Are modern video games too easy?

It's not that they're easy (Halo Legendary says hi) they just got incredibly short and without much internal value.

Ocarina of Time took months to complete and by the end of it I felt completely immersed. I could relate to the tragedy, the love, and the sense of duty in it. There were real themes the makers of the game were trying to convey but today that doesn't seem to be apparent.

There's no point to their art anymore. Therefore it's not an art. It's just mindless entertainment.

I worked in the games industry. It became like any other industry. It doesn't exist for your enjoyment. It exists to sell games. Make a game difficult in the past and it'd be popular because it was a challenge. Make a game difficult now and people just shrug and give up. Nobody wants to expend actual effort or thought. It's all about the quick win and the instant gratification. All media panders to this and has done for years. As attention levels drop, they make the wins ever quicker. I don't believe ADD is physiological. I believe it's environmental. It's an illness of capitalism, sitting alongside obesity, depression and anorexia nervosa.

i remember when a last boss was the hardest boss,now the last boss is just for show,but i think difficulty was one of the only ways to make it fun back then,now we spend so much time on graphics and complex cutscenes instead of actual gameplay

Or translated in a language everyone can understand:
He misses tetris,super mario,centipede and pong.
I think the trouble is modrrn developers are focusing too much on the graphic side and neglecting the pretty much everything else. I could play fallout 3 with my my eyes closed,earplugs in my ears and my hands tied behind my back,most videogames I played recently pretty much just play themselves. I mean,it is all about doing the same few things over and over again,follow the arrow telling you where to go,listen to whatever the guy is saying,you can actually avoid doing it cause it does nit really matter,follow the arrow again,load your weapon,shoot at him shoot at that,shoot some more,take this,take that,follow the arrow,over and over again till you reach the end of it and go:hurra!I spent five hours straight of my day pushing a couple of little levers and a some buttons repetitively and that makes me feel so accomplished.Now I am bored,I am not tired,my butt is sore,what could I do:I will watch some porn and jackoff then wait for my lil friends to come visit me so we can play videogames for another three hours.What an happy interesting day.
Even if there are one thousand different options you could use,you just never do,and if you do the game becomes unplayable and kind of extremely annoying.That is why lots of people are going for the Wii. So they can at least pretend like they are doing one of these repetitive activities like playing tennis and feel like they did not actually waste their time.Then you all end up needing some serious psychotherapy,some medications that will make you go fatter than you already are,and feeling depressed cause besides these three dumbasses who come to your house to play videogames and jackoff together while dreaming about screwing girls you will never get,you got no other real friends,only facebook ones,and you are wondering about what to do to lose some weight.

Yeah,they are too easy.

Games are part of the entertainment industry and I'm tired of people saying old games were better just because they were harder.

Does anyone ever say new games are better with all the controls, character designs, plots, or environments? Has anyone ever thought that with these fantastic plots the designers actually wanted the gamers to finish the game not mull around level 8. Yes old games were harder but those were arcade games, you paid a quarter for three turns. Modern games are console games and you don't want to pay $40 for something you can't win on a console you paid $200 for.

It's not today's games, it's games in general.
For instance, Sonic R from 1997 was basically finished within one hour of playing, while Final Fantasy VII took tons of hours to even get halfway.

While I am too young and to new of a gamer to have played those games on the actual consoles, I have played them on the PC. And all I can say is, damn! Those things are way to difficult for me. However, I do appreciate their value and I like them anyway. It seems like back then, ALL gamers must've been hardcore. There didn't really appear to be any "casual games." That is, except for Kirby. :3

In today's games, I think it really depends on what you're playing. Most games are obviously easier than old-school games, but the difficulty is just enough to keep you challenged. However, it really depends on what kind of games you're looking at. Nowadays, there are both hardcore and causal games. Kirby's Epic Yarn is super easy, while Super Meat Boy is insane. IMO, most games hit the sweet spot in the middle.

Hell I still play games from "back then"

my fav game is so old-school the biggest video effect is color text.

Yep. MUDs FTMFW. ;-)

Nothing beats a good Multi-user dungeon
especially when some of them have been running for darn near 20 years straight. :)

I think in the past making games hard was the only variety that could be added with the limited technology.

Now games can be story driven and have a lot more depth. If you are playing a story-driven RPG and die at a certain point multiple times it ruins the flow of the story and the game and makes the experience less fun IMO.

Games back then weren't hard because you weren't good at them, it was hard because you could only press punch in a certain direction and the enemies just seemed to not get touched and you always got killed for unexplained reasons.

I think today games are easy but when you start a game on (expert, god mode, hardcore, whatever name the company came up with) now it's challenging and hard. That's how I play my games. I must say, Dead Space 2 hardcore mode, is serious business.

Many games today have are made to be played by anyone and that's great. There's something for everyone.

It really depends on what games you buy, and what your gaming ability is.

It's up to the true PC gamers to search through all the new, pathetic excuses for games and play old ones, and very occasionally, new ones that are actually challenging/unique/have a deep storyline or tactical online play.

Like with any industry, those who want substance, balls and depth are shunned and left on the fringes. You think game developers care about real gameplay? They cater to the masses, which means they focus more on graphics (which, on consoles are mainly just over-the-top bloom effects).

Developers that I actually like, and who make challenging games:

Valve (nuff said)
Blizzard (StarCraft, Diablo, World of Warcraft)
Edios Montreal (Deus Ex: Human Revolution)
Mojang (Minecraft)
IO Interactive (Hitman: Blood Money)
EA DICE (if Battlefield 3 fails then I will hate them though)
Ubisoft (back in the old days with Splinter Cell 1-3)

Lots of old games were hard for the wrong reasons like bugs, bad control schemes, no map etc. Lots of old games would have been much easier if they had just been done correctly. I have a few old games that I love (descent 1&2, Half life, LoZ OoT, etc.) but I enjoy modern games for the great graphics and voice acting. BTW, if you want a difficult modern game there is always Halo on legendary and Dark Souls.

I said that modern games are too easy, by and large (Twilight Princess ring a bell?), but I also think, because video games are also a business, that video games in the past, for lack of modern technology and graphics and AI and all-around immersion, straight-up, old-fasioned difficulty was one of the best and only ways to bequeath play and replay value to a video game. This was how they made a game take time. Now (even though Skyrim, I would argue, is disappointingly easy in the face of Morrowind, which didn't index encounters to the player's level), games can be long and immersive enough to have some serious entertainment value, and the emphasis on sheer difficulty isn't as strong.

Ok if they're to easy than you are a hardcore mother fucking gamer!

Really depends on the game you buy, not all modern games on easy. Ever play the horror puzzle game Catherine? Even on Easy difficulty, try not to pull your hair out.

I don't know I just play Starcraft.

I suck at them, but I still love Assassin's Creed.

While games are more accessible and some are a lot easier by nature, I am very happy with games now.

In old games I used to be stuck at certain points with almost no health and this would force me to restart the level etc.

New games are easier, but at the same time it comes with the technology. Plus, there are different settings for you hardcore people. I don't find Legendary on Halo fun, but you might. Options FTW.

Most games nowadays are easy to finish, but have easter eggs, hidden areas and collectables that continue to challenge the hardcore gamer but allow casual gamers to feel satisfaction.

Demon souls is hard, even harder on the second playthrough, the hardest game ive played on in a while is dead space 2 on hardcore, your only allowed 3 saves and there arn't any checkpoints, i swear it is freakin impossible, 1 mistake and you waste 4 hours of your time.

Well I think it depends on the game, like the type of game. But really if you're looking for a game to be easy, I think you should stick to Mario and stuff, in the nicest possible way :P