Rant: Games Getting Easier?

This rant is inspired by the fact I officially suck at Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. After much dungeon trawling, frustration at forgetting to save my game and even enlisting the help of a friend to get me past that f**king Temple Of The Ocean King again I have become unstuck once more this time at the boss of the Goron dungeon. After a few defeats I was in DS hurling mode, and having actually sat down and thought about it, I have realized that getting pissed off at games is a fairly new phenomenon for me. Back in my N64 gaming days I would have quite happly endured many hair tearing moments to get 100% of a game and see everything, these days not so much. These days a game is rarely as difficult as games used to be “back in the day” and my approach and style of play has gradually changed over the years as a result of this.

 One of the key factors in the changing difficulty of games is the ability to save where you like. Older games years ago only ever let you save on completion of a level/dungeon and it was notoriously difficult to reach that goal sometimes. These days players are used to being able to save wherever they like regardless of what is on screen at present. Over on xbox.com I noticed a number of players recently complaining about Mass Effect purely because you couldn’t save during combat and there weren’t enough auto-saves. To me this highlighted just how spoiled we gamers have become from the ability to save where we like as Mass Effect has an incredibly lenient save system compared to older games and for people to be complaining that it wasn’t good enough was to me completely ridiculous. That said, I am just as guilty of being a fan of lenient save systems I clocked up close to 1000 saves in my recent trek through Oblivion and a good few hundred in Mass Effect aswell, how many times did I save in such titles like Ocarina Of Time a few years ago? A damn site less thats for sure. 

 The key question to ask here (as my girlfriend has just pointed out ) is that “Do we really need to save so often”, due to the power of quick-saves we as gamers have heavily abused the feature. Nearly every time I save in a game I don’t die and have no need to ever use that save again (except for the obligatory overwrite when I save .5 seconds later) because of the quick-save feature I no longer trust my abilities like I used to and the idea of *shock* replaying a section of a game aain becomes a horror unlike no other, bound to get my temper flaring. The power to save where we like has corrupted us no end, we don’t need to save every 5 seconds, we can probably complete most games without saving until the end of each section yet we still save away making games that lack a quick save feature seem far more frustrating and difficult than they actually are. What originally seemed like a great idea has heavily changed the way we play our games and view difficulty of games and that in hindsight is quite a bad thing.

So, have games got easier over the years? No, I don’t think so. What has changed however is a gamers approach to games which is almost entirely down to being accustomed to save so that whatever mistakes we make are instantly cancelled out. In some ways, this is of course a good thing, it has probably brought more casual gamers into gaming and opened the market a little to people who just aren’t that good at games as a while. However it is the way we as gamers have abused the save system that has made the differences between games where you can save anywhere and games where you can’t SEEM more apparent, thus making games that do challenge us to risk battling bosses without saving appear more difficult when really they aren’t.

 Apart from Zelda. Zelda’s hard.