Why are games easier? My take on the subject

[marurun]

You know, I had another thought on this as well. If you think about it, challenge, or hardness, in games is about teaching players a set of skills or responses. In some games, like R-Type, you're teaching a certain amount of memorization, being in the right place vs being in the wrong place. In others you're teaching particular tactical skills. And you're always teaching the player to have a particular kind of muscle memory for quick, instinctual control responses. But challenge sometimes boils down to HOW you're teaching those skills. Sure, there are indeed some games that are harder than others, because they demand tighter timing, more precise memorization, or simply more different techniques to learn. Fighting games are illustrative of the last point. Not only does your character have a ton of moves with parameters like startup time, damage, hitbox, and recovery time, but you also have to know all your opponents moves and how they work do know how best to counter them. But even massively difficult challenges can appear less challenging if the game is doing a good job teaching you along the way and easing you into those challenges.

Modern matchmaking systems in fighters, for example, when working as designed help players slowly learn their own abilities and the abilities of others as they fight progressively more difficult and experienced opponents. And by the time they are in the top tiers they have slowly learned a lot of what they need to know for mastery. The same can be seen in many Nintendo-designed games. I would argue that early on, Breath of the Wild is actually a very difficult game, because you don't fully understand the world, your enemies, your skills, and you have only lower-grade and low-damage weapons. I died a ton early one. It felt far more foreboding challenge-wise than any Nintendo title I'd played in a while. But over time, as my skills improved, so did my equipment, and so did my enemies, but as they got harder, I was also more prepared. Nintendo excels at teaching players how to interact with their games.

Some games are very bad at teaching you skills. These games are often called unforgiving. Like games that force you to perform a whole series of interactions and make you start over every time you fail. It's very common that the string of actions or interactions you have to perform start easy and get harder until the last few actions, which are the ones you need to learn, crush you. But if you are constantly started way back at the beginning, you're getting practice with the stuff that's not a problem more than you are the stuff that is. Now, this is less of a problem IF the string of actions or interactions all are related, meaning that the easier interactions use the same skills and are leading you in. It's still annoying, but it isn't unhelpful. But many designers aren't that thoughtful. You may have to perform a bunch of actions unrelated to the thing that threw you off, and when you die or fail and have to start over, you're back to doing the stuff that you can easily complete and having to slog through it for a chance to do the thing you can't, that those easier actions aren't properly preparing you for.

tl;dr A game is a teacher, and the challenge is how it teaches you the skills you need. Good teachers lead you from one thing to the next, slowly developing your skills to prepare you for the next thing. Bad teachers constantly hop around, don't teach good or logical skill progressions, and generally don't understand the learning process.

[Sarge]

I've seen this argument applied to the Turbo Tunnel in Battletoads. The game changes the rules for the last segment, no longer blinking the walls but having them instantly appear on screen. So everything you learned from there is actually moot, and you have to rely on something else entirely to get through. (I use the audio cues to know when to lane-shift.)

[benderx]

I'm not sure if games are becoming non-games, but more of open world design. I see more games being made on Unity to port games out fast. I also prefer games to be complete edition no downloadble dlc.