Some people treat video games like crocheting, and that's fine. Others like a challenge and that's also fine.
There are plenty of games being made for both audiences, and it's only when one group or the other starts to think that every game should cater to them that things get annoying.
Sometimes you just want to experience the game without the frustration and tedium of being stuck playing the same section or boss over and over. Some games are interesting and fun enough to warrant it though and it encourages you look forward to the challenge.
It's a matter of time and the type of games. Some games are mostly known for their challenge, for those it makes sense to play on the appropriate difficulty. Some games, like the Halo games, have difficulty which the developer wants you to play them on for the "optimal halo experience', so it makes sense there.
Some games are just huge sprawling things which take 100+ hours where difficulty really shouldn't matter for the overall enjoyment. Like Persona 5, Witcher 3, Deadly Premonition etc.
All the above is based on my own experiences. I mostly find myself tuning the difficulty to easy for big RPG or open world type games if given the choice.
Time is the issue here, not whether I care about being challenged or not.
I play Forza on the highest difficulty because failing a race still rewards in someways & it doesn't take too long to restart it & no 2 races are equal.
I play Gears of Wars 4 on the easiest difficulty because I simply do not have time to repeat ad nausea the same encounters because I suck at controller aiming. There is a story to unfold & time is limited.
It can be sumrise : is the gameplay loop interesting enough & am I good enough at it to want to make it a challenge vs I want to see the story, gameplay loop is boring.
Challenge...hmmm...sounds good...lemme try no wait. Do you mean challenge,
or do you mean bullet sponges, rubberbanding, AI with infinite resources, RNG, 3 phase boss encounters that start you back from the beginning, no checkpoints, 1 hit kills, trial and error QTEs...
People also play sport to relax, but that doesn't mean they don't like a challenge, and I don't think anyone views challenges in a videogame as some kind of life achievement
I don't think there is anything wrong with only playing easy games or playing to relax, I'd say most of the games I play are easy, but I also enjoy overcoming harder games and love the feeling of making progress in harder games
There is a huge difference, though, between challenge and being frustrating. Of course challenge in games can be great, but there is a limit to where the fun stops.
If I have to fight a boss 100 times, I don't find that fun. That doesn't mean I don't like challenge in games.
I like to play challenging platformers/schmups/puzzle games because I'm good at them.
Conversely, I suck at racing, sports, fighters and multiplayer FPS games. I still enjoy playing these kind of games, but there's no chance I'm ever going to get better at them. So easy mode it is.
I think challenge is a really good tool for making many kinds of games more engaging, but there are plenty of scenarios where it can be misused and drag an experience down. If someone is enamored with a game's aesthetics but maybe not its mechanics, maybe they'll get a better experience on Easy or with cheats or whatever.
You'll never see me saying that the generalized best way to experience Rockman 2 is with a rewind button, but obviously that mode of play fits some people's lives better and I'm not gonna tut-tut if that's how they want to play.
Some games are worth the challenge, some games aren't. Games like Cuphead, Soulsborne, XCOM I'll take the extra time to challenge myself. But I'm fine throwing the Witcher 3 on easy and just enjoying the world and story.
No worries, I'll edit my stuff too. Didn't mean to call you out but these discussions very quickly devolve into shit-slinging (which you can see from some of the posts since).
I don't care people want to play easy game, if they have the option... but at least give me the option to the other side too .
I mean create a very easy game with complex mechanic make it totally obsolete, Grandia 2 is the best exemple, one of the best battle system ever create, for a cakewalk game. We never need to use strategies to overcome anything, so it make the combat system worthless.
Sometimes people just want to turn their brain off and relax, or focus more on the story than the gameplay. Not everyone wants challenging experiences.
Because video games offer far more than just a challenge? They offer the opportunity to actually interact with fictional worlds, stories, and characters. You don't need to metaphorically bang your head against a brick wall to enjoy that.
For some people, playing on easy is challenging enough for them due to their skill level.
Easy mode doesn't always equate to "baby mode". Since disabilities, age, and other factors can play into it.
Besides, vidya is a big medium, and people get into it for all kinds of reasons. Not everyone likes to read challenging books, either. People like what they like.
I don't personally play on easy myself, but there definitely have been games where I loved the story, characters, setting, exploration, whatever more than the gameplay. Not every "hard" game is satisfying to master--that's a matter of taste.
Like, I don't think "Life is Strange" would have been improved by occasional bullet hell sections. I'm sure some players are mainly interested in difficulty, and that's cool, but games today have way more to offer than the challenge of the 80s arcade days. It's a big tent, you know?
A good example of games I like playing on easy is the Uncharted series. I play that for the adventure, the platforming, puzzle solving and fun gunplay. I don't play it to be frustrated and die a bunch of time.
I play games to unwind, not get stressed and anxious failing the same part 10 times in a row.
Also I only have so much time to play games. I like to spread my time across a lot of games so I try to cut down on parts that make me fail and repeat things.
The few times this year I've spent hours retrying one section of a game I just feel like I'm wasting my time.
I think it's a difference of what you come to games for.
Do you come to them as a method of relaxation/chill out, or do you come to them specifically as a game/puzzle to master or overcome?
I love hard (well designed) games because they are hard and playing hard (well designed) games is much more interesting than just cruising through something for me. But I also am going in wanting that and I wouldn't call my life outside of games particularly stressful.
Unless I'm specifically in it for the interactive narrative/experience or something like that, an easy game doesn't make much sense to me. The interaction kinda becomes superfluous. If it's no challenge I might as well just be watching it. But some people specifically want that, and that's fine.
I recommend reading Slouching toward relevant video games by Brie Code. It goes into how people respond very differently to stress and seems relevant here.
Yeah this too. I dont play games on easy, its usually on normal, but I just ranted in the "Im out" thread about this in regards to Soulsborne games. I do not have the time to memorize the attacks of every enemy in a game. So while these games might be great for people with lots of free time or no other hobbies, they feel somewhat insulting to me in how they treat the players time.
The last game I turned down to easy was the Ghostbusters game from 2009. I found the normal difficulty to be frustrating at times and I really just wanted to experience the story in that game. No regrets on that one.
I usually play on 'normal,' but almost never on hard, with the exception of sports games and Guacamelee.
But, for almost every narrative-driven game or progression-based game, I play on normal. Not because I don't want to overcome challenges, but because the enjoyment that I get overcoming a contrived challenge is worth much less to me than the frustration I get facing contrived challenges. What I like most about games is exploring worlds, even from as far back as the 2D platformers I played on NES and Genesis, the satisfaction I got for beating a level wasn't so much "wow, I overcame that difficult challenge," it was more, "I can't wait to explore the next level." It's essentially still the same for me now.
Most games on 'hard' or more hard aren't adding the types of challenges that I enjoy, they're making contrived situations more frustrating. A game like Call of Duty or Uncharted, on the harder difficulties, I don't enjoy those "challenges" because all they mean is super-human abilities by the CPU and more bad guys with better/super-human accuracy. For me, those get in the way of the light realism of what the game is normally presenting me. If I think of Uncharted as an Indiana Jones-type adventure game, I don't really enjoy spending 12 hours crouched behind a box, and running from box to box as grenades explode around me, same with CoD. If I'm thinking of CoD as some ridiculous Tom Clancy action war movie, dying every 30 seconds from an unending stream of Ruskies appearing out of utility closets makes the game worse for me.
There are some challenges that I really do enjoy on harder difficulties or with harder settings. In a game like Dishonored, I turn off the mission markers and notification spotlights and most things that tell you what to do. Those don't make the games necessarily more difficult, but I get a greater sense of joy discovering things through intuition and problem solving than I do just being told where an enemy is... It feels cheap and unrealistic to me when my character just knows where a bad guy is on the other side of the map. Though, even still, sometimes in a game I'll turn this back on ... Not to "make it easy," but when I think the game hasn't presenting enough evidence to discover the puzzle and the game assumes you're playing it with mission markers turned on, so they designers might have been lazy in laying out clues, just figuring you're going to have markers turned on.
In the latest Dishonored add-on I did this more often than I did in Dishonored 1 or 2, because I felt like both of those got it SO RIGHT, but Death of the Outsider would tell you to do something, but then give you no clues on where someone was... Particularly with the last misssion...
there was one last instruction to "Step into the Void" or whatever, but because the level becomes so maze like, you'd NEVER guess you had to basically go back to the beginning of the level to get to the end of it. So I wandered around for like ... 45 minutes, killed myself at least 3 or 4 times, and even the other in-game clues that you'd learned throughout playing the game give you no hint about how to actually step into teh void (for instance, if you pay attention in the game you know that 'the void' is this near-death experience and that cult members would bring themselves near-death to get a glimpse of the void, so I continually tried to bring myself near death towards the end of the game thinking 'this will bring me where I need to go.' But, nope, you just go to a random spot near the beginning of the level, back tracking through this pointless maze...
. So after wasting 45mins I finally just turned the marker on and I was like "Wtf.... how would I have known this otherwise?")
(Spoiler description: not a major spoiler, just some light mission instructions for the last mission... If you have mission markers turned on as most people do, then this isn't a spoiler)
The only games I play on the hardest difficulty is Madden and most sports games, because sports game AI is so freaking dumb it's the only way for me to really enjoy playing the games. It's not for the challenge of it, it's just that playing on any other difficulty is usually really boring for me, and so I'll take the artificial super powers of the D to make up for what I think is really lousy AI. I also have to institute a bunch of house rules and stuff to prevent exploits, which I really hate doing, but it's the only way. But, I have no problem with someone playing on rookie, pro, or all-pro, and for the life of me I wish that Madden would let you have variable difficulty in the online franchise mode, so I could play my User vs. CPU games on All Madden, and a couple of friends could play on Pro or All-Pro when they want to move up. We used to love doing the team building stuff as a group, but All-Pro would be really boring for me, but it'd be too diffficult for my friends, and so we'd never really continue. I'd be winning my games 51-20, and they'd be losing 35-7 (which is definitely not fun slogging through a game of Madden when you're getting crushed and nothing is going right).
Otherwise, I play games on normal because the enjoyment I get from arbitrarily making my enemies have greater super-human accuracy, or having 30 monsters come out a utility closet instead of 5 monsters just isn't enjoyable for me.
Sometimes surmounting simple challenges and obstacles is enough.
I play very few games over the course of a year, so I am generally willing to play more challenging games, but I think it likely that as I age, this will change.
For me, challenge and learning is a crucial part of enjoying games. Overcoming challenge is relaxing for me, while playing a game that pretty much plays itself gives me "wasting my time" anxiety. I'd much rather play one Dark Souls than ten Tomb Raiders.
Also, as I grow older (turned 40 this year), I enjoy the fact that hard games keep my reflexes and hand-eye coordination high.
I used to only play games on the hardest difficulty and frowned upon those who want to make games more accessible and cater to them. World of Warcraft is a perfect example of this with the dumbing down that happened in Wrath of the Lich King.
This all changed when I grew up though. I'll still play games occasionally on the hardest difficulty, but most of the time, I'll just stick with whatever game setting the developer put in as default. When you only have time to play couple hours a week, most would instead choose games that are easy to overcome instead of having to bash your head in just to beat the challenge.
This is the sole reason why I stopped playing MMO:s. I couldn't handle raiding anymore, 3-4 hours 3-4 times a week due to time restraints, and instead of going the "casual" route, I terminated my subscription and never came back to it again, apart from a brief tenure with Elder Scrolls Online when it was released.
Because video games offer far more than just a challenge? They offer the opportunity to actually interact with fictional worlds, stories, and characters. You don't need to metaphorically bang your head against a brick wall to enjoy that.
The thing is people get different things out of gaming that they enjoy. For some, it's the feeling of overcoming a challenge. For others, it could be a way of relaxing and having fun. There isn't one specific way for someone to enjoy this hobby.
Plus not everyone has the luxury of lots of free time to play challenging games or games on a challenging difficulty.
i play on easy most of the time because i'm just not that good at many games. i always start off on the lowest difficulty then ramp it up if i feel like it. i play games for fun so if i'm getting annoying/frustrated then what's the point?
i admit i've got some mental problems and when i was a teenager i had a lot of anger issues and still to an extent deal with them today but i just remember being so angry and i started hating on myself for not being good enough. i felt like an idiot because you see/hear of everyone else saying oh it's easy or making it look easy so i'm thinking why can't i do that too? also at times i've found myself physically lashing out by punching stuff and smashing shit up...it sounds immature i know but now i have control over it and never let it get to that stage.
i just wanna play games and have fun so if that means playing on super easy mode then so be it. i don't care what difficulty anyone plays at...as long as we're all having fun then that's all that matters.
Yeah this too. I dont play games on easy, its usually on normal, but I just ranted in the "Im out" thread about this in regards to Soulsborne games. I do not have the time to memorize the attacks of every enemy in a game. So while these games might be great for people with lots of free time or no other hobbies, they feel somewhat insulting to me in how they treat the players time.
Well, I don't play games on easy, because I think it's not worthy what you have paid for it, however, I can totally understand: a few years back, I was used to play almost everything on hard. Nowadays, I don't have much spare time to play, so I play everything on normal in order to be able to finish stuff. So yeah, It's completely understandable and reasonable to do so: the challenge is only worthy when it's fun, if you are having fun on easy, you should absolutely play on easy.
Sometimes it's fun to overcome a challenge, sometimes I don't care and just want to play a game and relax. It's like asking people who walk round the park why they aren't running a marathon - it'd be more of a challenge and you'd feel a great sense of achievement, but sometimes you just want to walk around the park and enjoy the day.
Too bad I can't do it in Bloodborne
