Is BlackOps Really That Bad To People?

[Reincarnate]

I look at games like Super Mario RPG, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, Doom I/II, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem, Mechwarrior, Zelda, Command and Conquer, Riven/Myst, Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid, SMB, Commander Keen, etc... games I grew up with and look back on fondly... and in all honesty, I notice that new games aren’t as creative and are fairly linear. The old games still had a primary path to take, but there were so many different ways to get there and tons of side-quests, goodies, and secrets. Something like Black Ops is very one-and-done. Once you play it, you’ve pretty much seen everything. The older generation seemed to have a lot of memorable, creative ways to handle things.

That being said, some older games are just ****-hard. I don’t care what you say — Battletoads, Rockman and Forte, etc — they can make ANY gamer of ANY age weep.

But really, the evolution of gaming is business driven. It’s all about figuring out better ways to monetize things.

In large part, things have moved a lot towards online play. Back in the day, I had to tie up my phone line just to play Red Alert or Duke Nukem 3D with someone. Gaming consoles like the SNES/N64/PSX (let alone the limited online capabilities of PC multiplayer) weren’t integrated with the Internet like the PS3, Wii, and XBox 360 are today. Gaming’s so much more accessible now.

Nowadays when you buy games like Black Ops or MW2 or Halo, you breeze through an easy single player mode and then you spend most of your time playing others online. That’s ultimately where the money is, and so that’s how games will be built. There’s less money to be made in making something too hard in single player mode. You don’t want people spending months trying to beat it when they could be online instead. At the same time you don’t want to simply do away with single player altogether (it’s great fun and you’ll experience plenty of spillover effect, and you also don’t neglect your market). The goal is to move people to multiplayer as soon as possible.

When we were young, had time, and were faced with limited online gaming access, we could therefore we could get away with having plenty of insanely hard platformer games that tried to kill us at every turn possible. That sort of dynamic just doesn’t seem to play out as well in today’s gaming climate.

With a broader market, you’re also going to have more unskilled gamers than skilled, so you have to adjust. Usually, MOST people that begin the first level of your game don’t make it to the very end. The return on investment experiences diminishing returns as you start to look at money spent towards the endgame. So in order to make that ROI worth it, you either have to shorten the game or make it easier so more people reach the ending.

The arcades have an influence here, too. Tons of games were also ported to the physical arcades, which were designed to be tough so you’d spend more money to continue. But with the increased access in home gaming, there’s less incentive to pay to play games in the arcade when you can get the same experience at home (while also being able to play others).

So yeah, I find the lack of difficulty depressing. I wouldn’t say that gamers are getting dumber, necessarily. I would say that the frontier of gaming itself has changed to become more profit-minded such that there is less reason to make your single-player game insanely tough. I just get annoyed when I am playing Black Ops and someone is literally telling me "Shoot the lock ahead!" as a lock glows gold and makes my next moves all the more obvious. There's no mystery or headscratching involved when the game is practically its own walkthrough. Black Ops is nice to look at... but I can't explore it very much. It's pretty much "Kill everything here, move into next area, watch scripted event, repeat." Snore.