| tarheel91 said: *shrug* There have always been ways you can make a game more or less challenging. If you really wanted Twilight Princess to be hard, you could have ignored the Heart Piece after every boss. Or, you could have had found a guide on GameFAQs and walked you through the game. Each person will only work so hard for a game. The person who enjoys working through frustrating parts will still work through them, and the person who'd give up, or go to a guide, or use cheats, will still do something to get past the difficult parts. Nintendo is just making it easier for people who don't want to deal with hard parts to do that. In doing that, it allows them to make more challenging parts for people who want more of that. Edit: I remember a challenge in OoT where you only have three hearts and you use some broken knife and no shield for the whole game. It just serves to reinforce my point. |
Your (and Chizrum's) point is well-taken, but that's not the angle I'm coming from. I do believe that this can be a handy feature for people who're already committed to gaming: you can learn how to do something that's tricking you, and if you're just really not in the mood you can skip to the good parts. My fear is the effect this will have on newcomers; they're not already as devoted to gaming, and with this feature around I believe they're likely to spend increasing amounts of time watching rather than playing, because they never improved enough to play the game for themselves. Since watching a computer play isn't particularly fun, I think that will tend to discourage newcomers from staying in our hobby.
By contrast, if games' difficulty came at a more organic pace, one which allowed players a chance to learn new skills and then refine them at a steady rate, I think more newcomers would get drawn in. To further your own analogy, a newcomer who never bothered to become good enough to tackle the first dungeon is probably not going to enjoy most of the mid-to-late game, and he or she is certainly never going to become devoted enough to even consider trying the 3-Heart Challenge. Why would he? Watching the game play itself wasn't particularly fun.
