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While some of the games given as examples, like Dark Souls and Dwarf Fortress, are memed as being hard, they're really not that hard.
I played Dark Souls after dealing with the far harder Monster Hunter games (the newer games have eased the difficulty curve but get even harder towards the end) before, so it never really felt all that difficult. Nioh also scales up the hurt to far higher levels than Dark Souls, but also gives you the tools necessary to do those fights if you get gud, which is where Elden Ring's last few bosses fall apart. Most Fromsoft Soulsborne games tend to have several mechanics that allow you to trivialize most of the content even if the standard guy swinging big stick will struggle. Usually something involving magic, blocking or parrying.
Dwarf Fortress is not hard. It's just convoluted. You can stick 7 dwarfs in a hole with a tiny patch to grow food and they'll live in happy mediocrity forever. Any difficulty comes from the player trying to do a 'stupid dwarf trick' or RNG sometimes sending an indestructible syndrome-spreader your way.
Stephen's Sausage Roll is by far the hardest puzzle game I played. Nothing else warrants mention in that genre.
And to highlight something in a genre that interests me, the Codemasters F1 games are both the most "mainstream" sim racing titles, but also by far the hardest. Sure, you could whack on all the assists and drop the difficulty to 0 and cruise your way to victory, but the baseline car without assists is one of the the most difficult cars to drive in all of sim racing. So difficult, in fact, that actual F1 drivers criticized it as being unreasonably difficult to drive and unrealistically prone to spinning out of corners. The AI is also extremely aggressive relative to most older racing games. Driving the same car in any other series, even more "hardcore" simulators, is a far more relaxed experience. I believe the 2023 version of the game improved, however this. Similarly, their contemporary "Dirt Rally" games are so much harder than the old "Colin McRae" titles that they might as well be a separate genre. Sim Racing has long had a bit of a problem with a hard=realistic perception, and generally improved simulation has lead to easier driving, not harder.
Dark Souls is like a 6 or 7 on the hardness scale out of 10. It's sometimes challenging but doesn't scale up too far once you've figured out whatever particular gimmicks are useful in the exact title. Monster Hunter and Nioh are more like an 8 because they do in fact keep scaling up in difficulty. Dwarf fortress is maybe a 3 or 4 once you've gotten around the controls because, aside from deliberately challenging yourself, the core gameplay is easier than most city/colony builders. I'll give Stephen's Sausage Roll and the racing games I mentioned 9, because they hit hard and never stop hitting. And the hardest mainstream games tend to be rhythm games on their highest difficulties for the sheer level of mechanical execution they expect. You cannot fire up Through the Fire and Flames on expert and clear it without at least 100 hours of prior practice in either Guitar Hero or in very similar games.
Old games are rarely hard. Contemporary gaming is harder at a baseline for at least some of these reasons:
Whenever I have played an older game that I thought at the time was difficult, I soon learned it was not. I was just younger. To give an example of something I recently replayed, Pikmin's 30 day time limit sounds like a challenge, and my memory of the game was that it was a serious threat. When I replayed it, I beat the game in 11 days, and the time limit was totally irrelevant. Roller Coaster Tycoon is another old game I recently played, and is utterly trivialized by using high ride prices (often 10x the default) and advertising, something the game doesn't clearly explain the impact of but once you know about them it's GG. There are exceptions, like Battletoads and Ghosts 'n' Goblins still being difficult, but these were the exception then just as very hard games remain the exception now.
Some games I remember as at least reasonably difficult (>=6/10): Ninja Gaiden series, Castlevania series, Mega Man series, early Zelda titles, early Mario titles, Mickey Mania, Gothic I-II(NotR), Mafia, System Shock 2. These are all proper games without an insane amount of artificial difficulty. It feels like most modern games on "normal" are like 3/10 at most. I think you are missing one important reason for why games are less difficult today: The market is much broader, implying that the average skill level is much lower.
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Have you ever finished Battletoads? Or Ninja Gaiden NES?
(Of course you did say "rarely", but those are very well known games.)
Battletoads (which I mentioned) and Ninja Gaiden are the exceptions that prove the rule. And still, if you were to task someone with completing Battletoads and completing Guitar Hero III, I know which one I'm betting on being finished first.
Assuming you're not asking for expert difficulty, I'll happily take the other side of that bet. Even if you are, I'll still probably take it - Through the Fire and the Flames is not a required song to beat the game. I think you're underselling the difficulty of older games, and I'm somebody who has cleared TtFatF on expert (barely - Rock Band 3 has much tighter timing and sells the song as DLC I can't do it there, so I'm not a god or anything). Battletoads is mean. Turbo Tunnel is called out as impossible even though it really doesn't take more than 10 minutes of practice if that (the final stretch literally just alternates up and down rapidly), but it gets so much worse later.
I'm highly confident that the average difficulty of reaching the end credits without modifying difficulty settings of a popular game from the 90s was higher than the same in the 2010s, though I can't find any studies saying so.
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That's true for you, and people like you. IE, male gamers with good reaction speeds and visual logic skills. It might not be true for journalists, especially the sort of woman who writes gaming journalism feminism articles.
I was watching a livestreamer recently, and she was trying to beat one of the old mario games. And just was dying, over and over again, on what seemed to be pretty simple stages. She didn't seem to learn or improve, she just kept making the same mistakes and only progressed by random luck. So at first I was tempted to feel smug. But then I thought, she's doing something I could never do- she's got a big crowd of people watching her, she's somehow connecting with them, and convincing them to give her money. That's a much more powerful skill than making mario jump onto platforms! But people really are different.
Yes, and a game that's an 8 or 9 on the scale is still even harder than dark souls for journalists too. There's no point cramming most of gaming into the top 3 points on 10 point scale just because the average Journalist is performing at a 3/10 level.
Also, for what it's worth, my visual reaction speeds aren't particularly great. I am terrible at fighting games and fast-paced shooters. Sim Racing is something I'm good at because reaction speeds matter a lot less than you'd expect, precision and repetition is more important, and we get the advantage of force feedback.
I have previously heard a variety streamer describe why they sometimes seem like inattentive amateurs on stream even if they're good at their go-to games. Their mental capacity is focused more on audience interaction than getting to grips with a new game.
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It's still a 6 or a 7, she's just unable to beat anything that's higher than a 2.
Set the goals in advance, otherwise they're meaningless. She may be winning at the game of fame and fortune, she still sucks at Mario.
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I think the hardest aspect of Dark Souls is "figuring out what to do to make it easy". Rarely is the wise thing to do to mash your head against a wall, at least until you start getting near the end. Early on, there are almost always alternate avenues you can explore that make things a lot easier. I think you could chalk this up to "challenge" as well, knowing where and how to seek out better opportunities. But it also introduces an element of luck. Someone who gets it in their head that they've figured the game out while missing key details about kindling and stats and weapon upgrades will have a really rough time.
In that particular case, this is only another argument against difficulty-setting. The tools are there, you just have to know when to go do other stuff. Sucks if you miss an ember though.
Sekiro, on the other hand, almost never offers these kinds of pathways or any opportunities for confusion, and really is quite challenging no matter what you do.
This seems to be my time to keep recommending Viva La Dirt League videos on the topic 😁
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Well, this challenges a lot of my preconceptions. I'm kind of 50/50 on it. Like, if I take Doom for instance, the original on standard difficulty, with modern ASWD and mouselook controls, is trivially easy. When I was a kid, playing with the default controls that practically had you moving like a tank, I think holding the alt key to strafe, it was borderline impossible. I exclusively played with cheats I found it so punishing at 10 years old.
With the original Warcraft, most of the difficulty IMHO came from the primitive controls. Warcraft II improved on them enough that I didn't find it too severe a challenge with respect to that at least. Starting with Starcraft, despite the group size being limited to 12 units, it's fine IMHO. On recent playthroughs, I did notice that the campaign in Warcraft II seems like more of a challenge, and I found myself actually running out of resources, and not really getting 2nd or 3rd tries if an assault failed. Starcraft by comparison had a campaign that was relatively easier, with more plentiful resources and a less aggressive AI, that seemed willing to let you recover from mistakes until you got it.
But I don't think you can directly compare multiplayer games. How "hard" a competitive game is will always be contingent on the players involved. Likewise, I'm not sure I consider the sort of "difficulty" that hinges on whether you have access to a wiki or not actual difficulty. Looking up what OP strategy works on a boss isn't that much different from the sorts of moon logic puzzles that eventually killed point and click adventure games, and which most gamers rejected as being artificial "difficulty". It's not difficulty, it's just bad design.
That said, there are hard games from back then which still hold up. I find NES and SNES era Mario games just as difficult as I always did. Lately I've been stretching outside of my gaming comfort zone and throwing a credit into the original arcade Gradius from time to time. It felt like a big achievement when I was able to semi-reliably get to level 3.
TV Tropes becomes helpful here.
Old games were full of this stuff.
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NES and SNES era Mario games had something most of their contemporaries lacked. They actually controlled well and had good visual clarity, setting the standards for pretty much all later platformers with the degree of momentum and mid-air control offered. This lets the gameplay itself be the challenge, instead of wresting with controls.
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