IMO, games feel easier to us because we have experience. I'm pretty sure most of use at least grew up on the snes. Back then, games were made with gamers in mind. It was a test of skill and also the system limitations made games hard. Castlevania was our generation's Dark/Demon Souls. We use our past experience when we play newer games and that's why they feel easy...because we've already done something similar before. We know that pits will kill you, spikes might kill you, and duck to avoid some projectiles. This is especially true with Zelda puzzles. A lot of the puzzles are reused in some way, like moving the ice block across a frozen lake to a certain hole.

Games were hard back then because they were new to us. The more games we play, the more experiences gets added up and the more skill we accumulate. We use our past experiences to play newer games. You can play Bioshock Infinite like Left4dead or play MGR:Revengeance like DMC or Bayonetta. I played Ace Combat 5 like Starfox and had no issues. f course this doesn't work for everything, but it does work for most games.

With the casual craze, developers have to tone their games down to appeal to the wider audience. Casuals outnumber gamers and they'd at least want some of the casual crowd to buy their game.

Games feel easier because WE (gamers) are better at them.
Games are made easy because they want to sell more copies to the casual market, which does outnumber gamers by a lot.

Sums it up for me.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

I would say it has a lot to do with the sheer amount of checkpoints in games nowadays. There are some games that are challenging if you ramp up the difficulty, but even with the added challenge of increased difficulty, all the checkpoints in these games makes the game easier. And if you die while playing a level, you usually don't have to go far before you get back to where you previously died-- especially in Open World games because the game Autosaves after you do virtually anything, like Entering a building or Buy something from a store, and you can save manually anytime you want.

Also I think the absence of previous 'Old School' features like only having a certain amount of Lives has alleviated the difficulty level too, because you can die an infinite amount of times in virtually every game now -- whereas in most Old School games you had only a certain amount of Lives, and there wasn't things like Regenerating Health in almost every big game either like it is now.

I guess as Gaming became more and more mainstream with each passing console gen. it's slowly became more tailored to appeal to wider audiences -- which probably explains why stuff like Regenerating Health and Countless Checkpoints have become the norm.

Its the same thing with online games to.. Just see how it went with Socom us navy seals. Went from hardcore million selling series, to a casual noob friendly Uncharted/COD hybrid that failed.

And COD + BF has ruined the shooter genre alot, all shooters are respawn casual noob friendly shit now. I WANT A HARDCORE TACTICAL 3PS SOCIAL USER CREATED CUSTOM RANKED ROOMS SERVERS SHOOTER AGAIN !

***** this generation !

They put out another cod that is what happened!!!

BRO PLAY DARK SOULS FOR A CHALLENGE OR raise the difficulty from easy!!!!

Tell me again how the multiplatform strategy was supposed to fix everything. Look at your results and compare them to Nintendo, which keeps thriving with exclusives. Your loyal fans are gone. And let’s not forget the pile of IPs you purchased only to let them rot.

The worst thing is this is down from last years numbers/expectations which was down from the previous years numbers/expectations. You think about how long “down” has been a consistent part of the communication and you realize those subscriptions are what’s holding that boat together. The price cut of gamespass is still a price raise in a string of price raises. They are trying to use players to offset the missing revenue. Now call of duty is out of gamespass, which is literally WHY they bought the company. To draw people to the subscription. They realized they missed a boatload of money and that wasn’t sustainable. Now you pay for it like you would have if they never bought the company… so why buy the company? Mind you those billions still need to be paid back. Yeah it gives you a chance to say we make the biggest FPS… but the internal conversations must be brutal at high level on topics that really matter. Like revenue. Profitability. And ROI for the shopping spree.

Is this like the 10th quarter in a row they're down 33% on hardware how is that even mathematically possible. You would think their mediocrity would Plateau