooters and the like.  So for me, I usually play on "normal" difficulty levels which compared to old games are laughably easy.  But as long as they have those harder difficulties for those people who are looking for that challenge then I'm down with it.  To each his own.

Games that artificially lower the difficulty so that even their hardest difficulties aren't that hard kind of annoy me.  Mass Effect was a good example where even the highest level difficulty was pretty doable and would only be a hard level difficulty on many other games.  I really think devs should work to give players a good range of choices so that if you want that challenge, you can have it, but if you don't then you aren't forced to beat your head against a wall.

Still, some of those old games really hit my nostalgia spot and I will occasionally try one out for old times sake.  But then I actually play it and remember why I like modern games better.  

ETA:  Mausermark, I see that you've got Goldeneye in there.  Have you played that recently?  I have loads of memories from that game with friends and whatnot and had a super thick set of rose-colored lenses for it, but when I went back to it not too long ago I actually thought it was not a good game.

On the other hand, Quake II had the best multiplayer.  What a great game.

I agree with the comments above; games these days have replaced short, difficult content with lengthy, easy content. The Assassin's Creed games are a perfect example of a 30 hour cut-scene story based tutorial with zero challenge.

There are still hard games out there if you want a challenge though. Steam has lots of roguelikes and generally hard games.

I can't post about hard games without mentioning Dark Souls, which I think more unforgiving than hard, but still one of the best games ever made.


But yeah, I'll just leave this here.

I agree.  Super meat boy is a great game for those that want a challenge.  So is Rogue Legacy, and Shovel Knight is a great game that just came out on PC and WiiU (I think?) that is very good as well.  Games that are still "challenging" by the old definitions are still out there, though obviously there are less of them.

Dark souls always struck me like a game that the devs made that was actually just broken, but they couldn't fix it and just put it out anyway.  "Uh, we designed it this way to be, uh, hard.  Yeah, that's it! Not broke as hell, just challenging!"  Obviously, I don't love Dark Souls.  

Yes and No.

For example, I've completed Halo 3, ODST, Reach and 4 on Legendary by myself.  I have not done that for Halo CE or Halo 2.

But on the other hand?  Games like Dark sould or even the later Mass Effect games on high difficulty settings can make you go crazy.

I think Dark Souls is a masterpiece of game design, personally.

I remember playing Halo co-op on the hardest setting and quitting before we beat it...it was hard as shit.

I think many of those old games that we saw as hard were really just poorly made games.

Not to justify them but the NES was still the wild west... not many people knew how to make truly good games and there was a lot of experimentation going on. And even worse just like today there was a lot of rush going on to get games to market to "cash in". I believe that many of the "hard" games of our youth would have been normal had they just had more play testing or better programmers working on them.

I mean, some games when you first started playing them like Mario or Castlevania were hard... until you learned the enemy patterns, learned the layout of the levels and were able to manage... but other games had cheap shot crap like respawning enemies, erratic or random spawn patterns, clunky controls or other handicaps that just made the games almost unplayable. No amount of experience or strategy or patience would help you... the games were just "cheating". Two notorious examples I can think of are Ninja Gaiden and Top Gun. No matter what we could do in those games you would encounter spots in them that just shat on you... they put you in no win situations that relied entirely on luck rather than your skill.

So that said, yes games were "harder" back then... but I feel it was because they were poorly made and "cheap" compared to many of today's offerings. There are still "cheap" games made today though... and they are simply the modern incarnations of their elders... rushed in development, poorly programmed or improperly play tested.

E.T. was a perfect example of a poorly made game that was super hard as a direct result of its shittiness.

Games have changed so much, it's hard for me to gauge.   My initial foray into computer games was on the Commodore 64, and to a much lesser extent, arcade stuff.   With practice, I got good at that stuff fairly quickly.

When the age of the first person shooter came, it was a pretty steep learning curve for me and took much longer for me to get any good at them.   Still play through most single player campaigns on medium, and whereas I hold my own online, I don't consider myself very good.  

As far as other modern genres, I gave up on RTS, because in most of the ones I tried, I would always reach a brick wall level where I would get completely stuck.

Great post.

I'll add that after playing video games since the early '80's, I'm very good at figuring them out.  My hand/eye coordination is well developed and I know almost every trick to make a game "difficult".  Because the learning curve isn't what it used to be (generally speaking), games tend to seem easier.

I think games are dumbed down significantly from where they were a decade or so ago, much less the 80s/90s.

Don't even get me started on shooters...ugh.  RPGs have gotten it the worst though.

Compare any new MMORPG to Everquest, hell compare Everquest (now) to Everquest (1999-2005ish era).  Much hand holding and breadcrumbing.  

Compare Elder Scrolls Skyrim to Oblivion or Morrowwind.  

It's impossible to NOT win a modern RPG.  There is not way to miss a quest mob or location because you are hand held right to it.  Even if the fight is hard you can just turn down the difficulty mid fight and steamroll it.

Streamlining character progression, streamlining skill trees, streamlining in general, SUCKS.  Make it complex, deep and nuanced.  (Eg:  Wow's 51 and 31 point spec trees vs the abortion of the talent "tree" now.)

The dumbing down has been to make games more accessible.  Because "gamer" today does not mean what it meant 20 years ago, or even 10.  EVERYONE is a gamer today, and the general population is too stupid and impatient to play Morrowwind, or EQ at launch or Rainbow Six/Rogue Spear.

So we get to streamline, hand holding, corridor, failure is impossible "games" we have today.

Yes, and this is why games like DayZ have taken off.  Some gamers still want a challenge.

I have to agree here, mods like DayZ and Breaking Point are harsh, unforgiving worlds where stupid hurts and frequently kills.  But note who is making them, the players, not the game companies.  

Also note when I say DayZ I mean the Arma2 mod, not the mess that is the standalone.  I hope and pray they can get the standalone back on track and released in a playable state.  

I think DayZ at it's core concept is brilliant.  An RPG built from a FPS makes for meaningful PvP/fear with the added depth of crafting, gathering and "gearing up".  You can make that work in almost any genre, Zombie Apocalypse,to the Spy Thriller to Sci Fi to High Fantasy.

I see it differently.

I think games like Day Z have taken off because they offer emergent gameplay. They allow the user to more or less create their own story... a story in which they can be whatever they want to be without limitations placed on them by the story or the creators. With most games you are confined to following the preordained story and at most you choose between binary choices that lead you to the same conclusions with the only difference being a slightly changed closing movie. Day Z allows people to be a hero, an asshole, a villain, a savior, whatever they feel like. If Day Z was a scripted story game you would have one choice. Hero. Or if it was Mass Effect you'd have two choices, Choir boy hero or asshole hero.

Truly emergent gameplay gives rise to the unpredictable, the unscripted. The difficulty of the game exists simply because you are competing against other human beings rather than kneecapped or purposefully limited AI. There is actually an industry anecdote going around that game designers have indeed made more complex and tactical AI enemies, but they don't use them. They constantly dial back the AI's intelligence... because human players cannot accept a "smart" enemy. They feel the computer is "cheating" when it flanks them, or hits them with a pincer strike or shoot and scoot. But if a human does it they are more accepting.

I myself look forward to the day when a truly emergent single player game comes about. A game that lets you just do what you want without the confines of script or story, but one that isn't just a simple sandbox mayhem simulator. Whoever is first to that door gets some of my money.

Agreed completely about how much AAA RPGs have gone down hill in the last few generations.

Post-Morrowind ES is the perfect example. MW's single, clean inferface screen replaced with 18 menus; the effect of your core target market becoming consoles.

I grew up with Black Isle, Interplay, the Infinity Engine games, Fallout. Like with hard games, there's still people making complex, deep RPGs (Age of Decadence for example).


And DayZ. What a fantastic concept. Like DS, I think lots of people misunderstand the concept, and think it's broken as a result. It's not supposed to be fair, or balanced. Rocket has specifically stated that he tried to make an 'anti-game', and years later people are still complain that KOS is breaking the game. Adding teams or penalties for killing people would defeat the entire point of the game.



I can believe this. Playing 45 minutes of an OFP mission before crawling over a crest and getting shot in the face (/cupcake dog flashback), or getting flanked by Spetsnaz in the woods at night. Much more dangerous than the average brainless DayZ player. Then every now and again you get absolutely rolled by someone and it makes it all worth it.



I'll settle for an RPG where you don't have to be the chosen one on a pre-destined mission to save the world, again.

Games had to be insanely hard back then for you to get any use out of them (ie play, die, repeat) to justify then $40-$70 price tag. With a few exceptions like RPGs (Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, etc) they had very little substance and little actual gameplay. If they weren't insanely hard you'd play through them and finish them in an hour or two.