are games becoming too easy?

[platformmaster918]

osed125 said:

platformmaster918 said:

osed125 said:

In order to attract the mainstream audience games need to be easy, if developers don't do it then most people will hate it and thus not buy it. There are some exceptions to this obviously, like the Soul's series.

One of the problems I usually face up with games is that they are "difficult" (the real word should be frustrating) for the wrong reasons: bad camera, bad controls, action commands (God I hate this things so much) etc. this has been around since the NES days but I feel like more games suffer from this lately, many of my deaths in video games are because of bad design choices and not really because I suck at the game (again there are exceptions to this rule), when I fail at a game it should be because I did something wrong, not because the game did something wrong. 

There's also the type of "hard" games that simple put all the guys shoot at you at the same time, that imo is a really bad design choice. Devs probably just increase the accuracy of enemies AI to make it feel it's harder, but in reality this is just frustrating. This part typically applies to FPS when to put them on hard difficulty.

funnily enough I put the Soul's series in that category.  At least when I played Demon's Souls I found the levels to be extremely easy other than the ones in tunnels or small rooms where targeting an enemy would result in me being unable to see.  Then I would get to a boss and die before figuring out the pattern and have to start the whole level over.  It was easy to get through most of the levels if you took your time, but damn was the no checkpoint at a boss thing dumb.  I'm not asking for any advantage.  Give me the same health I had after going through the level and same items, just don't make me go though 50 soldiers and tediously do the same half hour level again just to get back to the only hard part.  Stupid design imo.

It encourages you to be better at the game. What's the fun of dying to some soldiers when you respawn at the spot? I died a lot of Demon Souls and had to repeat the same areas again, but I was getting better, by doing some areas again I start learning the game and be better at it, which help a lot in future areas. It's not frustrating because the enemies are not really cheap (like everything, there are some exceptions in the game imo, but overall most enemies are fine), you just have to learn their patterns and know how to block and attack.

 In this type of cases I think people confuses difficulty with perseverance. If you try a million times one part and never beat or when you beat you feel like you didn't learned anything, then that's a really bad design choice. When you try a part a couple of times and (even though it may have take you a lot of tries) beat it and you feel you are getting better, that means the developers have done a good job. 

I never felt any better though because it was just matter of "ok now I know that this rock will fall down the steps which I had no way  of knowing before and have to fight those incredibly easy yet time consuming enemies again"  I don't know I seem to be the only one that hates the design of that game not because it's hard, but because it makes you go through the simple, easy peezy parts again and again because it'll blindside you halfway through a level with a trap you couldn't have possibly seen coming or you die on the boss who is normally 100x harder than any other section and yet have to go through all that stuff again.  Given there were shortcuts on some levels but most of the time it felt like they were artificially extending the game's life by eliminating checkpoints instead of actually making it more difficult.  I killed 2 bosses in each level and finally got tired of it because I spend 90% of the game killing easy enemies (the only normal guys i remember being really difficult were those octopus guards they were challenging).