Your reason for playing games. Has it changed?

[Kwaad]

pinata said: 20 years ago, games needed skill and a bit of dedication to beat, and for most games that difficulty was the most satisfying aspect about beating them. With time some of the genres have evolved from a focus on difficulty to just giving the player more of an overall experience (especially action/adventure), and the satisfying aspect isn't difficulty-driven anymore. You can see this change as a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your view of what a game should have or be. For me, as I get older and don't have as much time to spend on each game as I want to, I play games more and more while paying attention to level design, implementation of gameplay-elements, artstyle, story, etc... For example: I don't mind games like God of War having an easy difficulty - on normal mode -, because the overall experience is so great. I used to get a kick out of beating games on the higher difficulty settings, but that's a bit passed now. I have a backlog of 10 or so PS2 games I all want to play, so I can't get everything out of each game anymore. I don't even see it as a necessity, 'skill' totally isn't important to me. When a game grabs me, I still go for the extra stuff or other difficulties, but only with a select few (Elite Beat Agents was the last one I can remember). What I'm getting at: do you guys play differently than before? Are you someone who only cares for online play and improving his skills at a select number of games, or do you just want to play as many great games as possible, hereby not mastering the games themselves? What do you see as important nowadays: should a game have a challenging difficulty or do you rate it as a whole? It'd be interesting to see why you play this day and age, and how it changed or hasn't changed at all.

I love games like X3. Wich puts games like "Elite Plus" to shame in game complexity. What's funny is you go to other space sim games, and they always say "This game is no-where near as good as Elite." The sad thing is. There is X. (X4 is in the works) X is easily the most complex game I have ever played. It is extremely hard, and skill orientated. It uses more brains than most RTS. http://egosoft.com if you wanna look into this one. I love games like they were done 15 years ago. (20 years ago games were simple... not because they wanted to be, but the machines killed the ablility to have complexity) I agree I have seen a change in games. I liked the games that made me think. That made me sweat. That made me fear. Most modern games it's... just a game. Who cares. X3 is the only game that I can think of that basically says in the gameplay. "If your a casual gamer. Go away. this is NOT for you."