Streamlining of games isn't anything new and it's been happening year over year since the beginning. Many of these changes are a result of devs learning from previous game design "mistakes", some are a result of hardware evolving and previous limitations being gone (saves). Most of them have been for the better, but it feels like we've long reached a point where convenience and "quality of life" is prioritized over meaningful game design choices.
This thread is obviously brought on by Silksong, but it isn't even about "hard" games. The bar feels like it's been lowered across the industry, even things that were already easy are getting easier. The platforming genre has always been one of my favourites and I absolutely adore modern takes like Odyssey, Bananza and Astrobot but my love for them is diminished by them being effectively devoid of challenges. "But these are games for kids" - so were Super Mario 64, Donkey Kong Country, Crash Bandicoot, etc. And that's not to say that any of those games were hard, but they all had some level of challenge to them that no longer seems to exist. In fact, games in the 80s and 90s pretty much exclusively targetted kids and while there were some that were easier than others, it wasn't some expected standard.
And it's not even strictly about difficulty, there's a bunch of people that are too impatient to deal with any perceived inconvenience or friction in a game. "Why can't I save anywhere", "How come there's no map", "Why do my weapons break", etc. This isn't to say that you can't dislike these things, but deliberate design choices are being categorized by some as "bad design" or "not respecting my time" because it isn't convenient to them. The recent "corpse run" discussion is a good example - "why do I have to spend 45 seconds running back to the boss after I die", I'm sorry, I didn't realize this was a boss rush game? Do you not think the devs considered the full section when they placed the bench? They want the player to survive both that section and the boss to progress.
We've had entire genres become a shell of their former self because of streamlining and introduction of "Quality of Life" features. World of Warcraft slowly introduced so many of these features that it's barely recognizable as an MMO in many ways. It started with small things like "We'll introduce summon stones at the front of an instance", "Introduce Dual-Spec", "Reduce the cooldown on hearthstones", etc. Nowadays it's snowballed to the point where there's practically zero friction in the game whatsoever and the WORLD (you know, the main character of the game itself) is practically uninhabited because you can do everything from the comfort of a capital city.
I believe that friction has a place in the medium. The games that I look back fondly on are games that had friction that resulted in creating those memeories for me. Many games have reached a point of being such a passive experience of going through the motions that they're simply not memorable at all, pretty much every AAA game nowadays can be played on autopilot, following a map marker or arrow to your next destination and mashing some buttons when you get there.
Anyway, that's my rant. Make games hard again, they'll be better off.
This thread is obviously brought on by Silksong, but it isn't even about "hard" games. The bar feels like it's been lowered across the industry, even things that were already easy are getting easier. The platforming genre has always been one of my favourites and I absolutely adore modern takes like Odyssey, Bananza and Astrobot but my love for them is diminished by them being effectively devoid of challenges. "But these are games for kids" - so were Super Mario 64, Donkey Kong Country, Crash Bandicoot, etc. And that's not to say that any of those games were hard, but they all had some level of challenge to them that no longer seems to exist. In fact, games in the 80s and 90s pretty much exclusively targetted kids and while there were some that were easier than others, it wasn't some expected standard.
And it's not even strictly about difficulty, there's a bunch of people that are too impatient to deal with any perceived inconvenience or friction in a game. "Why can't I save anywhere", "How come there's no map", "Why do my weapons break", etc. This isn't to say that you can't dislike these things, but deliberate design choices are being categorized by some as "bad design" or "not respecting my time" because it isn't convenient to them. The recent "corpse run" discussion is a good example - "why do I have to spend 45 seconds running back to the boss after I die", I'm sorry, I didn't realize this was a boss rush game? Do you not think the devs considered the full section when they placed the bench? They want the player to survive both that section and the boss to progress.
We've had entire genres become a shell of their former self because of streamlining and introduction of "Quality of Life" features. World of Warcraft slowly introduced so many of these features that it's barely recognizable as an MMO in many ways. It started with small things like "We'll introduce summon stones at the front of an instance", "Introduce Dual-Spec", "Reduce the cooldown on hearthstones", etc. Nowadays it's snowballed to the point where there's practically zero friction in the game whatsoever and the WORLD (you know, the main character of the game itself) is practically uninhabited because you can do everything from the comfort of a capital city.
I believe that friction has a place in the medium. The games that I look back fondly on are games that had friction that resulted in creating those memeories for me. Many games have reached a point of being such a passive experience of going through the motions that they're simply not memorable at all, pretty much every AAA game nowadays can be played on autopilot, following a map marker or arrow to your next destination and mashing some buttons when you get there.
Anyway, that's my rant. Make games hard again, they'll be better off.
