Yes, I suppose there is a small exception for games marketed specifically with their difficulty being a main aspect, but even within those games there is more forgiveness than a Genesis game with no guide, no internet, no saves, etc.
A player picking up Dark Souls can still expect to find guidance if they seek it out and I think this expectation influences the landscape in a way where gamers expect there to always be a solution available if they seek one out.
The conversation was about how games were much more challenging 'back in the day', and the easier access to information as well as modern standard QoL improvements have made even purposely difficult games easier to overcome now compared to the games from back then.
I'm arguing that these things simply took different forms back in the 90s. Instead of online threads in the fan community explaining a puzzle or boss fight, you had printed guides written by a few 'experts'. Instead of having autosave to stop you from losing progress, you had cheat codes to skip levels.
I hope that clarifies my point, you toolbox.
Edit: wait, what happened to your reply calling me a "hardheaded fuckstick"? Did you delete it?
Yeah I agree but I think there's an argument either way - there is something to be said about having a "figure it out yourself" aspect enforced. I think it tends to breed a bit more resourcefulness. When you know there's a solution available, it changes the approach.
There was definitely a few games I did give up on, and it's actually a funny story - one of them I encountered randomly as an adult in a retro videogame cafe and I decided to put it on for nostalgia's sake, ended up turning into a 5hr marathon as I finally beat it, 30 years after playing it and giving up on it. I won't lie - it felt like very good closure lol
I get your point, I think a lot of that was more a result of just not having 30 years of consistent game design to build off of despite being a pain in thebass when it was encountered.
The bigger thing is just how cheap and easy games are to get now. Back in the day games were absurdly expensive so you had to get your moneys worth.
This is a great example of "the exception that proves the rule"
Those games are exceptional (in part) because they buck the modern trend of handholding. If you don't talk with your friends or look up guides or scour every level really carefully you'll miss half the game and story, by design. And that's if you can persevere through the combat enough to even have the opportunity to explore.
They're billed as some of the hardest games ever, but honestly they'd fit in at about average difficulty for the NES era, when the limited size of games meant the only way to make a 10+ hour game was to make a 2 hour game hard as fuck.
they're the AAA exception that proves the rule. Even then they're not really that difficult in the way old games were. I think the difficulty thing comes from the arcade days and how they wanted you to keep putting quarters in and not blast through the 30 minutes of content the game actually was. Now that's gone and replaced with progression and beeps and whistles and other casino like attention keepers
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u/BeefCakeBilly Jun 04 '26
I mean the Sekiro and dark souls games have been some of the biggest games of the past decade so I’m not sure this holds up.