As sure as I am that this revelation will be unsurprising to the bulk of you, it still must be said... The internet has a tendency to coalesce around certain ideas and feelings, whether it be due respect towards a company or intellectual property, or an unreasonable amount of disgust towards an individual or brand. That's not to say it doesn't happen offline as much as it does on; it's easy to climb onto a bandwagon in any setting. But, on the internet, the anonymity of most users often intensifies these ideas and feelings, regardless of the facts or situation surrounding them.
Why do I bring this up? Well... One of these "hiveminds," as I like to call them, always catches my attention, and it dogs me in the back of my mind every time I see it. I am talking, of course, about the notion that games of the modern era are somehow easier than those from decades past. You know what I'm talking about -- every forum or image board you can wade into has mentioned it, most often with a negative connotation strapped to the word "easy." I even quite vividly remember conversations between my friends and I on the subject in our high school's lunchroom. And while I agree that games have increasingly become easier to play, I would like to offer a different perspective as to why...
Games are not becoming easier -- they, and the people making them, are getting better. Allow me to explain:
Back when the games industry was in its true infancy, prior to and during the third generation of consoles, the process of making games was, likewise, in its own state of childhood. Quite a bit of the time, developers really had no clue what they were doing. A lot of them were just kids right out of high school or college (some of them not even that old), toying around with the new tech of the age. Many games that shipped to market were underdeveloped for various reasons, or had only been sparsely tested.
Sure, a lot of the difficult games of the time were of considerable quality; titles that spring to mind include Ninja Gaiden and the MegaMan series for the NES. However, a far greater number owed their challenge not to the intent of the developer, but to their lackluster design or very poor programming. Games like Silver Surfer or Top Gun were hard not because of clever level design or satisfying enemy encounters, but because of frustrating one-hit kills, unusable controls, impossible stages, and overpowered, near-broken foes. They were not made difficult in earnest; they were made that way because their developers either did not have the time or the money or the skill or the talent to make them playable.
It all makes sense, when you think about it, though. During the days of the NES, there was little to no precedent over how a game should be made. There was no Unreal or idTech or Source Engines to build your game around, very few classics to try to emulate, and no real system for breaking new people into development. Much of the time, developers were working from scratch with a skeleton crew. Today, things have changed.
Gaming is now a multibillion dollar business. There are engines to license, classics to copy, schools to hone young and talented individuals into game developers... Some of those developers have spent their entire lives learning how to develop games. A studio or publisher can sometimes hire literally dozens of people to make sure a game is balanced, to make sure it runs seamlessly. Modern gaming has become a well maintained machine, an admirable apparatus constantly edging to better itself.
Though there still exists quite a number of bad games, they come mostly from the inexperienced developers or publishers looking only to make a quick dollar. The ones that really matter, the triple A titles from top tier developers or indie games from developers that truly love games and gaming, are almost always of a high quality.
I feel as if individuals who connect with this particular hivemind look to the past through rose-tinted nostalgia goggles. There are still quite a number of naturally difficult and challenging titles on the market, and the hardest difficulty setting of most games that offer them are just simply brutal because they were designed from inception to be that way.
So, I would request that you keep the following in mind the next time you're playing a game on Easy or Normal and kill an enemy with little to no effort... Several very capable people worked very diligently to make it that way.
