Are games easier to beat/finish nowadays...

[TheGamea]

Simple Question, I just got my PS3 in august and ive beating BFBC2, BF3, Call of Juarez and saints row 3 and batman arkham xcity, now Im not a gamer (at least in my mind) but I am old enough to have ever video game system know to man starting from NES with the exception of xbox and neo geo and I cant recall beating a single game except for zelda NES and zelda Ocarina of Time, and I think FF7. So are video games easier to beat or finish now in your opinion?

 

[Loveless]

Yes and as usual, it's the fault of the casual gamer/mass market. Around the turn of the century the developers really started to downplay innovation and game length in favour of shorter games and better graphics in an effort to to appeal the casual fuckers.
In terms of business in theory it was a good move, in terms of game quality it was not. The end result was a massive boost to the rental and 2nd hand market because no-one in their right mind was going to spend £40 on a game they can finish in a weekend. Something the industry is still trying to crack down on and that will massively damage gaming. It's also why games like GTA sell so massively, because people know they'll actually get their moneys worth, but the lesser known games get buried.

 

[Captain Morgan Freeman]

Yeah i think games are easier to beat these days. I remember when i first played Metal Gear Solid on the playstation and being amased at how there were unlimited continues, that along with being able to save your progress meant you pretty much couldn't lose at the game. Back in the snes and nes days most games simply had a number of continues or lives and once you ran out you had to start the game all over again. Now those games were hard to beat. Back then games seemed to compensate for their shortness by making them harder to beat. Games like Mega man and Mario were shorter than games now due to games being able to hold less memory but you had to put in a lot more hours to beat them seeing as you couldn't save your game and only had a finite number of lives.

 

[Poop Master Flex]

I would say they are easier to beat for 2 reasons:

1) Most games have a difficulty level
2) Save states

Take for example Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES. This game was ridiculously hard because there were no save states. If you could save then you could finish the game in no time (try it on an emulator and you will see what I mean). Without save states every time there is a game over you start at the beginning of the world, so if you make it to the airship and lose all your lives then you start from the beginning and probably with less lives then you went in with. If the game had a save state then you could just play the airship over and over without having to navigate the world again, this alone makes games easier. In the original SMB if you got a game over you had to start again, that makes the game ridiculously hard to beat (without using warp zones of course) because its not enough to beat hard levels, you have to beat the ENTIRE game in one sit down.

Now take a difficult game like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Even on the hardest missions you can play the hard mission repeatedly, dying a million times over but because of the constant repetition it's much easier because you can slowly hack away at the mission, and in turn can get through the game.

Now take both difficult games and put them beside each other. In 1985 when Super Mario Bros. first came out I guarantee that took a lot longer to beat because you were constantly starting again from the beginning.

The easy, medium, hard logic is pretty self explanatory. Not for all games (like Mario and Zelda) but for a lot of games if the games too hard on medium then you can go to easy which makes games lose the challenge they may have had.

For these reasons I often like older games than newer ones (not a knock on new games at all). If you wanted to beat Contra without the lives cheat you have to commit to that game and figure it all out in order to beat it. If you want to beat Mario Bros. same thing, you have to commit. If you want to beat Galaxy you can set aside 20 hours and get through it without much issue (I did it in 16 my first time). If you have never played SMB in your life, good fucking luck getting through that game in 20 hours.

 

[jrichardson25]

Honestly, it depends on the game. There's a lot more that can be played now. There's several systems and several levels of gamers. To get the most broad scope, developers aim for a game that will challenge new players, be fun for those that have been playing and a difficulty setting that is more difficult for those that are hardcore.

The revolutionizing of the industry created game saves and several other things that make the process easier for people to get through longer games yet make them feel accomplished. Like the poster above stated, if you wanted to beat Mario in 1985 you had to commit. Now for Galaxy you can put 20 hours on it and its done.

It really is a sign of the times, and my suggestion is bump the difficulty up a bit. It will add that stupid amount of insanity older gamers like myself are used to.

 

[blue_dragon]

Sometimes I believe it's best to be able to choose.

For example like first times I beat MGS3 on easy-normal.... Only after that did I decide to really turn up the volume and go for the big European Extreme difficulty. It was really challenging but for the first time it really felt like you did an awesome job figuring out all the weaknesses of bosses and such which made it so much more fun.

I do believe that game developers need to give choices for hardcore fans to crank up the challenge.

But also give lower difficulty levels for those who just don't want to beat themselves half to death to maybe beat the game(talking about first 2 ninja gaidens).

IMO it should always be players choice to what difficulty he/she wants to play so an awesome variety of difficulties should be presented to solve that problem.

 

[Larry]

I agree that most definitely games are easier to beat than they once were. I think some of the reason behind that as well has to do with the advancement in technology though. Think back to NES, the games were glitchy at times, the controls were often horrible, and the combination of the two made beating a lot of games very difficult. One gaffe and it's over, or one glitch and it's over. Oops, I jumped on the platform but the platform disappeared. Oops I got hit by an invisible enemy and died. Oops I pushed the d-pad but my guy just fell, etc...

This improved dramatically with the SNES and Genesis IMHO. There were still plenty of ridiculously hard games though as we were still dealing with the same technology only improved, and the way games were made hadn't drastically changed as it would in years to come. Still, go ahead and try to beat Sonic 1,2,3 or any of them with Sonic and Knuckles, or Sonic and Knuckles on it's own. Try beating Super Mario World, Star Fox, hell go ahead and beat either Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter II on a reasonable difficulty. They are really hard to beat, and as mentioned previously by other posters, a lot of that came down to having to actually beat a game flat out, no save states, you only get so many lives, so many continues. It just became more enjoyable to do so as the controls and glitches were dramatically reduced.

 

[Trance Metaphor]

I wouldn't say they're easier to beat per se, because it really depends on what game you're playing. RPGs for example can be more time-consuming and challenging to beat than a lot of other genres, because of the ever-evolving battle systems and overall world complexities. There could be those near-impossible logic puzzle video games out on the market that you haven't heard of. Back in the day when I owned an Atari 2600, I couldn't for the life of me beat a single game. Not Jungle Hunt, not Pole Position, not even Donkey Kong. The only games I ever beat in the NES days were Double Dragon II and Double Dragon III. All the other games had ridiculous amount of levels and challenges that were exhausting. Nowadays, my attention span is VERY short when it comes to video games, so that itself makes games (30-60+ hours long) difficult to finish, especially when there's so much to do. Also, I have been pretty bad with boss battles all my life. The last game I beat was Chaos Rings for the iPhone, and that was only 4-5 hours long, but it was easy to get immersed in because of its enthralling way of telling a story.

 

[Shotaro]

Yes and as usual, it's the fault of the casual gamer/mass market. Around the turn of the century the developers really started to downplay innovation and game length in favour of shorter games and better graphics in an effort to to appeal the casual fuckers.
In terms of business in theory it was a good move, in terms of game quality it was not. The end result was a massive boost to the rental and 2nd hand market because no-one in their right mind was going to spend £40 on a game they can finish in a weekend. Something the industry is still trying to crack down on and that will massively damage gaming. It's also why games like GTA sell so massively, because people know they'll actually get their moneys worth, but the lesser known games get buried.

There are so many reasons that you are incorrect that I am baffled. Gaming has been mass market for years, it's not been a niche market since you or I were kids. If you want to be "hardcore" go play a time-sink like WoW. Two major things have lead to the change in difficulty in games.

1) A maturing demographic: I got a NES when I was five years old for Christmas back in 1990. Back then even people who were teens during the first and second generation consoles were at most in their twenties. I am now closer to thirty than I'd like to admit and I still play games. I also have a job, a mortgage and significantly less time to play games than I did even five years ago. If games are shorter it gives me more time to enjoy more games. I'm far from alone on that, I would love, LOVE to have the time to play a game non-stop until a beat it. Hell sometimes I manage to find the time, but if I can't beat a game in a few weeks or it starts to lose my interest I put it on the shelf and leave it. Which is problematic because:

2) Story matters now. Look at the big ticket franchises. Beyond CoD, Halo and EA sports. You have Uncharted, Assassin's Creed, Batman, God of War. All of those games have story as a crucial element. Story telling in games is evolving rapidly, why would ANYONE buy a game for the story if they know the game itself is going to be a chore.

Finally "hardcore" gamers are irrelevant for a good reason. They tend to buy a game and play it to death before buying another game. I work as a tutor so I know from talking to my students about it that most of them buy two or three games a year, usually from the Fifa, CoD or whatever franchises. I would consider myself a hardcore gamer, but what happens when I beat a game? Do I go online so I can extend my e-peen?

No. I go to the store and buy a different game. Games that you can finish mean people buy more games. It's that simple. Those casual gamers you deride from your horse so high buy more games than hardcore users. If they didn't exist do you honestly think for a single goddamn second that games would have multi-million dollar budgets? Hell I would wager that over fifty, no seventy percent of world of warcrafts subscribers have never maxed out a character. Why? Because they're playing other games at the same time. And yet, it's the most successful game in History.

Also the question of whether games are getting easier or not is irrelevant because of the massive niche market developing in games that are more difficult than piercing your own cock (that seems appropriately difficult). Go play Demon's Souls and tell me then that games are too easy.

There's nothing worse than people who act like elitist pricks because they spent 200 hours grinding to tenth level prestige. Shit's not difficult, just time consuming.