I don't think it's as black and white as people think, a lot of older games had design issues for various reasons that made them hard as opposed to the actual content being hard or intended to be hard, games now days have more thought designs and controls as well as people themselves becoming better at games. Play a game like Wonderful 101 on normal to realize games can be just as hard if not harder then previously, I think the difficulty in games has for most part remained the same.







