Originally posted by Latronus Ah, you are a young pup, NES LOL! I started on a TI-75 and a Commador and the Apple IIE was cutting edge for my generation. But to the point, I feel games have become easier for a couple reasons: 1. Suites took over and all they care about is making money and quantity became more important than quality. 2. The "every kid gets a trophy" generation is now playing games and god forbid they have to actually work for anything. So, to make money, games are dumbed down so that generation can continue to not have to deal with failure. God help us, we have raised a bunch of pansies that can't deal with having to work for anything in a game; let alone life... Just my 2 CPs.
I couldn't agree more with that statement.
I'm 32, started playing video games on my grandpas commodore 64 (Dragon Wars & Wasteland FTW) and truly miss the difficulty that came with the classics.
The only way you two can make this statement is if you're completely ignoring all the challenges which exist in modern games.
It's a little ironic that this generalization itself is "dumbed down" (based on what you want to believe, rather than the truth.)
Unless you come back and say you beat I Wanna Be the Guy, VVVVVV, every modern FPS on hardest difficulty, Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Ninja Gaiden Black, and were #1 multiplayer ranked in Starcraft 2, League of Legends, and Tribes: Ascend.
But if you're not chasing the modern hard games, you have no business making generalizations that modern games are easy because you're the one chasing easy games!
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
But if you're not chasing the modern hard games, you have no business making generalizations that modern games are easy because you're the one chasing easy games!
Thats true. If they are not playing the hard games, setting games on hard when they play or playing competitive PvP games they should shut up about the subject. Dark Souls was hard. Ninja Gaiden Black was hard (until I found a way to make infinet amount of money). Mass Effect or any other RPG is quite challenging on the hardest settings. You certainly have to pay attention to your build and use your skills correctly. Shogun 2: Total War and Civilization V are very hard on the hardest settings (partly because the AI gets outrageous buffs and cheats quite shamefully).
And not to forget, staying near the top in any E-sport game is hard. You can bet your internet coins that every single succesful E-sport game is deep and it is not about how many buttons you need to press. League of Legends champion has 3 abilities, 1 passive and 1 ultimate ability. You could certainly make that into a console game and the depth would not suffer at all. GW1 had 8 skills on the skillbar and the combat was incredibly deep. Much deeper than many complicated systems. Many fighting games are very deep and still they are essentially played with a controller.
Complexity is not depth. Modern games have shed the extra complexity because it only serves to make the game more inaccessible. What was the point of learning skills in Eve Online? There was no point. The choice was between acquiring them early on or gimp yourself in the long run. Not only that but the need to train them right at the beginning puts a lot of players off. They quit the game bored before they get to learn proper skills. Yes, some fans wailed "CCP is dumbing down Eve" but everyone with half a wit knows learning skills added no mentionable depth to the game and were actually harmful.
All this stuff about making mundane stuff cumbersome and hard does not make the game better. I can remember only a couple of games where I could've drawn a map if I wanted to, but I never thought it added depth to the game. First time I saw a hand driven map by my friend (some Zelda I think, or something similar) I immediately thought "Why doesn't the game draw you a map?"
The same way why the hell does the NPC need to spill his life's tale just to tell me he needs squirrel hides to make mittens. A list of tasks on the HUD is just fine for me. It is convenient. Minimap is convenient. They all make it easy for me to concentrate on the important stuff: Slaying monsters, finding treasures, being the hero...Anything else is more or less in the way really - an inconvenience.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
What was the point of learning skills in Eve Online? There was no point. The choice was between acquiring them early on or gimp yourself in the long run. Not only that but the need to train them right at the beginning puts a lot of players off. They quit the game bored before they get to learn proper skills. Yes, some fans wailed "CCP is dumbing down Eve" but everyone with half a wit knows learning skills added no mentionable depth to the game and were actually harmful.
The same way why the hell does the NPC need to spill his life's tale just to tell me he needs squirrel hides to make mittens. A list of tasks on the HUD is just fine for me. It is convenient. Minimap is convenient. They all make it easy for me to concentrate on the important stuff: Slaying monsters, finding treasures, being the hero...Anything else is more or less in the way really - an inconvenience.
Yeah that trait of EVE was definitely part of why I quit. Fixed now, I hear, but it was a stupid mechanic which deprived the game of fun.
I'm a bit mixed on the NPC thing. I sort of do want to interact with interesting characters in a MMORPG, but the tricky part is that cutscnes make it feel a little off.
For example the characters in TSW are (surprisingly) well-written and well-presented in their cutscenes. They feel like real characters instead of cardboard cutouts (or at least as real as the better characters in a horror movie can be.) That makes me want to keep watching cutscenes.
The frustrating part is that gameplay treats them like a typical MMORPG, where you may never see a character again after their introduction. This makes me want to stop watching cutscenes, because they feel inevitably irrelevant.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
i think games are easier for the older generation because we have had tons of practice with them. console and pc commands are almost at a set standard. how many games use WASD to move? M is open map. J or L is quest journal. or on console (havent owned one since SNES) but, B was run faster. A jump...etc. as we got older we got more familiar and new game designers adopted the standards set by their predecessors.
are some games really easy today? sure. but i think companies market games toward a younger audience. like they marketed towards us when we were young. so a combination of us growing up, marketing staying young, and our familiarity with the concepts and control schemes we grew up with, have all contributed to how easy we percieve games to be.
Games don't aim to a younger audience, games aim to the mainstream gamer. The mainstream gamer is the kind of gamer that showed up around the first PS2 and xbox. Suddenly gaming was the cool thing to do. Before it was a kids and nerd thing, you didn't wanted to be seen playing games as a 18 year old cause you would be a nerd. But suddenly gaming became the cool thing to do and it was no longer a kids and nerd thing. People who called you a nerd suddenly called you a noob in shooters. Years later the wii comes out and suddenly your own damn mother plays games, while she always said games where a waste of time and money.
The problem however with the mainstream gamer is that they fear anything new or challeging. It is not just a feeling because i would be more experienced with games, games did became more easy. Remember how you had to hunt down hearts or medipacks to get health again (Half-life for example). These days you hide behind a wall (with the press of a button and you are out of harms way) and tadaa after 3 seconds your health is at 100% again. This so 26 year old Johny enjoys his Call of Duty more. But as soon as a game dares to remove that option, than the game press and mainstream gamers shout murder and say the game is broken. Look at games that don't have a active cover system (press a button to stick behind a object like Gears of War). Space Marines got flamed down for not having a cover system while you took fire and many of todays gamers and the press (who are just mainstream gamers with a huge Halo and CoD fanboyism) said the game was unfairly hard this way and it was a broken mess cause of this. I as old gamer cheered for the fact that the game didn't think i was a dumb boy. There was no active cover but there was enough cover to hide behind. And you had to be tactical, you couldn't charge into a mob thinking you would be the last man standing with ease. No you had to make sure the gunners where taken down first, then try to seperate a orc from the horde so you could excute him,which would refil a part of your health bar but doing so you where vunerable cause you couldn't cancel the animation. Even this was seen as broken, but if you would be able to cancel it it would would make your pretty much OP but heeey mainstream gamers wanna be OP, they don't wanna die, they need to feel awesome or they gonna cry a game is stupid.
Im not a long time MMO'er. My first MMORPG was Ragnarok Online beta and my first pay to play was WoW (so about 8 or 9 years of MMO experience). But as someone said before within WoW you could already notice the insane need for easy walk in the park (this is thanks to activision who is known to only want to please the mainstream gamer and when Activision came in everything changed in WoW). When i just played WoW you had to read the quests if only to know where to go, and it wasn't more than "its east of the lumber camp". You had to look for your mobs and that gave a big explorer satisfaction. I even bought a atlas and another guide to help me on the way. Later Thotbot came so you could look up the quest location, but it still required searching. It was great and the raids where hard. Few years later no one reads the quests anymore cause there is a giant arrow pointing the way and if you still get lost you press m and you see the location of your quest and where the mobs are hidding. Warhammer online started this (though WoW already had it with mods, Warhammer had it as a official feature) and around that time every MMORPG suddenly took it. Than a new MMORPG comes out, i forgot its name it wasn't a big one and was made by a dutch studio. They didn't had any arrow telling you where to go, if you wanted to know where to go you had to read the quest. And in a review that was the biggest flaw of the game. Gods they couldn't stop complaining about how unconviniant it was to go to your quest. It was broken in their eyes and half of the time they had no idea where to go (yeah if you don't read you don't know where to go).
Games did become easyer, and a lot shorter, 5 or 6 hours is seen as normal. 10 years ago a shooter would be called short for being only 10 hours, these days 10 hours is seen as a long game. Anyway i wrote a wall of text so i leave it to this.
Going through this thread it seems as though everybody has an opinion on whether or not games have been dumbed down and why or why not. I think what's clear to everybody is that games have changed to adapt to a new audience, which is natural with any product.
Whether we're talking about our computers, our phones, our cars or in this case our games, the theme today seems to be user friendly. Developers say they want to remove the hassle from these things so that we can enjoy the experience more but for games specifically the 'hassle' has always been part of the challenge, and the challenge part of the experience. Video games started out as ways for a handful of tech-heads to challenge themselves. They weren't catering to the public so they made them as difficult as they needed them to be to achieve a satisfactory challenge. Even when developers did begin making games for the public, the only gamers were people who, like those original tech-heads, wanted to be challenged. All of those early gamers were generally older dudes so of course the games were harder back then.
But it's only natural that over time, as video games began appealing to different crowds, that the games would have to change. The first new audience were the youngins. Kids who, like me, would watch older siblings spend countless hours in front of video games in hopes of getting a turn, only to be sorely disappointed by being told "I don't want you playing my file". Since I came in around this time (start of SNES era) I can't vouch for how hard previous games were but I can say that most games I got to play as a kid were thouroughly challenging for both me and my older brother with a few exceptions. By N64 video games were a big thing and the audience was bigger than it had ever been but it was still mainly teenagers and guys in their 20's and 30's. Well equipped for the challenge.
Since then we've gone through dreamcast, and playstastions and gamecubesand xboxes and whatnot and the interest for video games has grown drastically and the audiences have gotten broader. Video games are no longer exclusive to the types of people they were first designed for (a lot of you on this forum seem to be those very people). Now they're for toddlers to grandparents and the hardcore gamer has to fit somewhere inbetween.
So all in all, I don't feel that video games have been dumbed down. Instead the spectrum of video games has simply widened so much that there is something for everybody now. Although the AMOUNT of titles today that a veteran would find challenging may be on the decline, but that's another argument.
#TeamVainlash Why did Marceline's dad eat her fries? I mean...cause she bought them and they were hers...
I am envious of the people who used paper based maps in old adventure games. I want to go back in time to that era. I'm saddened that I was born to a generation that skipped on the old school goodness, and have forever been searching for some.
I don't. I was there. It was a pain in the ass. I remember the first Might & magic, and uncountable number of graph papers for the map. It is not hard to map .. how hard can it be? Just note down the walls. But it is horribly boring & tedious.
Older != better. It is not old school goodness .... it is old school boredem.
And .. if you like mapping so much, just turn off the auto-map or don't look at it.
I always LOL at the people who think that doing everythign by hand is superior and fun. Heck, even Ultima 6 provides a CLOTH MAP so that you don't have to map stuff out yourself.
I don't play games to be a cartologist. It is a boring job.
Skyrim gave me a paper map. Someone out there is obviously still catering to us cartographers.
I like trinkets though. I still have my Ultima 6 map hung on the wall behind my computer desk. I bought the collector's edition, which also gives me the rune stone that teleport me to Britainnia.
I remember that!
I still had the cloth map that came with my copy of Ultima 4 hanging in my study until Katrina wiped me out. I also had my copy of the players handbook, mostly translated from the original runes i might add.
The above is my personal opinion. Anyone displaying a view contrary to my opinion is obviously WRONG and should STHU. (neener neener)
Well apparenlty there are a lot of schisms here with people's expectations.
For the record:
My girlfriend loves letters and prefers them to e-mail. Writing and recieving. I have to say I prefer receiving them to e-mail.
I have travelled across the U.S. (both ways - long trip) in a very small car and it's one of my best memories. I will do it again. No dysentery though.
I play chess every Friday.
And unlike the OP, I was born in '67 and my first video game was poing. Thereafter it was an old atari and I got used to dying in "Adventure". Has anyone played Adventure? You died all the time! Also, I found it very funny to see his "I was born in the '80;s" statement " and things were harder wwhen I was young". In that case they were freakin' brutal when I was young!
In any case, I think that's the thing, I got used to dying in games.
If I died I tried again. If I got frustrated I took a break. Nowadays people die once and "we don't have the right party this is a bust" gets said.
I dont' believe it's about "deep games" or what one considers hardcore entertainment but more about the expectations of failure and one's reward once you get success.
I seem to remember when I was young that it was ok to fail. It just acted as a teacher so you could do better the next go.
oh, and today is Friday!
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
So all in all, I don't feel that video games have been dumbed down. Instead the spectrum of video games has simply widened so much that there is something for everybody now. Although the AMOUNT of titles today that a veteran would find challenging may be on the decline, but that's another argument.
Exactly, although I'm not even convinced the amount of vet-worthy challenging games is on the decline. The list I mentioned earlier in the thread was only stuff right off the top of my head. Hundreds of challenging games exist apart from my list, and I'm not sure the rate of "hard" games has slowed so much as the rate of "easy" games grew to fit the demand quite rapidly.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Originally posted by SiveriaPerosnally gamers today quite frankly don't even have 20% of the skill that older gamers have, which is why the devs have to cater to the biggest group, which is the no-skill gamers of the last generation or so.
you must be kidding me! The younger generation would kick the living shit out of you in so many games (MOBA, shooters,)
Originally posted by SiveriaPerosnally gamers today quite frankly don't even have 20% of the skill that older gamers have, which is why the devs have to cater to the biggest group, which is the no-skill gamers of the last generation or so.
you must be kidding me! The younger generation would kick the living shit out of you in so many games (MOBA, shooters,)
those games require skill
Nah, the skills are the same. It's the same for both generations.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
Skyrim gave me a paper map. Someone out there is obviously still catering to us cartographers.
Cartophiles aren't necessarily the same demopgrahic as cartographers.
One likes maps. The second likes making maps.
Skyrim has a minimap and a map, so it doesn't appeal to cartographers directly.
I don't think I would say it could never be fun, but in most of my games I definitely don't want to waste a bunch of time creating the map for it just because the game couldn't be bothered to put in a minimap.
Muahahaha, activate trap!
The map included in Skyrim is only of the major landmarks. For a complete map one would have to add all the other discovered landmarks to the existing map, and could be considered a cartographer!
Not that I would ever do that though... lol.
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
Well apparenlty there are a lot of schisms here with people's expectations.
For the record:
My girlfriend loves letters and prefers them to e-mail. Writing and recieving. I have to say I prefer receiving them to e-mail.
I have travelled across the U.S. (both ways - long trip) in a very small car and it's one of my best memories. I will do it again. No dysentery though.
I play chess every Friday.
And unlike the OP, I was born in '67 and my first video game was poing. Thereafter it was an old atari and I got used to dying in "Adventure". Has anyone played Adventure? You died all the time! Also, I found it very funny to see his "I was born in the '80;s" statement " and things were harder wwhen I was young". In that case they were freakin' brutal when I was young!
In any case, I think that's the thing, I got used to dying in games.
If I died I tried again. If I got frustrated I took a break. Nowadays people die once and "we don't have the right party this is a bust" gets said.
I dont' believe it's about "deep games" or what one considers hardcore entertainment but more about the expectations of failure and one's reward once you get success.
I seem to remember when I was young that it was ok to fail. It just acted as a teacher so you could do better the next go.
oh, and today is Friday!
It's true, even if you didn't like it at first, you got used to it. You didn't have any choice. With old school cartridge games there were no updates, fixes or balancing so the game you bought at release was the game you kept for life. Also with the absence of the internet you had to figure out most things for yourself unless you had a friend who could help.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. -- Herman Melville
I can agree about games being easier, but saying that they are dumbing down...
My first experience in gaming was watching my sisters play with the first playstation, we also had (still have) tons of demo cd's. First game that i really played myself was Crash Bandicoot, so i didn't get any "easy" games for start
But saying that they have dumbed down? I can and can't agree on that, but after rewriting this post countless times, i find no evidence for games not being dumber today... Only games that have given me any thoughts lately have been Disgaeas.
I could blame the world being F*cked up in "Era of Fear", i could blame over protecting and blindly negative parents, or kids who can't experiement with something new... But in the end gaming industry goes with demand, and if demand right now is something,something and option to skip the dialogue, why bother with an idea?
Edit: But i completely skipped on Math *FaceDesk*. When we look at numbers, games today offer more flexible plating with boosts and stats
I do agree that challenge is less of a factor today with games, but the challenges are still out there should a gamer wish to seek one out. But that's a natural progression, don't you think? Not everybody is a competitve gamer? It just means more people are playing video games.
Well, besides the hand-eye coordination side of it (to which I DESTROY all my friends, comparably), I was leaning more towards the 'thinking man's game' side of hte argument. Abstract logic and whatnot, as needed in an exploration game like the original Metroid, or the various adventure games of old (Maniac Mansion ftw).
It seems to me that games, as a collective, have moved towards having to think less (thusly, less complicated and challenging in that regard), and being much more competitive - which turns me way off - because I can't stand a sore loser... and I have seen my share of them over the years, progressively getting worse as games get more simple, strangely enough.
Nobody in their right mind would argue that MGS games lack enough cutscenes. It's a difficult game when you can actually make them all STFU (!!!) and just let you play the damned thing. So it's hard to determine what people stopped playing because of the blabbity blab, and those that stopped because they were getting their ass handed to them. I have a friend that was psyched about MGS4 until he got his hands on it, and I can't figure which part of it made him stop playing... he is as impatient as he is stupid, so it's hard to ou tell.
so you are trying to say that old metroid somehow takes more thinking than theory crafting? Head on over to elitist jerks and be wrong from now until forever. Older games are difficult but only from a coordination standard. As soon as you start talking about thinking, the math involved in even the most themepark mmos outstripes anything you had in those days completely.
The map included in Skyrim is only of the major landmarks. For a complete map one would have to add all the other discovered landmarks to the existing map, and could be considered a cartographer!
Not that I would ever do that though... lol.
Why do you feel that's relevant?
There's a full map in-game. Hence, no requirement or benefit to creating your own map.
So even if that map doesn't even exist (which it didn't in my digital download), it's still not a game appealing to cartographers.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
so you are trying to say that old metroid somehow takes more thinking than theory crafting? Head on over to elitist jerks and be wrong from now until forever. Older games are difficult but only from a coordination standard. As soon as you start talking about thinking, the math involved in even the most themepark mmos outstripes anything you had in those days completely.
This ^^^
I remember in the days of EQ, playing a DPS wiz is extremely simple. There is VERY little optimizing. If you play a mage in WOW, optimizing your DPS takes a lot more work & know-how. Heck, even a different spec has a different optimized set of gear, rotation, and priority of casting.
I remember in the days of EQ, playing a DPS wiz is extremely simple. There is VERY little optimizing. If you play a mage in WOW, optimizing your DPS takes a lot more work & know-how. Heck, even a different spec has a different optimized set of gear, rotation, and priority of casting.
But is that really difficulty? It may be for the first person, but everyone after that will keep following the same old path until someone discovers something new. Even the end-game raiding isn't hard, it's just repetitive scripts. I never got interested in raiding (or gear grinds in general) for the pure reason of it being easy. Maximising dps gives what? A boss that dies 2 seconds faster? And dodging/adapting to the same 7-8 mechanics every fight isn't hard, it's being able to use your memory.
Aside from the coordination required to play games and press 10000 buttons at the same time, the only challenge I find is in RTS games. The on the spot thinking and critical decision-making straight away, with no planning and half of the knowledge you'd like to have is what makes them fun and exciting. And only the multiplayer that is.
It's totally different from what I just typed above, but to find out if difficulty is dropping, there has to be a clear definition of difficult. I believe that really depends on the person using the keyboard and mouse. For me there's no intellectual challenge in getting the highest dps, nor any intellectual curiousity. This makes MMORPG endgame hard to enjoy. For me difficult means controlling everything you/your avatar does whilst having to think and plan my next move. This means I have to get a high enough APM (Actions per minute), my clicks/keystrokes have to be correct, I have to have situational awareness and I have to use my brain to control and think about my next move as well as anticipating what my opponent is doing. And that's why I get my challenge fix from RTS games. This, of course, might be totally different for someone else.
"We need men who can dream of things that never were." - John F. Kennedy And for MMORPGs ever so true...
But is that really difficulty? It may be for the first person, but everyone after that will keep following the same old path until someone discovers something new. Even the end-game raiding isn't hard, it's just repetitive scripts. I never got interested in raiding (or gear grinds in general) for the pure reason of it being easy. Maximising dps gives what? A boss that dies 2 seconds faster? And dodging/adapting to the same 7-8 mechanics every fight isn't hard, it's being able to use your memory.
Aside from the coordination required to play games and press 10000 buttons at the same time, the only challenge I find is in RTS games. The on the spot thinking and critical decision-making straight away, with no planning and half of the knowledge you'd like to have is what makes them fun and exciting. And only the multiplayer that is.
Well a competitive RTS match is certainly more challenging, but that doesn't mean high-end raiding isn't challenging. There's still a fairly large difference between a noob and a master, even in MMORPGs.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
There is definitely an age gap for gamers between those in their early 20s and those in their mid 30s. I have some younger friends that have basically said straight out that they have stopped checking out the games I recommend, because they "suck."
The last 3 games I recommended are:
DayZ
The Secret World
WURM Online
Meanwhile, the younger guys want to play:
Diablo 3
League of Legends
WoW
See the differences? I do. I think it all started when kids started getting trophies for losing.
so you are trying to say that old metroid somehow takes more thinking than theory crafting? Head on over to elitist jerks and be wrong from now until forever. Older games are difficult but only from a coordination standard. As soon as you start talking about thinking, the math involved in even the most themepark mmos outstripes anything you had in those days completely.
This ^^^
I remember in the days of EQ, playing a DPS wiz is extremely simple. There is VERY little optimizing. If you play a mage in WOW, optimizing your DPS takes a lot more work & know-how. Heck, even a different spec has a different optimized set of gear, rotation, and priority of casting.
Except you forgot that WoW has a threat meter because many of their players lack the "know how" to know when they are doing too much dps and are about to pull aggro.
I don't know if this has been said before but it's not the players who have changed but the way games are being developed that has. Anyone saying that it was/is the gamers fault is not entirely correct. Back in the eary days of gaming it was a very small demograph and developers and gamers had a more personal relationship. Now I'm not talking about over the phone type relationship but more of a rivalry of sorts. Developers took it upon themselves to really challenge gamers to step up and beat their creations. If anyone remembers the Swordquest series you know. It was more so an insult to devs if kids could wipe their collective azzed with their babies and laugh for more. Times were simple and so were the politics. But this day and age devs are more concerned about getting MORE players to play rather than who's playing. Sad but true story buds. We live in another age were numbers matter not relationships between creators and those that play.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
I remember in the days of EQ, playing a DPS wiz is extremely simple. There is VERY little optimizing. If you play a mage in WOW, optimizing your DPS takes a lot more work & know-how. Heck, even a different spec has a different optimized set of gear, rotation, and priority of casting.
But is that really difficulty? It may be for the first person, but everyone after that will keep following the same old path until someone discovers something new. Even the end-game raiding isn't hard, it's just repetitive scripts. I never got interested in raiding (or gear grinds in general) for the pure reason of it being easy. Maximising dps gives what? A boss that dies 2 seconds faster? And dodging/adapting to the same 7-8 mechanics every fight isn't hard, it's being able to use your memory.
Well, at least the person has to read up on all the theorycrafting and use tools like RAWR to optimize gear. That is 100x more work/complexity than the early EQ combat mechanics.
Or the Diablo 3 combat system is a better example. There is NO one single cookie cutter build that works. Just for myself, i alternate between a high DPS beam build, a medium dps/good survival arcane orb build, and a kiting centric slow but more survival blizzard build.
Go watch any D3 guide video on youtube . and there are more ways to play than the "use the biggest, latest nuke" system of EQ.
"Gamers used to be just a few, a dedicated minority and very skilled."
It's a damn gem of demonstrative illustration.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I remember in the days of EQ, playing a DPS wiz is extremely simple. There is VERY little optimizing. If you play a mage in WOW, optimizing your DPS takes a lot more work & know-how. Heck, even a different spec has a different optimized set of gear, rotation, and priority of casting.
But is that really difficulty? It may be for the first person, but everyone after that will keep following the same old path until someone discovers something new. Even the end-game raiding isn't hard, it's just repetitive scripts. I never got interested in raiding (or gear grinds in general) for the pure reason of it being easy. Maximising dps gives what? A boss that dies 2 seconds faster? And dodging/adapting to the same 7-8 mechanics every fight isn't hard, it's being able to use your memory.
Well, at least the person has to read up on all the theorycrafting and use tools like RAWR to optimize gear. That is 100x more work/complexity than the early EQ combat mechanics.
Or the Diablo 3 combat system is a better example. There is NO one single cookie cutter build that works. Just for myself, i alternate between a high DPS beam build, a medium dps/good survival arcane orb build, and a kiting centric slow but more survival blizzard build.
Go watch any D3 guide video on youtube . and there are more ways to play than the "use the biggest, latest nuke" system of EQ.
You think most people are reading up on theorycrafting??? Maybe a very tiny handful are but 99% of the people either copy the flavor of the month spec/rotation, or go in with a subpar spec and riddiculed by other players.. Its sad but true. Makes you long for the good old days when it was simplistic and your skill set you apart from other players rather than your ability to copy others.....
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The only way you two can make this statement is if you're completely ignoring all the challenges which exist in modern games.
It's a little ironic that this generalization itself is "dumbed down" (based on what you want to believe, rather than the truth.)
Unless you come back and say you beat I Wanna Be the Guy, VVVVVV, every modern FPS on hardest difficulty, Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Ninja Gaiden Black, and were #1 multiplayer ranked in Starcraft 2, League of Legends, and Tribes: Ascend.
But if you're not chasing the modern hard games, you have no business making generalizations that modern games are easy because you're the one chasing easy games!
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Thats true. If they are not playing the hard games, setting games on hard when they play or playing competitive PvP games they should shut up about the subject. Dark Souls was hard. Ninja Gaiden Black was hard (until I found a way to make infinet amount of money). Mass Effect or any other RPG is quite challenging on the hardest settings. You certainly have to pay attention to your build and use your skills correctly. Shogun 2: Total War and Civilization V are very hard on the hardest settings (partly because the AI gets outrageous buffs and cheats quite shamefully).
And not to forget, staying near the top in any E-sport game is hard. You can bet your internet coins that every single succesful E-sport game is deep and it is not about how many buttons you need to press. League of Legends champion has 3 abilities, 1 passive and 1 ultimate ability. You could certainly make that into a console game and the depth would not suffer at all. GW1 had 8 skills on the skillbar and the combat was incredibly deep. Much deeper than many complicated systems. Many fighting games are very deep and still they are essentially played with a controller.
Complexity is not depth. Modern games have shed the extra complexity because it only serves to make the game more inaccessible. What was the point of learning skills in Eve Online? There was no point. The choice was between acquiring them early on or gimp yourself in the long run. Not only that but the need to train them right at the beginning puts a lot of players off. They quit the game bored before they get to learn proper skills. Yes, some fans wailed "CCP is dumbing down Eve" but everyone with half a wit knows learning skills added no mentionable depth to the game and were actually harmful.
All this stuff about making mundane stuff cumbersome and hard does not make the game better. I can remember only a couple of games where I could've drawn a map if I wanted to, but I never thought it added depth to the game. First time I saw a hand driven map by my friend (some Zelda I think, or something similar) I immediately thought "Why doesn't the game draw you a map?"
The same way why the hell does the NPC need to spill his life's tale just to tell me he needs squirrel hides to make mittens. A list of tasks on the HUD is just fine for me. It is convenient. Minimap is convenient. They all make it easy for me to concentrate on the important stuff: Slaying monsters, finding treasures, being the hero...Anything else is more or less in the way really - an inconvenience.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Yeah that trait of EVE was definitely part of why I quit. Fixed now, I hear, but it was a stupid mechanic which deprived the game of fun.
I'm a bit mixed on the NPC thing. I sort of do want to interact with interesting characters in a MMORPG, but the tricky part is that cutscnes make it feel a little off.
For example the characters in TSW are (surprisingly) well-written and well-presented in their cutscenes. They feel like real characters instead of cardboard cutouts (or at least as real as the better characters in a horror movie can be.) That makes me want to keep watching cutscenes.
The frustrating part is that gameplay treats them like a typical MMORPG, where you may never see a character again after their introduction. This makes me want to stop watching cutscenes, because they feel inevitably irrelevant.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Games don't aim to a younger audience, games aim to the mainstream gamer. The mainstream gamer is the kind of gamer that showed up around the first PS2 and xbox. Suddenly gaming was the cool thing to do. Before it was a kids and nerd thing, you didn't wanted to be seen playing games as a 18 year old cause you would be a nerd. But suddenly gaming became the cool thing to do and it was no longer a kids and nerd thing. People who called you a nerd suddenly called you a noob in shooters. Years later the wii comes out and suddenly your own damn mother plays games, while she always said games where a waste of time and money.
The problem however with the mainstream gamer is that they fear anything new or challeging. It is not just a feeling because i would be more experienced with games, games did became more easy. Remember how you had to hunt down hearts or medipacks to get health again (Half-life for example). These days you hide behind a wall (with the press of a button and you are out of harms way) and tadaa after 3 seconds your health is at 100% again. This so 26 year old Johny enjoys his Call of Duty more. But as soon as a game dares to remove that option, than the game press and mainstream gamers shout murder and say the game is broken. Look at games that don't have a active cover system (press a button to stick behind a object like Gears of War). Space Marines got flamed down for not having a cover system while you took fire and many of todays gamers and the press (who are just mainstream gamers with a huge Halo and CoD fanboyism) said the game was unfairly hard this way and it was a broken mess cause of this. I as old gamer cheered for the fact that the game didn't think i was a dumb boy. There was no active cover but there was enough cover to hide behind. And you had to be tactical, you couldn't charge into a mob thinking you would be the last man standing with ease. No you had to make sure the gunners where taken down first, then try to seperate a orc from the horde so you could excute him,which would refil a part of your health bar but doing so you where vunerable cause you couldn't cancel the animation. Even this was seen as broken, but if you would be able to cancel it it would would make your pretty much OP but heeey mainstream gamers wanna be OP, they don't wanna die, they need to feel awesome or they gonna cry a game is stupid.
Im not a long time MMO'er. My first MMORPG was Ragnarok Online beta and my first pay to play was WoW (so about 8 or 9 years of MMO experience). But as someone said before within WoW you could already notice the insane need for easy walk in the park (this is thanks to activision who is known to only want to please the mainstream gamer and when Activision came in everything changed in WoW). When i just played WoW you had to read the quests if only to know where to go, and it wasn't more than "its east of the lumber camp". You had to look for your mobs and that gave a big explorer satisfaction. I even bought a atlas and another guide to help me on the way. Later Thotbot came so you could look up the quest location, but it still required searching. It was great and the raids where hard. Few years later no one reads the quests anymore cause there is a giant arrow pointing the way and if you still get lost you press m and you see the location of your quest and where the mobs are hidding. Warhammer online started this (though WoW already had it with mods, Warhammer had it as a official feature) and around that time every MMORPG suddenly took it. Than a new MMORPG comes out, i forgot its name it wasn't a big one and was made by a dutch studio. They didn't had any arrow telling you where to go, if you wanted to know where to go you had to read the quest. And in a review that was the biggest flaw of the game. Gods they couldn't stop complaining about how unconviniant it was to go to your quest. It was broken in their eyes and half of the time they had no idea where to go (yeah if you don't read you don't know where to go).
Games did become easyer, and a lot shorter, 5 or 6 hours is seen as normal. 10 years ago a shooter would be called short for being only 10 hours, these days 10 hours is seen as a long game. Anyway i wrote a wall of text so i leave it to this.
Oh - they keep it simple and streamlined cause all of them dream of selling 'fat' millions of games like biggest titles like D3 , WoW, etc did.
Obviously many of those games fail horribly, and in last years quite a lot of AAA produtions failed to sell good.
I just hope that continued failures will knock some sense into devs & publishers, but maybe I am just too naive.
Going through this thread it seems as though everybody has an opinion on whether or not games have been dumbed down and why or why not. I think what's clear to everybody is that games have changed to adapt to a new audience, which is natural with any product.
Whether we're talking about our computers, our phones, our cars or in this case our games, the theme today seems to be user friendly. Developers say they want to remove the hassle from these things so that we can enjoy the experience more but for games specifically the 'hassle' has always been part of the challenge, and the challenge part of the experience. Video games started out as ways for a handful of tech-heads to challenge themselves. They weren't catering to the public so they made them as difficult as they needed them to be to achieve a satisfactory challenge. Even when developers did begin making games for the public, the only gamers were people who, like those original tech-heads, wanted to be challenged. All of those early gamers were generally older dudes so of course the games were harder back then.
But it's only natural that over time, as video games began appealing to different crowds, that the games would have to change. The first new audience were the youngins. Kids who, like me, would watch older siblings spend countless hours in front of video games in hopes of getting a turn, only to be sorely disappointed by being told "I don't want you playing my file". Since I came in around this time (start of SNES era) I can't vouch for how hard previous games were but I can say that most games I got to play as a kid were thouroughly challenging for both me and my older brother with a few exceptions. By N64 video games were a big thing and the audience was bigger than it had ever been but it was still mainly teenagers and guys in their 20's and 30's. Well equipped for the challenge.
Since then we've gone through dreamcast, and playstastions and gamecubesand xboxes and whatnot and the interest for video games has grown drastically and the audiences have gotten broader. Video games are no longer exclusive to the types of people they were first designed for (a lot of you on this forum seem to be those very people). Now they're for toddlers to grandparents and the hardcore gamer has to fit somewhere inbetween.
So all in all, I don't feel that video games have been dumbed down. Instead the spectrum of video games has simply widened so much that there is something for everybody now. Although the AMOUNT of titles today that a veteran would find challenging may be on the decline, but that's another argument.
#TeamVainlash
Why did Marceline's dad eat her fries? I mean...cause she bought them and they were hers...
I remember that!
I still had the cloth map that came with my copy of Ultima 4 hanging in my study until Katrina wiped me out. I also had my copy of the players handbook, mostly translated from the original runes i might add.
The above is my personal opinion. Anyone displaying a view contrary to my opinion is obviously WRONG and should STHU. (neener neener)
-The MMO Forum Community
Well apparenlty there are a lot of schisms here with people's expectations.
For the record:
My girlfriend loves letters and prefers them to e-mail. Writing and recieving. I have to say I prefer receiving them to e-mail.
I have travelled across the U.S. (both ways - long trip) in a very small car and it's one of my best memories. I will do it again. No dysentery though.
I play chess every Friday.
And unlike the OP, I was born in '67 and my first video game was poing. Thereafter it was an old atari and I got used to dying in "Adventure". Has anyone played Adventure? You died all the time! Also, I found it very funny to see his "I was born in the '80;s" statement " and things were harder wwhen I was young". In that case they were freakin' brutal when I was young!
In any case, I think that's the thing, I got used to dying in games.
If I died I tried again. If I got frustrated I took a break. Nowadays people die once and "we don't have the right party this is a bust" gets said.
I dont' believe it's about "deep games" or what one considers hardcore entertainment but more about the expectations of failure and one's reward once you get success.
I seem to remember when I was young that it was ok to fail. It just acted as a teacher so you could do better the next go.
oh, and today is Friday!
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Exactly, although I'm not even convinced the amount of vet-worthy challenging games is on the decline. The list I mentioned earlier in the thread was only stuff right off the top of my head. Hundreds of challenging games exist apart from my list, and I'm not sure the rate of "hard" games has slowed so much as the rate of "easy" games grew to fit the demand quite rapidly.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
you must be kidding me! The younger generation would kick the living shit out of you in so many games (MOBA, shooters,)
those games require skill
Nah, the skills are the same. It's the same for both generations.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Muahahaha, activate trap!
The map included in Skyrim is only of the major landmarks. For a complete map one would have to add all the other discovered landmarks to the existing map, and could be considered a cartographer!
Not that I would ever do that though... lol.
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
It's true, even if you didn't like it at first, you got used to it. You didn't have any choice. With old school cartridge games there were no updates, fixes or balancing so the game you bought at release was the game you kept for life. Also with the absence of the internet you had to figure out most things for yourself unless you had a friend who could help.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
I can agree about games being easier, but saying that they are dumbing down...
My first experience in gaming was watching my sisters play with the first playstation, we also had (still have) tons of demo cd's. First game that i really played myself was Crash Bandicoot, so i didn't get any "easy" games for start
But saying that they have dumbed down? I can and can't agree on that, but after rewriting this post countless times, i find no evidence for games not being dumber today... Only games that have given me any thoughts lately have been Disgaeas.
I could blame the world being F*cked up in "Era of Fear", i could blame over protecting and blindly negative parents, or kids who can't experiement with something new... But in the end gaming industry goes with demand, and if demand right now is something,something and option to skip the dialogue, why bother with an idea?
Edit: But i completely skipped on Math *FaceDesk*. When we look at numbers, games today offer more flexible plating with boosts and stats
so you are trying to say that old metroid somehow takes more thinking than theory crafting? Head on over to elitist jerks and be wrong from now until forever. Older games are difficult but only from a coordination standard. As soon as you start talking about thinking, the math involved in even the most themepark mmos outstripes anything you had in those days completely.
Why do you feel that's relevant?
There's a full map in-game. Hence, no requirement or benefit to creating your own map.
So even if that map doesn't even exist (which it didn't in my digital download), it's still not a game appealing to cartographers.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
This ^^^
I remember in the days of EQ, playing a DPS wiz is extremely simple. There is VERY little optimizing. If you play a mage in WOW, optimizing your DPS takes a lot more work & know-how. Heck, even a different spec has a different optimized set of gear, rotation, and priority of casting.
But is that really difficulty? It may be for the first person, but everyone after that will keep following the same old path until someone discovers something new. Even the end-game raiding isn't hard, it's just repetitive scripts. I never got interested in raiding (or gear grinds in general) for the pure reason of it being easy. Maximising dps gives what? A boss that dies 2 seconds faster? And dodging/adapting to the same 7-8 mechanics every fight isn't hard, it's being able to use your memory.
Aside from the coordination required to play games and press 10000 buttons at the same time, the only challenge I find is in RTS games. The on the spot thinking and critical decision-making straight away, with no planning and half of the knowledge you'd like to have is what makes them fun and exciting. And only the multiplayer that is.
It's totally different from what I just typed above, but to find out if difficulty is dropping, there has to be a clear definition of difficult. I believe that really depends on the person using the keyboard and mouse. For me there's no intellectual challenge in getting the highest dps, nor any intellectual curiousity. This makes MMORPG endgame hard to enjoy. For me difficult means controlling everything you/your avatar does whilst having to think and plan my next move. This means I have to get a high enough APM (Actions per minute), my clicks/keystrokes have to be correct, I have to have situational awareness and I have to use my brain to control and think about my next move as well as anticipating what my opponent is doing. And that's why I get my challenge fix from RTS games. This, of course, might be totally different for someone else.
"We need men who can dream of things that never were." - John F. Kennedy
And for MMORPGs ever so true...
Well a competitive RTS match is certainly more challenging, but that doesn't mean high-end raiding isn't challenging. There's still a fairly large difference between a noob and a master, even in MMORPGs.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
There is definitely an age gap for gamers between those in their early 20s and those in their mid 30s. I have some younger friends that have basically said straight out that they have stopped checking out the games I recommend, because they "suck."
The last 3 games I recommended are:
DayZ
The Secret World
WURM Online
Meanwhile, the younger guys want to play:
Diablo 3
League of Legends
WoW
See the differences? I do. I think it all started when kids started getting trophies for losing.
Joined - July 2004
Except you forgot that WoW has a threat meter because many of their players lack the "know how" to know when they are doing too much dps and are about to pull aggro.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
Well, at least the person has to read up on all the theorycrafting and use tools like RAWR to optimize gear. That is 100x more work/complexity than the early EQ combat mechanics.
Or the Diablo 3 combat system is a better example. There is NO one single cookie cutter build that works. Just for myself, i alternate between a high DPS beam build, a medium dps/good survival arcane orb build, and a kiting centric slow but more survival blizzard build.
Go watch any D3 guide video on youtube . and there are more ways to play than the "use the biggest, latest nuke" system of EQ.
Sorry, still laughing about this one.
"Gamers used to be just a few, a dedicated minority and very skilled."
It's a damn gem of demonstrative illustration.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
You think most people are reading up on theorycrafting??? Maybe a very tiny handful are but 99% of the people either copy the flavor of the month spec/rotation, or go in with a subpar spec and riddiculed by other players.. Its sad but true. Makes you long for the good old days when it was simplistic and your skill set you apart from other players rather than your ability to copy others.....