This resonates with me. I’m pushing 40, I’ve got kids and responsibilities. The time I have available for gaming is limited to 1.5 hours on weeknights, if I’m lucky. By that time in the evening...
This resonates with me. I’m pushing 40, I’ve got kids and responsibilities. The time I have available for gaming is limited to 1.5 hours on weeknights, if I’m lucky. By that time in the evening I’m wiped from the day and half-asleep already. If I have any hope of making meaningful progress in a modern game, I’m not spending my whole tiny attention window replaying and failing the same arbitrarily difficult battle or whatever. Ain’t nobody got time for that!
When I was a kid I had endless time for grinding through a slog and overcoming any challenge a game might throw at me. It was a rewarding feeling — I get the appeal of it. I just can’t realistically do that today, and in this phase of my life I wouldn’t want to anyway. I find it tedious and unfulfilling. I game at the end of the day to unwind, not push the limits of my frustration. So yeah, I’m unashamed to play on easy mode.
But I’d shy away from statements like “easy mode is actually for adults” because I recognize there are plenty of adults in different situations from mine. There’s a whole tapestry of different kinds of gamers out there. Some are middle-agers who play specifically for that thrill of overcoming a trial. There’s a reason the Souls games and Elden Ring, etc., sell like hotcakes. They’re not for me, but they are for lots of people, and I don’t want to diminish them.
As someone who absolutely loves souls games, I'd like to point out something that the author doesn't talk about which is about the design of encounters (especially bosses) and difficulty. There's...
As someone who absolutely loves souls games, I'd like to point out something that the author doesn't talk about which is about the design of encounters (especially bosses) and difficulty. There's an art to designing difficulty and there's a big difference between 'arbitrarily' difficult, and well-designed difficult. There's punishing and there's challenging. Part of the reason the main serious of dark souls took off so much is that there's extremely good encounter, level, and boss design (boss design being perhaps the most important and unique feature here). The inclusion of punishing content is extremely rare, and in the few cases where they miss the mark, people chastise them for it. It's also part of the reason a lot of souls clones fall flat, because it's much easier to design punishing encounters than it is to deliver on challenging.
The classic example of challenging vs punishing is to look at gaming history. Old arcade games difficulty was designed specifically to be punishing, because that was an easy way to ensure that people kept spending money. If the encounters could be figured out in a different way, rather than just requiring the buttons you pressed to be pressed faster (reaction time) or requiring more complicated input (more timed presses), then people would eventually be able to play through quite a bit further on the same amount of money. Being good at the game was mostly a function of reaction speed and only minorly a function of understanding the game mechanics.
By contrast, the frames needed to react to a boss in souls game may vary from boss to boss, but every boss comes with weaknesses. The extremely fast boss might be more easily blocked or have some sort of stagger mechanic or be weak to spells or have very few hit points. They make the game challenging by forcing you to change the way you play, or approach encounters in different ways, rather than purely by making it more difficult to execute the same actions you've been executing throughout the game. I have a lot higher tolerance for this kind of difficulty and enjoy it a lot more than knowing exactly what I need to do and just failing on the pure execution of it because of fatigue or because my muscle memory hasn't built up enough for my reaction time to be adequate. Making it so more difficult bosses in the game just kill you on one mess up (or alternatively just giving them an annoying large amount of hit points) isn't fun for me. Making a boss difficult because the way I've chosen to play my character will be punished in this battle and I need to do something else is a very different kind of difficulty and one in which I won't just adjust the difficulty to get past an annoyance.
Yeah, hard but fair is worlds away from hard just for the sake of it, or “hard” but actually impossible/based on dumb luck/just obnoxious lol. I always deserved to die in Elden Ring.
Yeah, hard but fair is worlds away from hard just for the sake of it, or “hard” but actually impossible/based on dumb luck/just obnoxious lol. I always deserved to die in Elden Ring.
Much like you, I have a family and responsibilities meaning my game time is short. I took a hiatus that was almost a decade long, but getting to go back and play triple A titles for cheap has been...
Much like you, I have a family and responsibilities meaning my game time is short. I took a hiatus that was almost a decade long, but getting to go back and play triple A titles for cheap has been fun.
I got Titanfall 2 for $5 on sale. I started playing on "Hard" and realized I wasn't having fun. I was experiencing exactly what you describe. I lowered the difficulty begrudgingly to "normal" and I'm having fun. Sometimes I still die, but it's because it's self-inflicted and it's much less frustrating, than the game bring arbitrarily harder to get a "challenge"
Titanfall must be one of the rare games I played on Normal - usually I just use Story or Easy. I don't have the time or the energy to learn how to beat specific opponents, I mostly want to play...
Titanfall must be one of the rare games I played on Normal - usually I just use Story or Easy.
I don't have the time or the energy to learn how to beat specific opponents, I mostly want to play through the story and experience the game mechanics.
I wouldn't wholly agree with the 'Easy mode is [...] for adults' thesis here - this is only part of the story, in my opinion - but I think a very good point is touched on here in this quote....
Video games were challenges to be conquered; in many cases, the experience was technical, not narrative or emotional...
I wouldn't wholly agree with the 'Easy mode is [...] for adults' thesis here - this is only part of the story, in my opinion - but I think a very good point is touched on here in this quote. Modern videogames encompass a much wider variety of experiences, including both the technically- and narratively-oriented, plus all manner in-between. Often you see this acknowledged by developers in purposeful 'Story Mode' difficulty, and it's often on this experiential basis that I would choose difficulty. For a game with good narrative and weak gameplay I might compensate by selecting an easier difficulty to expedite the tedium, but in games more in my technical wheelhouse, e.g., extreme sports and rhythm games, I'll definitely go for higher difficulties to achieve a more satisfying gameplay experience.
This is really familiar. I just don’t want to struggle for an hour to get through a simple level. Everything that is slowing you too much just gets in the way of enjoyment, with the limited time...
This is really familiar. I just don’t want to struggle for an hour to get through a simple level. Everything that is slowing you too much just gets in the way of enjoyment, with the limited time you have available. And sometimes you haven’t played for a while and forget how to play it.
Another example of that is quick time events. Pressing a button 20 times in succession is just stupid gameplay design. Some games (RDR2) let you set it up so each press is like 4x so it’s only a few presses. Often I remap some of the back buttons on my Steam Deck to just press that button 100 times. I can jump through these events in no time.
What’s also a big deal is that games now have better and bigger stories. Some are part movie, part game. There is not that much mastery required to get through the gameplay, but it can still be annoying or time consuming. This is unlike older games which were often just much harder and explained or helped you out way less. These simply required mastery.
I resonate with this article, in a sense. While I don't often turn down the difficulty options in games that I play, I definitely understand the appeal. I kind of hung up on Dark Souls back in the...
I resonate with this article, in a sense. While I don't often turn down the difficulty options in games that I play, I definitely understand the appeal. I kind of hung up on Dark Souls back in the day for that reason; I simply lacked the time to dedicate to finishing the game after Anor Londo, because progress was never guaranteed. You could spend hours trying to get anywhere, and make no progress.
Mind you, I love Elden Ring and I love FROM Software games generally, specifically for the difficulty. But I can also recognize that my ability to enjoy those classically-difficult games is dependent on what my life's other requirements are (kids, career, etc).
I had a similar revelation a while back, playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder with my son. The game has the usual characters (Mario, Luigi, Peach, etc), but also a slew of Yoshis and Nabbit. The Yoshis and Nabbit do not take damage from contact with enemies, but they also cannot use powerups. At first I thought that they would be for "easy" mode - for kids or players who don't want the frustration of being killed.
But now, I feel that they are for the adults who are playing with the kids. The kids can play as Mario and have all of the fun powerups and stuff; but when the going gets tough, they can (literally) ride on the Yoshi-player's back, and Yoshi can carry them out of the hard/difficult parts.
I'm going to share a story about Dark Souls 2. I'll keep it brief. We all know Dark Souls has no easy mode and for the longest time, I bounced off the game at the first sub boss - that's right,...
I'm going to share a story about Dark Souls 2. I'll keep it brief.
We all know Dark Souls has no easy mode and for the longest time, I bounced off the game at the first sub boss - that's right, The Pursuer, until my buddy who gave me the game basically goaded me into continually trying while on a voice call with him. I went on to 100% the game.
I'm an adult, I have responsibilities, I have very little time for gaming these days. And I don't 'like' playing games on easy. I don't need enemies in Red Dead 2 to have ten health bars and double armor though. I need the game to be properly balanced. Assassin's Creed Odyssey? Played the whole game on very easy because I felt that the game was very poorly balanced. Enemies had too much health (for humans) and it made the game not fun. I didn't turn it down because I was a busy adult. I hate the journalistic push either way to explain easy or hard games as anything other than difficulty levels. I like RTSes and I usually play with easy AI because, to be honest, I'm not really good at them. Not because I'm busy!
This is, in the appearance of inclusion, gatekeeping adulthood! I can share my Elden Ring or Donkey Kong County Tropical Freeze struggles with children to teach them about adversity and not giving up on a challenge. Not every TV show needs to be a sitcom because we're all busy adults who can't deal with long complex plots.
Odyssey had the stupid enemy leveling mechanic where enemy level was always your level. Later patches allowed you to tone it down so that mobs from lower level areas would still be around your...
Creed Odyssey? Played the whole game on very easy because I felt that the game was very poorly balanced.
Odyssey had the stupid enemy leveling mechanic where enemy level was always your level. Later patches allowed you to tone it down so that mobs from lower level areas would still be around your level, but still a bit lower.
The whole point of overleveling is to be so strong in the endgame that you can just walk through the easy areas, brushing away opponents like they're nothing.
Level scaling isn't fundamentally bad, but it's presence in many games often highlights a critical lack of expressiveness in their role playing systems, ultimately robbing them of the power...
Level scaling isn't fundamentally bad, but it's presence in many games often highlights a critical lack of expressiveness in their role playing systems, ultimately robbing them of the power fantasy that makes "leveling up" feel good.
Cyberpunk 2077 does it really well as of 2.0, which actually introduced level scaling. By the end of my playthrough, I still felt considerably more powerful than I did at the beginning. This is because I was continually refining my character build, trying different things, and experimenting with different playstyles facilitated by the game's skill tree, weapon variety, and and cyberware system. Importantly, although enemy health and damage generally scales with the player, the enemy composition of encounters remains unchanged. You can blast through a lower skill area using your newfound abilities and enjoy your power fantasy even if you can't just stand still taking bullets to the face for three minutes.
Lots of other "RPGs" don't offer the same breadth of abilities and upgrades that Cyberpunk does, and most of the player's increasing power largely comes from just improving their raw dps or their ability to tank damage.
Assassin's Creed's problem is more fundamental though. The game simply shouldn't be an RPG. At it's core, it is a stealth series, and the RPG systems they built are completely contradictory to that. It doesn't make sense for enemies to ever survive having a big blade shoved through their skull in this context. It doesn't help that the RPG systems they built for it are shallow and uninteresting.
Yea, the Ezio series of games was more of a puzzle on how you can get in and one-shot the target and still get away alive. Even the places where you had to climb to synchronise the maps were...
Yea, the Ezio series of games was more of a puzzle on how you can get in and one-shot the target and still get away alive. Even the places where you had to climb to synchronise the maps were puzzles in their own, not just things you climb in 10 seconds and get the checkpoint.
Going in and just slaughtering everyone wasn't an option, Ezio was a good swordsman, but not a killing machine.
Oh man I miss the days when climbing a tower required finding the path to the top, looking for hand-holds and traversing around all sides of the building, etc., instead of just holding the up...
Oh man I miss the days when climbing a tower required finding the path to the top, looking for hand-holds and traversing around all sides of the building, etc., instead of just holding the up button.
Although let’s be fair, Ezio took on hordes of enemies at times too. And the parry/counterattack move, though it required a bit of timing, was a pretty OP way to slaughter waves of them quickly. The series has always struggled with the balance between stealth and open combat. But I agree that the move into RPG mechanics was a detrimental one, and the level scaling has gotten way out of hand.
Ezio absolutely was a killing machine though. It's honestly a ton of fun to get a crowd of like 10 or 15 guards surround you and then systematically dance and weave through them and use the...
Ezio absolutely was a killing machine though. It's honestly a ton of fun to get a crowd of like 10 or 15 guards surround you and then systematically dance and weave through them and use the counter to kill each one. The dodge and counter mechanics are really good at making Ezios fighting style seem very elegant and finessed without demanding too much from the player in terms of skill level.
Assassins Creed 1 was far more a problem when you got stuck in a fight, which lead to some very frustrating and tedious fights. I imagine that's why they made it so much easier in the later games.
If a mercenary assassin jumps from fifty feet up and stabs you in the neck with a sword blessed by the gods that can fell a minotaur you'd better not just shrug it off, throw me, and draw your sword.
If a mercenary assassin jumps from fifty feet up and stabs you in the neck with a sword blessed by the gods that can fell a minotaur you'd better not just shrug it off, throw me, and draw your sword.
Seems like most people end up wanting an easier mode because life gets in the way. For me, what changed is what I considered to be fun. It's no longer fun for me to try 900 times to beat a boss,...
Seems like most people end up wanting an easier mode because life gets in the way. For me, what changed is what I considered to be fun. It's no longer fun for me to try 900 times to beat a boss, this is why I stopped playing Death's Door even though I was otherwise enjoying the game. Seeing all of the guides online talk about boss x being incredibly easy only added to my frustration level, the game was no longer fun because I was stuck and unable to move on to the parts I had been enjoying.
The best adjustments I've seen so far were for Shadow of the Tomb Raider; the difficulty settings included combat, exploration, and puzzles. I've always loved the puzzles in those games but am terrible at combat, being able to adjust one up and one down made this game incredibly fun for me.
Definitely. I don't have the time anymore to get good at a game the way I could have before. Additionally, I lost the ability to play any first person games after the birth of my child. Morning...
Yet it wasn’t just the industry that changed my relationship with easy mode; it was life.
Definitely. I don't have the time anymore to get good at a game the way I could have before.
Additionally, I lost the ability to play any first person games after the birth of my child. Morning sickness somehow changed how my brain works permanently, and I get motion sickness within 5 minutes of playing even Slime Rancher, let alone old games like counter strike or rainbow 6.
After recovering from (also pregnancy induced) carpel tunnel, I'm also careful about controller claw hands and how long I sit down to play.
Is there any shame when an older athlete go on the bunny slope, or use a different bow, or limit high dives, or put on glasses? We all age and our bodies age even if demand on our time isn't a factor.
One way we have easy mode in real life is money. Far too many things are easier with more money :)
From Mayo Clinic: Pregnancy sometimes makes a whole bunch of changes to a body, beyond the bump and past delivery. The hormonal system seachange can relax your entire body's ligaments, which can...
Fluid retention may increase the pressure within the carpal tunnel, irritating the median nerve. This is common during pregnancy and menopause. Carpal tunnel syndrome associated with pregnancy generally gets better on its own after pregnancy.
Pregnancy sometimes makes a whole bunch of changes to a body, beyond the bump and past delivery. The hormonal system seachange can relax your entire body's ligaments, which can bring its own host of pains and problems. And then there's the lack of sleep, social isolation, physical healing problems that can come after the child arrives.
I have a desk and computer job, and needed wrist braces and entirely new mouse and desk chair setup etc. Thankfully it all went away after a few years. At its worst I would wake up with throbbing stabbing pains in my forearm/wrists and be basically unable to hold utensils with a basic fist grip, let alone use fine motor tools like pens or perform fine motor tasks like playing twitch reflex games.
I don't want to sound like it's the worst thing that could happen to people who have pregnancies though: creating entirely new humans seem to be one of the most significant tasks a species, and a culture, can achieve, from a biological and sociological standpoint, so overall risks vs rewards seems balanced.
I'm all for more options in games accessibility--both high and low. Devil May Cry is my favorite game series by far, and recent entries (4 and 5, 5 in particular) have done a fantastic job at...
I'm all for more options in games accessibility--both high and low. Devil May Cry is my favorite game series by far, and recent entries (4 and 5, 5 in particular) have done a fantastic job at making the game playable by as many people as possible. On one end of the spectrum, Easy (Human) difficulty with the 'Auto' toggle means anyone who can spam Triangle/Y is able to perform a variety of combat moves, and will have little if any trouble beating any enemy or boss in the game thanks to how little damage they take and how much they deal. The opposite end of the spectrum, Super Hard (Dante Must Die), essentially inverts those values. The difficulty goes up to, and in some cases exceeds the typical 'Dark Souls' difficulty, where a single hit takes off anywhere from 3 to 8+ blocks of health at once. Or hell, an even harder difficulty (Hell and Hell) where it's that but you die in one hit.
I'm very much the type of player who wants to be challenged, and enjoys seeing how I've managed to become increasingly skilled and able to tackle higher difficulties. I'd hate to see someone interested in a game I enjoy, only to be unable to participate because they prefer to have an easy, fun jaunt through fights I prefer to get my shit slapped in until I master them. I just like to see games designed with that philosophy in mind. Not so much designing the game for the lowest common denominator, but making sure that it's able to be played by as wide a variety of people as possible, whether they're tryhards or casuals. It's a luxury single player games can take, not being bound to ensuring the player's opponents are having a good time as well.
I can sort of understand people who play heavily story-based games, but for me it has been the complete opposite. The primary reason why I play videogames is not to experience their story, because...
I can sort of understand people who play heavily story-based games, but for me it has been the complete opposite.
The primary reason why I play videogames is not to experience their story, because most videogame stories are not written even on par with cheap B-grade books or movies, but to engage with their gameplay systems. I do normally find the stories enjoyable, but they're not good enough on their own.
When I walk through the game without much friction, I feel like the time spent was kind of wasted and would be better spent on something else that is also relaxing but brings some more tangible rewards. I really dislike games that try to constantly guide the player into doing the intended thing - I don't play Ubisoft games for example.
So as I started spending less time playing videogames, I started to focus on games with interesting gameplay and higher difficulty, because overcoming an interesting challenge is the most fun and most rewarding use of my gaming time.
As others point out, there are many games with lazy difficulty settings that are not fun to play against, but practically that's a non-issue. You have a limited time for gaming, tons of games are coming out every year and there are some 20+ years old games that are still great fun, it's not that hard to just select games with decently tuned difficulty.
The solution to this is simply to play video games with better stories. You will essentially never get it from an AAA studio; you have to look elsewhere.
The primary reason why I play videogames is not to experience their story, because most videogame stories are not written even on par with cheap B-grade books or movies
The solution to this is simply to play video games with better stories.
You will essentially never get it from an AAA studio; you have to look elsewhere.
If you have some tips and they also have interesting and refined gameplay, I'm interested. I rarely play AAA games anyway. But imo, even games like Baldur's Gate have writing on par with decent...
If you have some tips and they also have interesting and refined gameplay, I'm interested. I rarely play AAA games anyway.
But imo, even games like Baldur's Gate have writing on par with decent pulp fantasy. Which is fine, but it just doesn't really stand on its own.
My absolute top recommendations (off the top of my head) would be Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, The Beginner's Guide, What Became of Edith Finch, Kentucky Route Zero, Night in the Woods, and SOMA. I...
My absolute top recommendations (off the top of my head) would be Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, The Beginner's Guide, What Became of Edith Finch, Kentucky Route Zero, Night in the Woods, and SOMA. I think each of those is worth being called literature, not just "good video game story."
But, to talk more generally, I think there's an inherent tension between "traditional" storytelling and gameplay.
You can play games with good stories and engaging gameplay if you're willing to broaden your idea of what a "story" can be. There are lots of games in this category: Myst, any FromSoft game, Shadow of the Colossus, Braid, The Stanley Parable, Journey, Half-Life 2, Limbo, KittyHorrorshow's ouvre (really, the entire short horror game community is full of gems), anything by BLENDO Games . . . I could go on forever with games like this.
On the other hand, if you want a more traditionally-told story and you're willing to sacrifice gameply, I'd mention things like The Beginner's Guide, What Became of Edith Finch, The Stanley Parable, and Dear Esther. "Walking simulators", as they're sometimes called.
Also, if you're willing to tolerate "interesting pulpy amateur auteur"-level writing, there are classics like Planescape: Torment, Morrowind, Fallout (1/2), and Grim Fandango.
Oh, and special mention to Pentiment. It's a heavily story-based game, and while I don't think Pentiment's plot is all that, just about everything else about it is a marvel.
I tend to think of modern video games as story based art form, comparable to opera or ballet. A different form of excellence beyond story is involved but the story is also key to the experience.
I tend to think of modern video games as story based art form, comparable to opera or ballet. A different form of excellence beyond story is involved but the story is also key to the experience.
I think ballet is a very apt point of comparison, because it suggests that you can tell a story (for a sufficiently broad definition of "story"), but also that you need to choose a story and a way...
I think ballet is a very apt point of comparison, because it suggests that you can tell a story (for a sufficiently broad definition of "story"), but also that you need to choose a story and a way of telling it that takes advantage of the medium, rather than (say) simply chopping up a Hollywood movie and playing it between segments of "action".
If you’re open to mobile, there’s a super awesome game called Afterplace that has great story, IMO. Done by a one man dev team, sorta top down Zelda style. I was terrible at it, but it had an...
If you’re open to mobile, there’s a super awesome game called Afterplace that has great story, IMO. Done by a one man dev team, sorta top down Zelda style. I was terrible at it, but it had an invincible mode that let me experience it without having to defeat everything. Fantastic game, all around.
I also don’t enjoy games for the stories and the cut scenes. I want solid gameplay. My kid just went away to college and a steam deck is in the mail. What games have you been playing that make you...
I also don’t enjoy games for the stories and the cut scenes. I want solid gameplay.
My kid just went away to college and a steam deck is in the mail. What games have you been playing that make you happy?
One bias of mine is that I don't care about story that much, but I do care about the setting, how the whole world feels, exploration etc., not just about gameplay, so keep that in mind. Recently...
One bias of mine is that I don't care about story that much, but I do care about the setting, how the whole world feels, exploration etc., not just about gameplay, so keep that in mind.
Recently mostly older games. STALKER trilogy is awesome, so are some of the standalone mods (True Stalker just came out and it's pretty good, GAMMA is a great not-entirely-stalker sandbox mod closer to semi-realistic milsims, but it may not run on a Steam Deck). Thief 1 and 2 are probably the best purely stealth games ever, and The Dark Mod is a really good spiritual successor that's completely free. Baldur's Gate 2 - I knew it would be good, but I didn't expect it to be that good. The Metro trilogy is pretty great as well, I'd say Exodus is the weakest, but 2033 especially is great. Oh, and I also had immense fun with playing through Doom campaigns and the Quake campaign using mods that make the games harder and more "modern". Brutal Doom/Project Brutality and Quake 1.5 Combat+.
From slightly newer games the one I enjoyed the most in years was Kingdom Come Deliverance. The story is pretty good as well, but the whole game is amazing. It's rough around the edges in places, and that includes actual gameplay mechanics, but you can feel that they had the ambition to create something special, and I greatly appreciate games that manage to do that. Plus the world is very realistic, the landscapes truly feel like Bohemian countryside (I live not that far from where the game takes place).
I feel like there's a couple of things the discourse on game difficulty misses almost every single time, though the article does touch on the latter: Hard can be very different from player to...
I feel like there's a couple of things the discourse on game difficulty misses almost every single time, though the article does touch on the latter:
Hard can be very different from player to player.
Not all players are looking to get the same thing out of their experiences.
It can be frustrating to see how often a certain type of person will insist that the difficulty of a game is not only essential, but that it's the point, as if that difficulty is actually the same for all players or that all players should want to experience that challenge. "Difficulty" also seems to often get conflated with time and effort rather than skill or understanding.
Even worse is the conflation of accessibility and difficulty, and the idea that adding difficulty or accesibility options might make a game worse by "cheapening" the experience... by not having all players have the same experience? An entirely terrible goal to aim for in the first place when one of the many wonders of games is how many different stories can result from different people playing the same game. The modding scene around many games is a great example of how in other contexts selecting the experience you want from a game is seen in a far more positive light.
Same for me – I've tried plenty of times but I don't have the reflexes to play games that require a lot of speed or coordination. The frustration that lead to my original comment is how often...
Same for me – I've tried plenty of times but I don't have the reflexes to play games that require a lot of speed or coordination. The frustration that lead to my original comment is how often people recommend Dark Souls or Elden Ring to me because I like fantasy stuff, but I just don't have the reflexes to play them well or the patience to play something that requires a lot of repetitive practice.
I can't think of the last time I actually played a strongly narrative-driven game like The Last of Us but if I was there for the story more than the game play I'd probably drop the difficulty if...
I can't think of the last time I actually played a strongly narrative-driven game like The Last of Us but if I was there for the story more than the game play I'd probably drop the difficulty if it was getting to me too. I didn't have any qualms about using the item duplication glitch in Tears of the Kingdom to get around farming a bunch of materials for armor upgrades since I'd already gone through all the experiences that I'd need for that anyway, I just wasn't as interested in doing it another dozen or more times as a time sink after already putting a hundred hours into the game.
More generally, I'll switch difficulties depending on the game and what I want to get out of it. For the roguelite FPS Roboquest I turned the difficulty up because I want a challenging experience and while my reflexes aren't as good as they were when I was playing Unreal Tournament twenty years ago, I'm still aiming for a fast-paced arena shooter and I can keep up with what the game's throwing at me.
Meanwhile with Civilization I usually want more of a relaxed experience in watching my empire grow without being threatened too much so I'm fine on the lower difficulties there.
When I first played Wotcher 3 in my... 34 years? I got advice from my friend who played the game afew times already: Pick Deatch march difficulty (highest) and turn on enemy autoleveling (nothing...
When I first played Wotcher 3 in my... 34 years? I got advice from my friend who played the game afew times already: Pick Deatch march difficulty (highest) and turn on enemy autoleveling (nothing is ever under my own level no matter how miniscule the enemy is).
I have never played such a great game! Sure, it was hard as hell, but it was so satisfying to advance in the game! I finished the game after 150 hours and it really was a blast! I can't imagine how easy it must be on actual easy difficulty...
Almost a year ago I finished Horizon Zero Dawn (my very first playthrough) on normal difficulty. A month ago I finished it for the second time on Ultra hard (highest),yet in New Game+. The same as with Witcher3 applies here. Not easy, but what a rewarding feeling when you accomplish something! Definitely worth it!
Having said that, I can kinda understand that the headline is actually true. Not everyone wants to spend countless hours replaying one fight over and over again and many people wouldn't even be able to overcome it. Yes, gaming is for younger ones. But we, old wolves, shouldn't just give up - Let's go for higher difficulties!
Playing through Witcher 3 in only 150 hours on highest difficulty isn't something a normal mortal can do :D Just the quests and the dialogs and traveling is 70-80 hours for the base game and a few...
Playing through Witcher 3 in only 150 hours on highest difficulty isn't something a normal mortal can do :D
Just the quests and the dialogs and traveling is 70-80 hours for the base game and a few side quests easy.
I did all the side quests (I could find; no DLC) and no fast travel. Skellige was a pain in the ass swimming everywhere. Maybe I did it in more tha 150. But definitely under 200.
I did all the side quests (I could find; no DLC) and no fast travel. Skellige was a pain in the ass swimming everywhere.
Maybe I did it in more tha 150. But definitely under 200.
The bad part about Witcher on hard in my opinion is that you constantly have to be eating, since resting no longer heals you. Also, when you get attacked by a level matched swarm of rats, it's...
The bad part about Witcher on hard in my opinion is that you constantly have to be eating, since resting no longer heals you. Also, when you get attacked by a level matched swarm of rats, it's game over.
That being said, I'm over 30 and generally play games on normal or hard. I got more satisfaction out of Sekiro than Elden Ring if that says anything.
I find "hard" modes incredibly lazy in most games, so I default to "normal" or "easy" modes when the option is available. However, I love FromSoftware games and Soulslikes, which are generally...
I find "hard" modes incredibly lazy in most games, so I default to "normal" or "easy" modes when the option is available. However, I love FromSoftware games and Soulslikes, which are generally considered "hard", and have no difficulty settings available to select.
I think this is because the design of these games, to me, seems very fair and considerate of the player, and feels like the exact opposite of "hard modes" where enemies just become bullet sponges. I generally don't mind spending time failing, iterating and getting better at a hard game when the difficulty is part of the game design, even though I have much less free time available to me now.
A few years ago I played Sekiro for the first time. I was stuck on Gyoubu Masataka Oniwa (the horse guy) for maybe 2 weeks. I only had ~2 hours to play video games a few days a week, and not all in one block either, 15 mins here, 20 mins there etc. I would feel such a great sense of excitement to come back to that boss arena and try to defeat him, and the sense of joy and satisfaction I felt when I did finally beat him took me back to being a teenager again.
I have never felt anything comparable with "hard" modes lazily shoved into other video games as an afterthought.
So here's a GMTK video that talks about this a bit, if you're interested: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K5tPJDZv_VE and his follow up video a couple years after that video:...
This is why I play Classic WoW instead of retail wow! I just had a conversation with my GM about this last week, we both enjoy playing classic because we have busy lives and the content is easy....
This is why I play Classic WoW instead of retail wow!
I just had a conversation with my GM about this last week, we both enjoy playing classic because we have busy lives and the content is easy. Our guild is "semi-hardcore" and pretty driven to try hard in raids, but what that translates to is people show up to raid on time, ready to play, with all the buffs and consumes needed to make shit easy and we raid for like an hour or two a couple nights a week.
On reading the headline, my immediate thought was "are you fucking kidding? This guy must be awful at games..." After reading through the comments though... Jesus. Am I the only one who's still...
On reading the headline, my immediate thought was "are you fucking kidding? This guy must be awful at games..."
After reading through the comments though... Jesus. Am I the only one who's still really fucking good at games at 35? I get to play between 10 and 20 hours a week on average (maybe 30 once in a while) these days.
I default to turning up the difficulty by one over 'normal', and go from there. I will, on occasion, turn it down if the difficulty is done very poorly (like when shooters just give the enemies more health and that's it. All it does is slow me down, it's not any harder). But generally I enjoy the challenge, getting good at a game is the whole point to me.
Exactly. I'm a professional with a career that takes up most of my time, and I have hobbies I want to spend time on. I enjoy playing games, but I dislike grinds, repetition of levels or busywork....
Exactly. I'm a professional with a career that takes up most of my time, and I have hobbies I want to spend time on. I enjoy playing games, but I dislike grinds, repetition of levels or busywork. Gaming feels enough like unproductive time without sucking the enjoyment out of it. Give me a story, an immersive environment and passably entertaining gameplay that goes fine after a try or two. Otherwise my time is being wasted, and I don't have patience for people deliberately wasting my time.
Is reading a book unproductive? You make progress in the book. I could go on a pointless tirade but all your hobbies are unproductive. You might say "Well, I'm trying to lower my 5k time" or "I'm...
Gaming feels enough like unproductive time without sucking the enjoyment out of it.
Is reading a book unproductive? You make progress in the book. I could go on a pointless tirade but all your hobbies are unproductive. You might say "Well, I'm trying to lower my 5k time" or "I'm working on my painting ability!" but both of those don't really 'produce' anything, even any art you may decide to make will undoubtedly be worth less than the cost of materials.
So, not telling you how to live your life or anything - you don't have to play hard mode - but your leisure time will never be productive. If it was, it wouldn't be leisure!
I get that perspective. I do have different games I play depending on my energy level (like Teamfight Tactics I could play almost unconsciously at this point). I have a very weird brain though....
I get that perspective. I do have different games I play depending on my energy level (like Teamfight Tactics I could play almost unconsciously at this point).
I have a very weird brain though. Focusing on a game for real is kinda how I get my brain into gear for real mental work. It's like my warmup a lot of the time. And I frequently play for 15m as a break when I'm really going hard on my work.
Good for you, but isn't the point that you play games to have fun, and if that's turning up the difficulty for someone to get good, and turning it down for someone else to enjoy the story or...
Good for you, but isn't the point that you play games to have fun, and if that's turning up the difficulty for someone to get good, and turning it down for someone else to enjoy the story or scenery it's all good?
I mean, congrats? Some people don't get to play 10-20 hours a week and maybe some people just don't want to deal with that. It's literally in the article. Does it really matter how difficult the...
I mean, congrats? Some people don't get to play 10-20 hours a week and maybe some people just don't want to deal with that. It's literally in the article.
Real life, of course, doesn’t offer those options. But that’s part of the allure of turning down the difficulty in games as an adult. Those fictional worlds are more under your control than actual life will ever be. That’s a real fantasy come true.
Does it really matter how difficult the game is in a story based game, especially when the end result is mostly the same?
So, you've never heard the saying "It's the journey, not the destination"? Yeah, the end of RE4, Leon saves the girl and gets away but how many times did you narrowly avoid death? Kill a ganado...
So, you've never heard the saying "It's the journey, not the destination"? Yeah, the end of RE4, Leon saves the girl and gets away but how many times did you narrowly avoid death? Kill a ganado with the last round in your mag? Get to a save point with your mag empty? The story is literally always the same but the gameplay is what changes. Most games are that way, even "choices matter" games.
Part of human nature is appreciating the struggle. If your favorite rags to riches story suddenly became a "Always was riches" story, it'd probably be cheapened in your eyes.
One of my favorite games is Celeste. It's a difficult game, and I played through all the A and B sides without assist modes. I literally couldn't care less if someone else played through it with...
One of my favorite games is Celeste. It's a difficult game, and I played through all the A and B sides without assist modes. I literally couldn't care less if someone else played through it with assist mode on or not, because they still got to experience the story that I love. If they enjoyed it, that's even better.
Edit: to be clear, I was originally responding to this part of the original comment:
After reading through the comments though... Jesus. Am I the only one who's still really fucking good at games at 35? I get to play between 10 and 20 hours a week on average (maybe 30 once in a while) these days.
I think that it's toxic to basically imply everyone else is bad at games. I personally enjoy challenging myself in games, doesn't mean other people do. Some people want to play the game to experience the story, so I'm glad that there's a way for them to do so.
It depends entirely on what type of game we're talking about. FPS against other players? Games that require precise combinations or fast-paced sequences of buttons in a very short time-frame, but...
It depends entirely on what type of game we're talking about. FPS against other players? Games that require precise combinations or fast-paced sequences of buttons in a very short time-frame, but those combos change depending on situation? I struggle a lot more now than when I was in my teens or early 20s. Especially if I am switching between different games in just a few days. Muscle memory doesn't happen as fast or switch over as easily anymore.
This resonates with me. I’m pushing 40, I’ve got kids and responsibilities. The time I have available for gaming is limited to 1.5 hours on weeknights, if I’m lucky. By that time in the evening I’m wiped from the day and half-asleep already. If I have any hope of making meaningful progress in a modern game, I’m not spending my whole tiny attention window replaying and failing the same arbitrarily difficult battle or whatever. Ain’t nobody got time for that!
When I was a kid I had endless time for grinding through a slog and overcoming any challenge a game might throw at me. It was a rewarding feeling — I get the appeal of it. I just can’t realistically do that today, and in this phase of my life I wouldn’t want to anyway. I find it tedious and unfulfilling. I game at the end of the day to unwind, not push the limits of my frustration. So yeah, I’m unashamed to play on easy mode.
But I’d shy away from statements like “easy mode is actually for adults” because I recognize there are plenty of adults in different situations from mine. There’s a whole tapestry of different kinds of gamers out there. Some are middle-agers who play specifically for that thrill of overcoming a trial. There’s a reason the Souls games and Elden Ring, etc., sell like hotcakes. They’re not for me, but they are for lots of people, and I don’t want to diminish them.
As someone who absolutely loves souls games, I'd like to point out something that the author doesn't talk about which is about the design of encounters (especially bosses) and difficulty. There's an art to designing difficulty and there's a big difference between 'arbitrarily' difficult, and well-designed difficult. There's punishing and there's challenging. Part of the reason the main serious of dark souls took off so much is that there's extremely good encounter, level, and boss design (boss design being perhaps the most important and unique feature here). The inclusion of punishing content is extremely rare, and in the few cases where they miss the mark, people chastise them for it. It's also part of the reason a lot of souls clones fall flat, because it's much easier to design punishing encounters than it is to deliver on challenging.
The classic example of challenging vs punishing is to look at gaming history. Old arcade games difficulty was designed specifically to be punishing, because that was an easy way to ensure that people kept spending money. If the encounters could be figured out in a different way, rather than just requiring the buttons you pressed to be pressed faster (reaction time) or requiring more complicated input (more timed presses), then people would eventually be able to play through quite a bit further on the same amount of money. Being good at the game was mostly a function of reaction speed and only minorly a function of understanding the game mechanics.
By contrast, the frames needed to react to a boss in souls game may vary from boss to boss, but every boss comes with weaknesses. The extremely fast boss might be more easily blocked or have some sort of stagger mechanic or be weak to spells or have very few hit points. They make the game challenging by forcing you to change the way you play, or approach encounters in different ways, rather than purely by making it more difficult to execute the same actions you've been executing throughout the game. I have a lot higher tolerance for this kind of difficulty and enjoy it a lot more than knowing exactly what I need to do and just failing on the pure execution of it because of fatigue or because my muscle memory hasn't built up enough for my reaction time to be adequate. Making it so more difficult bosses in the game just kill you on one mess up (or alternatively just giving them an annoying large amount of hit points) isn't fun for me. Making a boss difficult because the way I've chosen to play my character will be punished in this battle and I need to do something else is a very different kind of difficulty and one in which I won't just adjust the difficulty to get past an annoyance.
Yeah, hard but fair is worlds away from hard just for the sake of it, or “hard” but actually impossible/based on dumb luck/just obnoxious lol. I always deserved to die in Elden Ring.
This just reminded me of this sagely advice by alternative universe Solaire
Much like you, I have a family and responsibilities meaning my game time is short. I took a hiatus that was almost a decade long, but getting to go back and play triple A titles for cheap has been fun.
I got Titanfall 2 for $5 on sale. I started playing on "Hard" and realized I wasn't having fun. I was experiencing exactly what you describe. I lowered the difficulty begrudgingly to "normal" and I'm having fun. Sometimes I still die, but it's because it's self-inflicted and it's much less frustrating, than the game bring arbitrarily harder to get a "challenge"
Titanfall must be one of the rare games I played on Normal - usually I just use Story or Easy.
I don't have the time or the energy to learn how to beat specific opponents, I mostly want to play through the story and experience the game mechanics.
I wouldn't wholly agree with the 'Easy mode is [...] for adults' thesis here - this is only part of the story, in my opinion - but I think a very good point is touched on here in this quote. Modern videogames encompass a much wider variety of experiences, including both the technically- and narratively-oriented, plus all manner in-between. Often you see this acknowledged by developers in purposeful 'Story Mode' difficulty, and it's often on this experiential basis that I would choose difficulty. For a game with good narrative and weak gameplay I might compensate by selecting an easier difficulty to expedite the tedium, but in games more in my technical wheelhouse, e.g., extreme sports and rhythm games, I'll definitely go for higher difficulties to achieve a more satisfying gameplay experience.
This is really familiar. I just don’t want to struggle for an hour to get through a simple level. Everything that is slowing you too much just gets in the way of enjoyment, with the limited time you have available. And sometimes you haven’t played for a while and forget how to play it.
Another example of that is quick time events. Pressing a button 20 times in succession is just stupid gameplay design. Some games (RDR2) let you set it up so each press is like 4x so it’s only a few presses. Often I remap some of the back buttons on my Steam Deck to just press that button 100 times. I can jump through these events in no time.
What’s also a big deal is that games now have better and bigger stories. Some are part movie, part game. There is not that much mastery required to get through the gameplay, but it can still be annoying or time consuming. This is unlike older games which were often just much harder and explained or helped you out way less. These simply required mastery.
I resonate with this article, in a sense. While I don't often turn down the difficulty options in games that I play, I definitely understand the appeal. I kind of hung up on Dark Souls back in the day for that reason; I simply lacked the time to dedicate to finishing the game after Anor Londo, because progress was never guaranteed. You could spend hours trying to get anywhere, and make no progress.
Mind you, I love Elden Ring and I love FROM Software games generally, specifically for the difficulty. But I can also recognize that my ability to enjoy those classically-difficult games is dependent on what my life's other requirements are (kids, career, etc).
I had a similar revelation a while back, playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder with my son. The game has the usual characters (Mario, Luigi, Peach, etc), but also a slew of Yoshis and Nabbit. The Yoshis and Nabbit do not take damage from contact with enemies, but they also cannot use powerups. At first I thought that they would be for "easy" mode - for kids or players who don't want the frustration of being killed.
But now, I feel that they are for the adults who are playing with the kids. The kids can play as Mario and have all of the fun powerups and stuff; but when the going gets tough, they can (literally) ride on the Yoshi-player's back, and Yoshi can carry them out of the hard/difficult parts.
https://archive.is/fg5SY
I'm going to share a story about Dark Souls 2. I'll keep it brief.
We all know Dark Souls has no easy mode and for the longest time, I bounced off the game at the first sub boss - that's right, The Pursuer, until my buddy who gave me the game basically goaded me into continually trying while on a voice call with him. I went on to 100% the game.
I'm an adult, I have responsibilities, I have very little time for gaming these days. And I don't 'like' playing games on easy. I don't need enemies in Red Dead 2 to have ten health bars and double armor though. I need the game to be properly balanced. Assassin's Creed Odyssey? Played the whole game on very easy because I felt that the game was very poorly balanced. Enemies had too much health (for humans) and it made the game not fun. I didn't turn it down because I was a busy adult. I hate the journalistic push either way to explain easy or hard games as anything other than difficulty levels. I like RTSes and I usually play with easy AI because, to be honest, I'm not really good at them. Not because I'm busy!
This is, in the appearance of inclusion, gatekeeping adulthood! I can share my Elden Ring or Donkey Kong County Tropical Freeze struggles with children to teach them about adversity and not giving up on a challenge. Not every TV show needs to be a sitcom because we're all busy adults who can't deal with long complex plots.
Odyssey had the stupid enemy leveling mechanic where enemy level was always your level. Later patches allowed you to tone it down so that mobs from lower level areas would still be around your level, but still a bit lower.
The whole point of overleveling is to be so strong in the endgame that you can just walk through the easy areas, brushing away opponents like they're nothing.
Level scaling isn't fundamentally bad, but it's presence in many games often highlights a critical lack of expressiveness in their role playing systems, ultimately robbing them of the power fantasy that makes "leveling up" feel good.
Cyberpunk 2077 does it really well as of 2.0, which actually introduced level scaling. By the end of my playthrough, I still felt considerably more powerful than I did at the beginning. This is because I was continually refining my character build, trying different things, and experimenting with different playstyles facilitated by the game's skill tree, weapon variety, and and cyberware system. Importantly, although enemy health and damage generally scales with the player, the enemy composition of encounters remains unchanged. You can blast through a lower skill area using your newfound abilities and enjoy your power fantasy even if you can't just stand still taking bullets to the face for three minutes.
Lots of other "RPGs" don't offer the same breadth of abilities and upgrades that Cyberpunk does, and most of the player's increasing power largely comes from just improving their raw dps or their ability to tank damage.
Assassin's Creed's problem is more fundamental though. The game simply shouldn't be an RPG. At it's core, it is a stealth series, and the RPG systems they built are completely contradictory to that. It doesn't make sense for enemies to ever survive having a big blade shoved through their skull in this context. It doesn't help that the RPG systems they built for it are shallow and uninteresting.
Yea, the Ezio series of games was more of a puzzle on how you can get in and one-shot the target and still get away alive. Even the places where you had to climb to synchronise the maps were puzzles in their own, not just things you climb in 10 seconds and get the checkpoint.
Going in and just slaughtering everyone wasn't an option, Ezio was a good swordsman, but not a killing machine.
Oh man I miss the days when climbing a tower required finding the path to the top, looking for hand-holds and traversing around all sides of the building, etc., instead of just holding the up button.
Although let’s be fair, Ezio took on hordes of enemies at times too. And the parry/counterattack move, though it required a bit of timing, was a pretty OP way to slaughter waves of them quickly. The series has always struggled with the balance between stealth and open combat. But I agree that the move into RPG mechanics was a detrimental one, and the level scaling has gotten way out of hand.
Ezio absolutely was a killing machine though. It's honestly a ton of fun to get a crowd of like 10 or 15 guards surround you and then systematically dance and weave through them and use the counter to kill each one. The dodge and counter mechanics are really good at making Ezios fighting style seem very elegant and finessed without demanding too much from the player in terms of skill level.
Assassins Creed 1 was far more a problem when you got stuck in a fight, which lead to some very frustrating and tedious fights. I imagine that's why they made it so much easier in the later games.
If a mercenary assassin jumps from fifty feet up and stabs you in the neck with a sword blessed by the gods that can fell a minotaur you'd better not just shrug it off, throw me, and draw your sword.
Seems like most people end up wanting an easier mode because life gets in the way. For me, what changed is what I considered to be fun. It's no longer fun for me to try 900 times to beat a boss, this is why I stopped playing Death's Door even though I was otherwise enjoying the game. Seeing all of the guides online talk about boss x being incredibly easy only added to my frustration level, the game was no longer fun because I was stuck and unable to move on to the parts I had been enjoying.
The best adjustments I've seen so far were for Shadow of the Tomb Raider; the difficulty settings included combat, exploration, and puzzles. I've always loved the puzzles in those games but am terrible at combat, being able to adjust one up and one down made this game incredibly fun for me.
Definitely. I don't have the time anymore to get good at a game the way I could have before.
Additionally, I lost the ability to play any first person games after the birth of my child. Morning sickness somehow changed how my brain works permanently, and I get motion sickness within 5 minutes of playing even Slime Rancher, let alone old games like counter strike or rainbow 6.
After recovering from (also pregnancy induced) carpel tunnel, I'm also careful about controller claw hands and how long I sit down to play.
Is there any shame when an older athlete go on the bunny slope, or use a different bow, or limit high dives, or put on glasses? We all age and our bodies age even if demand on our time isn't a factor.
One way we have easy mode in real life is money. Far too many things are easier with more money :)
I’m curious to hear more about the pregnancy induced carpal tunnel
Anything interesting you would be willing to share?
From Mayo Clinic:
Pregnancy sometimes makes a whole bunch of changes to a body, beyond the bump and past delivery. The hormonal system seachange can relax your entire body's ligaments, which can bring its own host of pains and problems. And then there's the lack of sleep, social isolation, physical healing problems that can come after the child arrives.
I have a desk and computer job, and needed wrist braces and entirely new mouse and desk chair setup etc. Thankfully it all went away after a few years. At its worst I would wake up with throbbing stabbing pains in my forearm/wrists and be basically unable to hold utensils with a basic fist grip, let alone use fine motor tools like pens or perform fine motor tasks like playing twitch reflex games.
I don't want to sound like it's the worst thing that could happen to people who have pregnancies though: creating entirely new humans seem to be one of the most significant tasks a species, and a culture, can achieve, from a biological and sociological standpoint, so overall risks vs rewards seems balanced.
I'm all for more options in games accessibility--both high and low. Devil May Cry is my favorite game series by far, and recent entries (4 and 5, 5 in particular) have done a fantastic job at making the game playable by as many people as possible. On one end of the spectrum, Easy (Human) difficulty with the 'Auto' toggle means anyone who can spam Triangle/Y is able to perform a variety of combat moves, and will have little if any trouble beating any enemy or boss in the game thanks to how little damage they take and how much they deal. The opposite end of the spectrum, Super Hard (Dante Must Die), essentially inverts those values. The difficulty goes up to, and in some cases exceeds the typical 'Dark Souls' difficulty, where a single hit takes off anywhere from 3 to 8+ blocks of health at once. Or hell, an even harder difficulty (Hell and Hell) where it's that but you die in one hit.
I'm very much the type of player who wants to be challenged, and enjoys seeing how I've managed to become increasingly skilled and able to tackle higher difficulties. I'd hate to see someone interested in a game I enjoy, only to be unable to participate because they prefer to have an easy, fun jaunt through fights I prefer to get my shit slapped in until I master them. I just like to see games designed with that philosophy in mind. Not so much designing the game for the lowest common denominator, but making sure that it's able to be played by as wide a variety of people as possible, whether they're tryhards or casuals. It's a luxury single player games can take, not being bound to ensuring the player's opponents are having a good time as well.
I can sort of understand people who play heavily story-based games, but for me it has been the complete opposite.
The primary reason why I play videogames is not to experience their story, because most videogame stories are not written even on par with cheap B-grade books or movies, but to engage with their gameplay systems. I do normally find the stories enjoyable, but they're not good enough on their own.
When I walk through the game without much friction, I feel like the time spent was kind of wasted and would be better spent on something else that is also relaxing but brings some more tangible rewards. I really dislike games that try to constantly guide the player into doing the intended thing - I don't play Ubisoft games for example.
So as I started spending less time playing videogames, I started to focus on games with interesting gameplay and higher difficulty, because overcoming an interesting challenge is the most fun and most rewarding use of my gaming time.
As others point out, there are many games with lazy difficulty settings that are not fun to play against, but practically that's a non-issue. You have a limited time for gaming, tons of games are coming out every year and there are some 20+ years old games that are still great fun, it's not that hard to just select games with decently tuned difficulty.
The solution to this is simply to play video games with better stories.
You will essentially never get it from an AAA studio; you have to look elsewhere.
If you have some tips and they also have interesting and refined gameplay, I'm interested. I rarely play AAA games anyway.
But imo, even games like Baldur's Gate have writing on par with decent pulp fantasy. Which is fine, but it just doesn't really stand on its own.
My absolute top recommendations (off the top of my head) would be Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, The Beginner's Guide, What Became of Edith Finch, Kentucky Route Zero, Night in the Woods, and SOMA. I think each of those is worth being called literature, not just "good video game story."
But, to talk more generally, I think there's an inherent tension between "traditional" storytelling and gameplay.
You can play games with good stories and engaging gameplay if you're willing to broaden your idea of what a "story" can be. There are lots of games in this category: Myst, any FromSoft game, Shadow of the Colossus, Braid, The Stanley Parable, Journey, Half-Life 2, Limbo, KittyHorrorshow's ouvre (really, the entire short horror game community is full of gems), anything by BLENDO Games . . . I could go on forever with games like this.
On the other hand, if you want a more traditionally-told story and you're willing to sacrifice gameply, I'd mention things like The Beginner's Guide, What Became of Edith Finch, The Stanley Parable, and Dear Esther. "Walking simulators", as they're sometimes called.
Also, if you're willing to tolerate "interesting pulpy amateur auteur"-level writing, there are classics like Planescape: Torment, Morrowind, Fallout (1/2), and Grim Fandango.
Oh, and special mention to Pentiment. It's a heavily story-based game, and while I don't think Pentiment's plot is all that, just about everything else about it is a marvel.
I tend to think of modern video games as story based art form, comparable to opera or ballet. A different form of excellence beyond story is involved but the story is also key to the experience.
I think ballet is a very apt point of comparison, because it suggests that you can tell a story (for a sufficiently broad definition of "story"), but also that you need to choose a story and a way of telling it that takes advantage of the medium, rather than (say) simply chopping up a Hollywood movie and playing it between segments of "action".
The modern God of War games, Horizon Zero Dawn (less Forbidden West), The Last of Us, are just a few. They have good stories in my opinion, anyway.
If you’re open to mobile, there’s a super awesome game called Afterplace that has great story, IMO. Done by a one man dev team, sorta top down Zelda style. I was terrible at it, but it had an invincible mode that let me experience it without having to defeat everything. Fantastic game, all around.
I also don’t enjoy games for the stories and the cut scenes. I want solid gameplay.
My kid just went away to college and a steam deck is in the mail. What games have you been playing that make you happy?
One bias of mine is that I don't care about story that much, but I do care about the setting, how the whole world feels, exploration etc., not just about gameplay, so keep that in mind.
Recently mostly older games. STALKER trilogy is awesome, so are some of the standalone mods (True Stalker just came out and it's pretty good, GAMMA is a great not-entirely-stalker sandbox mod closer to semi-realistic milsims, but it may not run on a Steam Deck). Thief 1 and 2 are probably the best purely stealth games ever, and The Dark Mod is a really good spiritual successor that's completely free. Baldur's Gate 2 - I knew it would be good, but I didn't expect it to be that good. The Metro trilogy is pretty great as well, I'd say Exodus is the weakest, but 2033 especially is great. Oh, and I also had immense fun with playing through Doom campaigns and the Quake campaign using mods that make the games harder and more "modern". Brutal Doom/Project Brutality and Quake 1.5 Combat+.
From slightly newer games the one I enjoyed the most in years was Kingdom Come Deliverance. The story is pretty good as well, but the whole game is amazing. It's rough around the edges in places, and that includes actual gameplay mechanics, but you can feel that they had the ambition to create something special, and I greatly appreciate games that manage to do that. Plus the world is very realistic, the landscapes truly feel like Bohemian countryside (I live not that far from where the game takes place).
I feel like there's a couple of things the discourse on game difficulty misses almost every single time, though the article does touch on the latter:
It can be frustrating to see how often a certain type of person will insist that the difficulty of a game is not only essential, but that it's the point, as if that difficulty is actually the same for all players or that all players should want to experience that challenge. "Difficulty" also seems to often get conflated with time and effort rather than skill or understanding.
Even worse is the conflation of accessibility and difficulty, and the idea that adding difficulty or accesibility options might make a game worse by "cheapening" the experience... by not having all players have the same experience? An entirely terrible goal to aim for in the first place when one of the many wonders of games is how many different stories can result from different people playing the same game. The modding scene around many games is a great example of how in other contexts selecting the experience you want from a game is seen in a far more positive light.
I can't play games that rely on fast twitch reflexes or hand eye coordination. I still enjoy games
Same for me – I've tried plenty of times but I don't have the reflexes to play games that require a lot of speed or coordination. The frustration that lead to my original comment is how often people recommend Dark Souls or Elden Ring to me because I like fantasy stuff, but I just don't have the reflexes to play them well or the patience to play something that requires a lot of repetitive practice.
I can't think of the last time I actually played a strongly narrative-driven game like The Last of Us but if I was there for the story more than the game play I'd probably drop the difficulty if it was getting to me too. I didn't have any qualms about using the item duplication glitch in Tears of the Kingdom to get around farming a bunch of materials for armor upgrades since I'd already gone through all the experiences that I'd need for that anyway, I just wasn't as interested in doing it another dozen or more times as a time sink after already putting a hundred hours into the game.
More generally, I'll switch difficulties depending on the game and what I want to get out of it. For the roguelite FPS Roboquest I turned the difficulty up because I want a challenging experience and while my reflexes aren't as good as they were when I was playing Unreal Tournament twenty years ago, I'm still aiming for a fast-paced arena shooter and I can keep up with what the game's throwing at me.
Meanwhile with Civilization I usually want more of a relaxed experience in watching my empire grow without being threatened too much so I'm fine on the lower difficulties there.
When I first played Wotcher 3 in my... 34 years? I got advice from my friend who played the game afew times already: Pick Deatch march difficulty (highest) and turn on enemy autoleveling (nothing is ever under my own level no matter how miniscule the enemy is).
I have never played such a great game! Sure, it was hard as hell, but it was so satisfying to advance in the game! I finished the game after 150 hours and it really was a blast! I can't imagine how easy it must be on actual easy difficulty...
Almost a year ago I finished Horizon Zero Dawn (my very first playthrough) on normal difficulty. A month ago I finished it for the second time on Ultra hard (highest),yet in New Game+. The same as with Witcher3 applies here. Not easy, but what a rewarding feeling when you accomplish something! Definitely worth it!
Having said that, I can kinda understand that the headline is actually true. Not everyone wants to spend countless hours replaying one fight over and over again and many people wouldn't even be able to overcome it. Yes, gaming is for younger ones. But we, old wolves, shouldn't just give up - Let's go for higher difficulties!
Playing through Witcher 3 in only 150 hours on highest difficulty isn't something a normal mortal can do :D
Just the quests and the dialogs and traveling is 70-80 hours for the base game and a few side quests easy.
I did all the side quests (I could find; no DLC) and no fast travel. Skellige was a pain in the ass swimming everywhere.
Maybe I did it in more tha 150. But definitely under 200.
The bad part about Witcher on hard in my opinion is that you constantly have to be eating, since resting no longer heals you. Also, when you get attacked by a level matched swarm of rats, it's game over.
That being said, I'm over 30 and generally play games on normal or hard. I got more satisfaction out of Sekiro than Elden Ring if that says anything.
Rats! I will be honest - there is a part of story where I had to turn of that level scaling to keep me sane...
I find "hard" modes incredibly lazy in most games, so I default to "normal" or "easy" modes when the option is available. However, I love FromSoftware games and Soulslikes, which are generally considered "hard", and have no difficulty settings available to select.
I think this is because the design of these games, to me, seems very fair and considerate of the player, and feels like the exact opposite of "hard modes" where enemies just become bullet sponges. I generally don't mind spending time failing, iterating and getting better at a hard game when the difficulty is part of the game design, even though I have much less free time available to me now.
A few years ago I played Sekiro for the first time. I was stuck on Gyoubu Masataka Oniwa (the horse guy) for maybe 2 weeks. I only had ~2 hours to play video games a few days a week, and not all in one block either, 15 mins here, 20 mins there etc. I would feel such a great sense of excitement to come back to that boss arena and try to defeat him, and the sense of joy and satisfaction I felt when I did finally beat him took me back to being a teenager again.
I have never felt anything comparable with "hard" modes lazily shoved into other video games as an afterthought.
So here's a GMTK video that talks about this a bit, if you're interested: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K5tPJDZv_VE
and his follow up video a couple years after that video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NInNVEHj_G4
This is why I play Classic WoW instead of retail wow!
I just had a conversation with my GM about this last week, we both enjoy playing classic because we have busy lives and the content is easy. Our guild is "semi-hardcore" and pretty driven to try hard in raids, but what that translates to is people show up to raid on time, ready to play, with all the buffs and consumes needed to make shit easy and we raid for like an hour or two a couple nights a week.
On reading the headline, my immediate thought was "are you fucking kidding? This guy must be awful at games..."
After reading through the comments though... Jesus. Am I the only one who's still really fucking good at games at 35? I get to play between 10 and 20 hours a week on average (maybe 30 once in a while) these days.
I default to turning up the difficulty by one over 'normal', and go from there. I will, on occasion, turn it down if the difficulty is done very poorly (like when shooters just give the enemies more health and that's it. All it does is slow me down, it's not any harder). But generally I enjoy the challenge, getting good at a game is the whole point to me.
Exactly. I'm a professional with a career that takes up most of my time, and I have hobbies I want to spend time on. I enjoy playing games, but I dislike grinds, repetition of levels or busywork. Gaming feels enough like unproductive time without sucking the enjoyment out of it. Give me a story, an immersive environment and passably entertaining gameplay that goes fine after a try or two. Otherwise my time is being wasted, and I don't have patience for people deliberately wasting my time.
Is reading a book unproductive? You make progress in the book. I could go on a pointless tirade but all your hobbies are unproductive. You might say "Well, I'm trying to lower my 5k time" or "I'm working on my painting ability!" but both of those don't really 'produce' anything, even any art you may decide to make will undoubtedly be worth less than the cost of materials.
So, not telling you how to live your life or anything - you don't have to play hard mode - but your leisure time will never be productive. If it was, it wouldn't be leisure!
I get that perspective. I do have different games I play depending on my energy level (like Teamfight Tactics I could play almost unconsciously at this point).
I have a very weird brain though. Focusing on a game for real is kinda how I get my brain into gear for real mental work. It's like my warmup a lot of the time. And I frequently play for 15m as a break when I'm really going hard on my work.
Good for you, but isn't the point that you play games to have fun, and if that's turning up the difficulty for someone to get good, and turning it down for someone else to enjoy the story or scenery it's all good?
I mean, congrats? Some people don't get to play 10-20 hours a week and maybe some people just don't want to deal with that. It's literally in the article.
Does it really matter how difficult the game is in a story based game, especially when the end result is mostly the same?
So, you've never heard the saying "It's the journey, not the destination"? Yeah, the end of RE4, Leon saves the girl and gets away but how many times did you narrowly avoid death? Kill a ganado with the last round in your mag? Get to a save point with your mag empty? The story is literally always the same but the gameplay is what changes. Most games are that way, even "choices matter" games.
Part of human nature is appreciating the struggle. If your favorite rags to riches story suddenly became a "Always was riches" story, it'd probably be cheapened in your eyes.
One of my favorite games is Celeste. It's a difficult game, and I played through all the A and B sides without assist modes. I literally couldn't care less if someone else played through it with assist mode on or not, because they still got to experience the story that I love. If they enjoyed it, that's even better.
Edit: to be clear, I was originally responding to this part of the original comment:
I think that it's toxic to basically imply everyone else is bad at games. I personally enjoy challenging myself in games, doesn't mean other people do. Some people want to play the game to experience the story, so I'm glad that there's a way for them to do so.
It depends entirely on what type of game we're talking about. FPS against other players? Games that require precise combinations or fast-paced sequences of buttons in a very short time-frame, but those combos change depending on situation? I struggle a lot more now than when I was in my teens or early 20s. Especially if I am switching between different games in just a few days. Muscle memory doesn't happen as fast or switch over as easily anymore.