I think a lot of this can be attributed to the general evolution of Game Design theory.
Remember, video games did not, despite most people thinking otherwise, grow out of the PC market. They grew out of the Coin-Op Arcade market. You know, where you had a single life then you had to feed the machine more money to continue - those games were all very specifically designed to give the average player about 2 or 3 mins of play time before more money was needed. It was never designed so people could become expert gamers and get 1 or 2 hours out of a single quarter.
However, that era is more or less dead. There’s very little reason to design games with that kind of thinking in the modern world of game development. This old trend filtered into early home console machines and even some PC games where the trend turned into you having 3-to-5 lives to start with and maybe some continue credits or the game edited to add in more 1up’s. However, over the past decades game designers have realised we don’t really need to do that any more. The rules changed, the goals of what a game should do have shifted.
People who grew up playing coin-op design era games, either in the arcades on with early home consoles most likely see the current generation of games as easy or casual but it’s really more of a shift in the goals of the designer, a change in the kind of experience they’re presenting. Give it another 20 years and the design needle for games will have shifted again, and another whole generation of players will probably be having this same argument but using different metrics of measurement.
That’s not to say there isn’t room for games that use similar designs to those older era games but they’re probably doing it for different reasons today. For example, in Dark Souls I’m guessing the designers made it difficult to highlight the ultimate fragility of the experience as opposed to a system to measure your play time by monetary investment. Similar outcome, but totally different design goals.
If you crave a game so difficult it makes you die a lot, perhaps you need to re-examine your childhood and ask yourself - do you really like difficult and frustrating games or are you just pining for a similar psychosocial experience due to years of conditioning by evil coin-op game designers of old?
:o
Previous paragraph was a joke… mostly.
Consider a game like Assassins Creed, which I think of as having a fairly modern design for an action game, lets examine a common scenario using current and (made up) old designs.
New: I try to jump from a roof to assassinate a guard, if I fail (and I do, a lot) I can usually run away, hide, try again later.
Old: I try to jump from a roof to assassinate a guard, if I fail (and I do, a lot) which results in bloody gory death, or I’d make it out with but a sliver of health which would prevent me from getting much further in the game after which I’d re-load and try again - this almost sounds a bit like Dark Souls doesn’t it?
The former seems easier and more casual, and I guess it is, it’s more approachable, more forgiving, but ultimately the result is going to be more or less the same as the old style design minus the potential frustration.
No doubt there are countless examples people will post to illustrate otherwise but I’m not saying this is a fixed law that describes the change in all games, just a general theory to explain some of the changes to game design in general over the last decade. Nor am I saying one approach is better than the other, both provide different yet perfectly valid experiences for different types of players (even if some of them may be suffering from evil childhood conditioning j/k).
