Is this really a good idea? I think I'm really not a good player, but I think a lot of games are becoming much to easy. There are few occassions where I have to stop and think how to overcome an obstacle, because the most obvious approach doesn't work. I can see how it would frusterate casual gamers, who are not used to think beyond the obvious ways a game presents, but is making them "simple" really the answer?
Okay, the industry doesn't care, because everything that makes more sales is good. But I want to have to struggle a bit with my games. I want to be required to figure out how things could work. Of course it's hard to design challanges that are a challange to veteran players, but can be overcome by total noobs with some amount of thinking. But just running down the hallway pressing fire while I watch a (hopefully) great story unfold in cutscenes isn't my kind of great gaming.

Maybe it's finally time to pick "hard" as my custom dificulty.

Has anyone tried the easy setting recently? A retarded, paraplegic ferret could win most games...

Easier probably won't help, but a custom difficulty does sound fun. While quite a bit less complex, casual games have had a custom difficulty for a while. I also believe that parental controls should dictate what's in a game and not the ESRB (or at least I'd like to play around with the idea). It would be cool to see games rated for All instead of for few. Replace guns with snowballs or something, brighten up the colors, remove gore, and instead of people dying maybe they can teleport out or float away or something, but only when the parental controls are set to a younger age. Of course that probably would also trigger an easier setting on the game.

But no, games don't need to be easier, especially not Bethesda games....

Well Tom's title is misleading (and rightly so to hook us in), Brett Douville also says in his article that some games should be kept hardcore, like Ninja Gaiden, which is supposed to provide an "extreme level of challenge".

When applying a difficulty to a game I don't think it can be generalised. Each game should have a specific difficulty, therefore it is hard to pin down an ideal setting. But something like a "traditional" FPS should have options to have the most difficult settings. But a game must never be cheap, whatever difficulty. Start me with only 10hp or whatever but give me the opportunity/tools to be able to survive whatever you throw at me. I think alot of the old games used to be cheap, which is probably partly why we older gamers feel that games are getting easier in most cases.

Oh an example of modern day cheap, the fire armadillo boss in Ninja Gaiden 2 is remarkably lame. If you don't know already, after fighting another boss you then fight this armadillo with no chance of saving. Once you wittle down his HP he blows up. I instinctively tried to run from it but no, I died. So I played through all that again and on the third go I try to block an explosion that looks like some sort of nuke. I win. A ninja's block stops explosions, but only one particular type of explosion - one from a gargantuan volcanic armadillo.

Yeah, let me just apologize in advance for every headline you ever read on Fidgit. Think of those as having nothing to do with the article and everything to do with tricking people into reading the article. I don't particularly like it, but this is the internet we've all created together... :(

Anyway, I think Douville's point -- and where I completely agree with him -- is that playing easier should always be an option. He's not talking about a global adjustment to the difficulty level of all games for all players. He's talking about difficulty settings. And I think that nearly every game could benefit from some idiot-proof way to cruise through most of the content, almost challenge-free. A couple of best-case examples are the no fail mode in the Guitar Hero/Rock Band games, or the easiest difficulty level on BioShock. Those games contain some truly special content, and the developers know enough to make that content available to non-gamers.

A worst case example is Braid! I love the content in that game, and it makes me a little sad that there's no way for less dedicated players to see it.

What do you know, more bad ideas from a bad game developer. Why do we listen to these idiots? Their games say everything we need to know about them. They have nothing to offer - they produce games that are one fifth as immersive, deep, and memorable as games that were coming out 15 years ago.

One time, I found a dollar on the street. There was a string attached, and when I walked around the corner, Tom Chick hit me over the head and made me click on every headline in the past six months.

THAT's how far he's willing to go. :(

Seriously though, I thought Brett Douville made several good suggestions. Locking a player in on one difficulty setting? Bad idea. Most of the time, easy/normal/hard works as labeled, but occasionally you get a game where "normal" is either ridiculously easy or frustratingly hard. Why force a restart just to change that?

I've been playing an MMORPG called Dungeon Runners lately, and DR lets you scale the difficulty from "normal" to "insane". The only downside of an easier setting is less loot from monsters, but I appreciate being able to team up with a newbie and help them out at a lower setting for a while.

What really drives me mad is when a game is just too damn easy and doesn't have a difficulty select. Anyone remember Suikoden on PSX? Here was a title that set gamers on an epic scavenger hunt for 108 player characters, yet it would have been insultingly easy even *without* 100 hours of incidental grinding while you try to figure out how to get the last blacksmith brother join your "entourage."

If Suikoden had a difficulty setting, my enjoyment would have gone up a thousand percent.

The first Star Wars game I ever played was Force Unleashed. I was expecting a great game with at least a mediocre story. Instead, I got a mediocre story with a tough game. I played on easy, and got extremely frustrated when the game's 'in game' directions were not sufficient. If not for having the game's guide book I would have given up.

I feel a game's easy setting should play itself in a sense. There should be stuff to figure out, but the game could have a help system that throws up directional icons or help tips if you spend too long wandering around, unable to find the objectives.

Games could be made with easy without eliminating some challenging aspects. You could even have bonus levels, objectives, etc., that only harder levels show.

My argument is based on the fact that everyone pays the same money to play the game. Even if the gamer is dumb and has no skills, they still payed for the game. They should get a chance to play it through.

I think that they are concentrating too much on the graphic aspec of the games instead of the story in AD&D games. If they put more thought into what the game was about as they put into the graphics it would be great.