Difficult Games Have Returned! But Why Did People Want Them Gone?

He's gonna get wrecked.

Siliconera recently posted this article asking about why tough games are rising in popularity recently. Samu Wosada, creator of the absolutely excellent 1001 Spikes weighs in on this. The short of it is that he believes that over the last generation of consoles a large number of developers looked to graphics, music and writing as ways to make their game feel like it's truly "the next generation of gaming." Because of this he says a large number of modern games have gameplay elements that make surmounting failure more tedious rather than gratifying. Wosada says that now some devs are focusing on gameplay over story, graphics, music and writing and this has led to games like Dark Souls actually having failure be an element that the game builds itself around. I pretty much agree with Wosada on this. I also believe that overly focusing on graphics, writing, etc. has led to a large number of games that have failure present just for the sake of having it and when the player fails there's really never any weight behind their failure. A good example would be Bioshock, which is a fantastic game, but the presence of the game's Vita Chambers ruins some of it. The game is supposed to be scary and a thrill ride throughout many sections but when you know that if you die you only lose a little bit of progress and the enemies you're fighting will still have all of the damage they incurred fighting you previously it kind of makes all of that tension dissolve.

Here's an image of Wosada's 1001 Spikes. I don't know if there are actually 1001 spikes on screen but man, that's a lot of spikes.

But I'm not really going to talk about the return of these games to the mainstream. I'm wondering what made these games leave the mainstream. Back in the NES and SNES era there were games that were very difficult. This was mainly a carryover from the arcade days. Players died a lot so they would keep pumping in quarters. Consequently, console game design went the same way. Players did die a lot but this ended up adding longevity to the game. And when players did surmount a challenge it seems as though the overall feeling was this overwhelming sense of accomplishment after finally defeating something that took them hours or days. But now if a game has that feature people will tend to scoff at it. What has changed?

Well game design for one.We don't need to extend the time that people spend on games anymore with elements from games like Mega Man X or Castlevania because games these days are longer. They're a lot longer actually. And that's not from difficult content. That's story, music, well designed encounters, side quests, dialogue and a ton of other things that can add to a game's length and make the player feel fulfilled and enjoy themselves. But there's still those instances where a player feels like a challenge is taking too long. There's instances where a player abandons a game because they feel like it's too much work for them to put in. It's weird, considering the fact that if a person had spent money on something to entertain them you would think that they would want to see it through to the end. What's the X Factor that might be contributing to this feeling?

It's not Steam itself. Steam is great!

This is a screenshot of my Steam Library. That number is a little skewed due to the way Steam categorizes things but I have 100 games. That's a lot of games. And looking on Steam I can see that my library is paltry compared to a lot of users out there. The fact of the matter is that there's a lot of games out there. And a lot of gamers have A LOT of games. But most importantly a lot of gamers have a lot of games that are UNPLAYED. I'd like you to take a peek at your Steam, Origin, shelf, etc. How many games do you have unplayed? Now think about this. One of those unplayed games is giving you a lot of trouble. More trouble than you would normally experience in a game. And that's when those words pop up in your mind, or some variation of them.

"Screw this. I'm going to play something else."

Back when I was a kid I had The Lion King for Sega Genesis. This was the only game I had for over a year or so. I always got hopelessly stuck on many sections of the game. Yet I still played this game every day and loved every second of it. I didn't have hundreds of games in my backlog. I just played this and I loved it. And when I finally beat a difficult part I was ecstatic. It always felt good knowing that all of my hard work had paid off. These days it's too easy to give up and just go play something else, especially when your backlog is so huge that you probably will never get through it all. Are you buying a game to play that particular game? Or are you buying it just to give yourself more options? Are you buying it just to pad time until something you REALLY want is released. All I'm asking is this: Next time you don't know what to play, go back to that one game. That game that gave you so much trouble, that game you quit, that game you dropped when another one came out, whatever it is go back to it. Give it another go. Surmount that challenge and don't give in to the temptation of your backlog of unplayed, unopened games. Essentially all I'm asking is finish what you start before moving on to something new.

And remember, not every game has a Vita Chamber.

So what do you guys think? Is the backlog and growing options for games a big reason as to why difficult games fell by the wayside? Or is it something else? What games did you choose to struggle through? Let me know in the comments and I'll see you next week.