Game Design: Challenging Games

     I've mentioned this before in an earlier post of mine, and it's an important enough issue to warrant it's own post I think; that video games aren't very challenging anymore.

     There was once a time where beating a level of a game, let alone the game itself was really damn hard. It made people cry, get angry, throw things, get depressed, get violent, etc. Games were hard, and when you beat one, you felt proud and accomplished. You'd succeeded in your task and maybe not a whole lot of people you knew could say the same thing.

     I'm not talking about Superman 64 hard where it's because the game is just stupid. I'm talking about Contra and any number of other older games that were really challenging to get through.

     They were also fun. While they were extremely challenging, part of the fun was the challenge.

     Now compare it to Assassin's Creed: Blag Flag, which I did play all the way through, and while it had its points, the game is so repetitive in gameplay it gets really old before you're even halfway through playing the game. It's also way too easy. There aren't really any consequences for doing things wrong, except that you start over at your last check point, but other than that, you can take on dozens of enemies and even though you're only using 18th Century muskets and pistols, they're deadly accurate; and by deadly accurate, I mean they hit your target without misfiring and as long as your target is within range(which is still way too far)and you have the crosshairs on them, you're good to go. Maybe if each mission became more challenging than the last, the games repetitiveness  wouldn't be so bad(although, it was pretty bad), the game was really easy. The best thing about that game was the sea battles, and they were the most challenging, at first, before you upgrade your ship into an unstoppable beast(which even then if you get too cocky you can get destroyed).

     That being said, I did enjoy a lot of the game, and while that is true, it could have been so much better. Games just walk people through everything they have to do now, and don't even make them figure out what they need to do. Very few games are stimulating intellectually or otherwise. Even the Medal of Honor series, which was not incredibly challenging, but they were fun, is more challenging and requires more thought than most of the Call of Duty games. And I was a Call of Duty fan when it came out, but they haven't really expanded past their model, which is one of the main reasons Call of Duty replaced Medal of Honor as everyone's favorite WWII gaming series; Medal of Honor had gotten old, and they weren't being innovative anymore. There's only so many times people can play the invasion of Normandy without it just looking all the same. That might have been what killed WWII games in general though, was that people just got sick of playing them, and why Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was so popular when it came out, or Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. Those are other, smaller subjects for another time though.

     The point is, games need to actually be challenging again, rather than trying to appeal for the widest audience possible, just so they can make money.

     Kinja points out something I have left out thus far; that games have gotten easier, but harder to manage, meaning that while games have gotten easier by a lot, the way we are playing these easier games has become more complex, with more buttons and controls than ever before. And that might be what has replaced the challenge of a difficult game; the challenge of trying to manage yourself with an easy game.
 
    I think maybe this might come to newer solutions to games in the future; making them less complex to manage, but more challenging to play, and having a balance of the old and new. We won't know until the future though, so until then, we must keep hoping and doing what we can to improve the gaming industry ourselves, if that will even work.