I played that level today, for the first time. I only just got the game this week.

I did the same thing. I didn't know you were supposed to roll the barrels. I cleared the top, then the middle, then the bottom of the hill and ran to the next section.

However, I didn't think it was easy. I died several times until I worked out in what order to eliminate the enemies and which spots I could recover from hits.

I'm sure you are much better at COD than me, but do you want your games to be so hard that they destroy the fun for everyone else? If COD was harder on normal a lot of people would consider it unfair and either turn it down to easy or quit.

I assume you are playing on the hardest difficulty. If you find the hardest difficulty too easy and I consider it so hard it's not fun I'm not sure how developers can make you happy and still keep people like me happy. I think the difficulty levels have enough range for everyone. If you turn it up to the hardest level and still find it easy I think you may just be beyond what devs can accomodate for.

usually games have a hard mode that offers some challenge. I've actually starting testing my limits more this gen because of trophies and am glad for it. Resistance 2 and 3 on superhuman were fun and the GoW games on hard are a blast and very satisfying to beat. When you finally get to the quicktime event and feel like you're bashing that prick's face in after he kicked your ass so many times it's difficult to explain how satisfying those finishers are on hard. Some games I don't want challenge and others I play for it. Normally once I beat a game on hard I always play it on easy from then on just to enjoy the story since I've proven I can beat it at it's best. All the Uncharteds I play through on hard, then crushing, then easy from then on when I revisit them and it's just relaxing and satisfying to know I did it.

I just wish games wouldn't hide a difficulty setting by making you go through once to unlock it. Let my do the hardest mode in my first playthrough that's a pet peeve of mine. It's just devs artificially extending the life of a game for challenge seekers.

oh and peanut butter cups are amazing

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.

Edit: also too many checkpoints, seriously some games today put a checkpoint every 5 seconds >.>

Nope, just different difficulty levels.

Interestingly, I played my very first playthrough on Black Ops 1 on veteran difficulty. The first 90% of the game was fine, and then the second to last mission. Holy shit, they did a horrible job balancing that one. Literally one of the most frustrating missions I've ever played. Ended up giving up and turning the difficulty down because I wasn't having any fun.

Also, I'm playing Dissidia 012 at the moment, and the difficulty on this seems pretty steep. I win about 1 in every 10 matches in battle mode.

Regenerating health makes shooters too easy. Kill one guy, hide and heal and repeat. I also blame auto save.

Yeah I don't like that regenerative health talk. What did people do back then in games ? Backtrack to look for instant health kits and that's not fun for anyone. In other games people collected health packs to use them during battles and that's not too different from regenerative health either.

Though I think the best way to do it would be to only regenerate your health when a battle is over. Some games do that but I don't really remember them. (Enslaved ?)

Games are getting easier every gen. At first came Atari there the games were so criptic and hard and the controls so weird that the games were unplayable. Notall of them but alot were.

Then came NES the controls were good enough still graphics and physics made games hard.

Time goes by and the technology is not hindering anymore just the design. This seems like games became easy since we grew up with doing weird stuff and mastered unplayable controls to complete games. We also understand gamelogic we learned to read games now everything is easy. There is not much you can do about it.

A game I couldn't (didn't want to) finish, was hard, those games don't exist anymore because they pissed people of. Its a good thing games became easier. Nobody wants to replay a scene 100 times or find out a chain of random acts to perform in the correct order to progress in a game.

This one ?: http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/Rebirth

Yeah I remember having some troubles during the toxic gas scenes but it was still bearable IMO.

i died several times doing it as well. and the thing is, i dont want games to be so hard and die a lot of times, its why i turned off demons souls after playing it for a while. but i do want it to be challenging in a way, i want to be kept on the edge of my seat, and if i fuck up, ill get punished for it, it just seems so much rewarding that way, its why i am enjoying the new GoW game. its pretty challenging on hard mode, but if i stay focused, play with a good strategy and have a good read on the enemies i can beat them with out much of a sweat, but i have to do all that stuff. not like in assassin's creed 3 for example where i just walk up to a billion people and kill them all without a sweat. i dont want games to be a walk in the park, it just takes out the fun for me. its like this, would you enjoy halo so much if you knew that whatever the hell you did you wouldnt die? wouldnt it take out the epic factor?