Editorial: Climbing The Difficulty Curve

There has been a growing trend over the last few years to make games that are easy enough for every player to finish them. In many ways this is a positive development which reflects the maturity of the industry and the mainstream nature of the audience who regularly play games. It also reflects publisher desires to create mass market, accessible products which can generate maximum profit for them.

However today I’m posing the question “Have singleplayer games become too easy?”

Early games were far more challenging than they are now and initially this was largely due to the lack of a save option. You had to play the thing all the way through in one sitting, when you ran out of lives you had to start again from the start. Now don’t get me wrong I don’t miss replaying the first three levels of a scrolling shooter twenty times just to progress past that tricky missile but the sense of achievement and immersion is reduced when you complete a game in half hour chunks over a month. Upon completing modern games I rarely feel the same rush of pride that I did from reaching the end of Double Dragon or Ikari Warriors."

Read on< a href="http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2008/01/15/climbing_the_difficulty_curve/1" target="_blank">at Bit Tech.