I recently beat Elden ring all remembrances which gave me some TROUBLE considering I had to beat melania. also I forced myself to do it without summoning spirit ashes or using great runes lol. Just discovered final fantasy as well your channel and have been playing FFX and I really love it. You make good vids man Idk how you don't have more subs! anyway you got a sub from me, keep going strong bro :) cheers
Your last point about respecting your time is interesting cause that's definitely true for the large majority of single player releases but im feeling like more and more AAA releases are coming out and want to be the ONLY game you play all the time with their grindy battle passes, dailys, limited time events, rotating store ect..
I've dropped games for doing that stuff. I do play Fortnite, but I've never had issues getting the BP finished up to 140, where the actual unique rewards end, and I don't often reach 200, not because I don't have time, but because I don't always care about the super styles. I played Mighty Doom, the phone game, and it is just too grindy, which killed some of my motivation to keep playing the game. I just don't want to work a second job as a game, I want to play it and have fun with challenges that encourage me to try out other weapons or what not.
Interesting anecdote from my own gaming past. I'm 37, so I was a child of the SNES or Sega Megadrive (genesis) era. A big game for me and my friends was Sonic 2. There was one kid who swore that if you collected all the chaos emeralds from the special zones, you could turn Sonic yellow, and give him the ability to fly. No one believed him, but also none of us were able to get all of the emeralds. Lo and behold, and as any fan of the game will know, this is indeed possible. Collecting all of the emeralds grants the player the "Super-Sonic" ability. The charm was that back then, there was no way to confirm or deny any of these gaming myths, so you never knew whether you were chasing shadows or actually on to something real. It kept it interesting, magical and always fun.
I think the games were more expensive and less easily accessible than now. Also those arcade machines were made to get all of your coins lol. But it's really all about the commitment and limitation. Many old game devs had to be very creative to work around hardware limitations, so the games were awesome and kids had less games (well at least i did) so they played them over and over. I remember when my dad got me a PS2 with 4 games one of which was Deus Ex which had english voiceover and all text in italian lol. Me being a 12yo from Ukraine who had barely started to understand english I really did fall in love with the game and wanted to understand more of it, which drove me to learn 2 foreign languages. Good times.
This is the reason why I find myself going back to older games or hands down games. Because trust me the way that modern game is constructed, I usually find it boring.
@@theguyinthere This is a great point, and one I think Nintendo knew really well; hence the Nintendo Power BS. The kids in the know would of course still share, but it guaranteed a social interaction if you couldn't afford the mags. If you could, suddenly you were one of the "it" crowd. Granted, the ostracization of nerds at the time was still very much a thing. So you were only kool to a select group of people.
The hardest modern game for me is Sekiro Shadows Die Twice, but I enjoyed it enough that I didn't abandon it. There are plenty of games I just didn't have the commitment for that may be harder The hardest games of all time I think are the NES originals like Ninja Garden, Castlevania Startropics etc. Some of which I couldn't even beat with a save state option 🤷
@@diogenes3300 Eldin Ring is a harder game if you resist a lot of things the game offers you like spirit summons, level grinding and magic spamming. Sekiro excludes these strategies for the most part. The stats cap in Sekiro is very stubborn and grinding for more strength is not even worth the time. Special abilities are only meant to be used a handful of times and rarely enough to control an entire boss battle. Lastly, there are no summons in Seki and just like in Ghost of Tsishima, Katana is your only main weapon.
@@diogenes3300In a way it is. Sekiro wants you to finish fights in the intended way most of the time and allows the use of only one weapon, so you're forced to learn the timings and patterns to win without any "easy out" options like summoning help
I would say ER is harder, but it's hard to the point of being unfun at times, and I say this as someone who beat it twice and fought every boss. Sekiro is hard but felt fairer for the most part, being more execution driven. ER lets you break it by using summons and magic, a luxury not granted by Sekiro. You just need to get good, grinding to improve your skill rather than stats. I think it took about 20 hours for me to just kill Genechiro for the very first time, then on my second playthrough I got the best ending in about 12 hours. @@diogenes3300
I was forged in the fires of 80's and 90's gaming. Game difficulty can keep your mental game higher for longer and improve your ability to problem solve and make quicker decisions. If I am elected president I will make The Souls Series and Battle Toads part of the curriculum.
@@asteria9963 To each their own. However multiple studies have actually proven games DO in fact make you better at life. Problem solving skills, reading comprehension, and pattern recognition are often improved through various types of video games. I'd avoid making absolute statements as fact.
Games were harder back then most likely because of the Arcades. The way for an Arcade to get money out of you is to make you die constantly to spend more money. This trend also went to the home consoles like the PS1. By the start of the PS2 era games were more accessible and not has hard. That's why with the PS1 you had lot's of games that had the "lives" mechanic.
Honestly games that are too easy I feel doesn’t respect my time, because I feel like I’m not really accomplishing anything, and it feels like I’m wasting my time. I honestly feel that a lot of these “conveniences” are just taking away any challenge. The obscure puzzles are definitely a thing of the past, but I find quicksave functions to literally just take away challenges. Sure there’s such thing as poor save area locations, but that is more due to the faults of the game. And I think that’s the main issue here. Most quality games that weren’t trying to emulate the arcade experiences tend to have passwords and saves in the right spots and unlimited continues. So I don’t think it was a matter of a sign of the times, it was more just poor game design.
Being too easy is definitely it's own kind of problem! I actually kind of love the brutal difficulty of the NES. It just really sucks when you die and lose it all 🤣
The point about the time is very true. I grew with ps1 resident evil. When the resident evil 4 og came out on ps2 i didnt considered an resident evil. Fast pacing, you can save it freely, you just had to move forward so no need to backtracking. Didnt felt like a resident evil. I played tho and liked. The times had changed but i didnt at that time. It was another console so the game had to be different. The aim was another generation wich saw games different. Now that i had played the resident 4 remake i see how much that game was not made for me. But like you said, im older now, i understand why the changes were made. Great video bro.
I dont agree, a lot of old video games were not difficult, but frustrating. The only thing I agree with, is that a lot of new games do have too much handholding.
I think a lot of the difficulty of older games is the frustration of dying frequently and then losing progress. Games today may not be easier but they don't punish you as hard when you die.
Great video! Funny that the topic of my next video is difficulty in games, haha. I see lots of people bring up old games difficulty as a good thing. Even if sometimes that’s the case, and there is an argument to be made that some games are too hand holdy, the difficulty was certainly not fair and frustrating at times. As a fan of harder games, I definitely appreciate modern game design and games that can be hard, but fair, like the souls games.
As an adult, the conveniences are necessary! haha but it's true that some of the stakes feel lowered. As a kid, getting to a boss fight was a big deal because you knew that you could lose it all!
@@gnosis_gaming Definitely! Just look at Resident Evil games or the original dead space, part of the fear of death was knowing that you can loose progress if you die before that save point or typewriter, making the overall experience scarier because of the high stakes
I nearly 100% cleared it with basically no trouble *there is a higher difficulty but it felt like tedium rather than rewarding as your allies drop like flies.* All the characters are busted pretty much.. They added some nice interactions between characters that previously had none, but they could have done more with that I believe. They made the world map fun! I'd buy it again in a heartbeat, but it's not perfection.@@gnosis_gaming
Just don't get me started on some NES games - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Dam(n) mission - Terminator 2: Hospital Mission - 8 Eyes: 3rd boss - GIJOE: almost had me quit in the first 60 seconds before I discovered I could go left at the start to collect an extra powerup which allows you to beat the first micro-boss 30 seconds into the game
anyone remember seeing those advertisements for tip hotlines at the back of game booklets? the ones that were like... $1/minute (in 90s money)? i'm not gonna fling any accusations but it does make one wonder if that played a part in the level of difficulty lol
You didn't wreck to PS1 by leaving it on for days. The games were harder, and so was the hardware. Strong games make strong men. Strong men make weak games. Weak Games make Weak men. Weak men Pre-order.
It was often artificial difficulty or jank, but yeah, they were harder, though often in a bad way. Still, there were better games back then regardless.
Was that Megaman Legends?? Mighty morphin power rangers on SNES? Oh man what a throwback...I'm with you - if I were younger I'd be more on a hill to die on about the difficulty curve moving but I've come to appreciate it more :') I just don't have the patience nor time that I had as a kid to replay the same boss fights or even backtrack/reload earlier saves. It's a blessing and a curse. Depends on where you are in life and what you're looking for in games
I be honest I miss how games used to be, no tutorials or auto saves or arrows to points where to go like you a idiot and don't know to run forward lol or not to mention checklists or easy puzzles so even a 3 year old could solve, is why i prefer the ps1!
im still like this today, if a modern game just expects me to play for hours, i rather stop playing it. quicksave should be a must. its not mandatory to use it
in my opinion today's hard games are significantly more enjoyable than old ones because by removing all those annoyances, tediousness and things that noone ever liked, games instead have to focus on giving you an actually fair but still hard challenge rather than relying on all those horrible mechanics for example, if we look at shin megami tensei 5, 4 and 3 you notice that after 3 (nocturne), things started getting a bit more streamlined but the overall difficulty remained somewhat close because they had to adjust for the streamlining of features, however they are slightly easier then you got games like tales of arise which I would say is pretty dang hard while being a modern game lacking all the old game annoyances, but the mechanical skill and new features that old games just couldn't have make up for it so again, in my opinion today's hard games are significantly more enjoyable and interesting
You know, I kind of miss games being super hard. Games giving players childlike wonder and seriousness to the game. I think it's stupid people saying how "It's dated" when it's really just a skill issue. It's why games like MGS or Resident Evil 1 are so rewarding. It's a bit hard, but it makes it so much more worth it when you realize how deep and complex the story is. At least to me. I think this is a generalization though because not all video games in the 90's where that hard either. But there is nothing wrong with liking less challenging games because for a lot of us in the world we aren't hear just to play games to be competitive. We're here to play video games for fun. To kill a bad guy and be a hero. Some of us are grown ass adults who have to follow their non-video game dreams. Just because a video game is hard doesn't mean it's fun. But in the end it's really all about balance.
how is having better accessibility "bad"? it makes the game more accessible, as in, approachable by a wider demographic that would otherwise be unable to play and enjoy the game. Microsoft is literally leading the way in terms of accessibility, especially for people with disabilities. Expanded difficulty options, even those seen effectively as "cheats" by the able-bodied and the neurotypical (infinite dashes in Celeste, for instance), are part of a broader push towards accessibility in the industry. It's pretty good.
@@gdmnsdgl Not every single thing that is made should be made to appeal or even playable to every single type of audience. If a developer has a vision to make their design accessible to people with disabilities than that is awesome and commendable, but you shouldn't FORCE developers to change their artistic visions. That's where you get production line slop that appeals to "everyone" except it ends up really being no one. We can go back to Dark Souls as an example, an "easy mode" would go against pretty much the core of the appeal of the game. The game is the opposite of "accessible" but that isn't a design flaw it is a deliberate design choice.
I strongly disagree that 90s games were particularly hard. In the 90s, everyone thought new games were easy and 80s games were the hard ones. In the 80s, games were often still made with an arcade cabinet mentality, where the idea was the make the game crushingly difficult in order to get you to spend more quarters. That was simply the conventional wisdom about how game difficulty was meant to be tuned. It wasn't until the Fourth Generation when games started to be tuned to more casual players and become more accessible. There is a major difference in difficulty between Zelda 1 and Link's Awakening, between Mario Bros 1 and Super Mario World, or between Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy VI. And when a really hard game DID come out in the 90s, like Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts or Contra III, most of my friends avoided them because they were too frustrating. (This doesn't apply to old PC games from that era, which were often absurdly difficult and impenetrable)
I cannot take anyone who says "Games used to be harder and that's better because..." seriously. You were ten years old, had a far less refined taste in games, and you had virtually unlimited time on your hands. You also only had a small amount of games to play. How can you spout such nonsense with a straight face? It's like saying "Times were better without the internet". I was there, you were there, and we all know how much life sucked 99% of the time. We only dealt with those garbage games because we were bored out of our minds and didn't have the means to flood our brains with fresh experiences every day. The AVGN exists for a reason. Most of them simply weren't good.
@@asteria9963 ok 👌 this video isn’t called ‘games were better…’ it’s called ‘gamers were harder’ and yes, often in bad and annoying ways, as described.
Here's my controversial take, I'm not going to just be subjective, we should be bold instead of always equivicating. Old games were often badly designed, but when they were well designed, the core designs and standards they were built around (no save, lives, levels and cryptic puzzles) were better than MOST of what we have now. Which is why so many of their concepts are emulated by indie games that people respect, and avoided by AAA games that people denigrate. But most indie games are not quite as strong as the classics they pay homage to. I do not care if this is too broad a statement.
@@gnosis_gaming Castlevania 1, it was leaps ahead of its peers, probably only Mario Bros 1 and 3 are as tightly designed for the time. Example, one of the hardest bosses in the game can be beaten with a sub-weapon that makes it easier, but you have to do a different challenge of carrying the sub weapon through the whole level and earn it, there's no cheesing the boss but there is an easier way. CVI for a new player has all the challenge of a Souls game, but it's more condensed and possibly better paced. Possibly. A game like Tomb Raider I is a good example of how they used the core mechanics to become increasingly challenging not only for one game, but over four games, which the new remaster will demonstrate to players soon. The design of Tomb Raider is iterative, TR2 is for experts of the first game, 3 for experts of the second and so on. By contrast each of the games in the survivor trilogy acts as if you have no knowledge of playing the previous title, and only Rise expands the core mechanics in any real way and even then it's mainly by adding stuff instead of refining what's there. And Rise is the same kind of game as lots of other titles, while Tomb Raider classic plays uniquely, with a grid system players got used to over the years, that no other game did. Others include Resident Evil 1 and 2. I'm not actually sure if the remake of 2 is better but I am certain the reason people like it so much is it has the same design as the classic PSX games. Tight spaces, maps that you begin to memorize, increasing momentum as you get better, item management and route planning. At it's core t is the same gameplay even if the combat is deceptively more like modern shooters, you are still essentially choosing whether to dodge a zombie or kill it. I consider most of these games more challenging than a lot of modern games, but I would say once you learn how to play them, they are also stress relieving.
theres 2 kinds of games 1. challenging arcade-like experiences where skill is the factor that makes in engaging 2. literally addictive RNG slot machines, sometimes for real money, where luck and time are the factors
Thats why I pretty much always set my game to the highest difficulty level. With the exception to stuff like Doom Eternalls permadeath modes of course.
@@gnosis_gaming All three. And more.. I love FROM Software games.. Both Niohs and Lies of P (sorry was half asleep when first commenting 😅) to name a few.
Games were made for children and teenagers that were video game players. AKA non casuals. Now games are made almost exclusively for casuals, competing against mobile games for the attention of children and the lowest common denominator young adult.
Older games where made hard to pad out time because how short they often where. Or in Arcade machine games case to eat your money. rpgs padded out its game play time with insane grinds. Like in original dragon quest you spend more time grinding than progressing.
Casual gamers are still gamers and just as valid. The truth is: Games were primitive. The only way to make them fit on a cartridge and have them last longer than a day was to make them difficult to beat.
The issue with your argument is we DO have hard games. Kingdom come deliverance, distance, geometry dash, outward, doom 2016/eternal, etc. Have you heard people talk about most of these games? No, they talk about fromsoft games like dark souls 1/2/3, elden ring, etc. Those are hard because they obscure information from you, introduce intentional frustration, etc. Stuff you describe old games do to be ''hard''. Cause most of the stuff you described, can be found in actually good modern games. Heck look at the fromsoft fanbase. They are so confused, they want their games to be needlessly hard, yet hate ds2 sotfs and even ER which did just that the most. They want a hard game, but don't want a hard mode, challenge/speedruns be rewarded, etc. And I specifically point them out because these guys deflect every single criticism levied against fromsoft's, frankly unrefined game designs. Stuff, older games are made of. Stuff, these ''souls like'' games employ. Because there is a night and day difference between how something like doom or distance approach difficulty, and how fromsoft does. And doom/distance do it better.
Thanks for commenting! Games today are hard in a different way. I think I mentioned in this video games like Baldur's Gate 3. Games in the past were harder because they punished you harder, losing progress permanently, etc.
@@gnosis_gaming Yeah, but there's a difference between tedium and frustration and difficulty. Old games were tedious and frustrating because they obscured information, had crappy controls, crappy camera, etc. A lot of which you can find in fromsoft games, which just creates artificial difficulty. Now, today we do have games which will make you lose your progress forever. Like doom eternal with ultra nightmare, geometry dash, outward's hardest difficulty, KCD. However, they don't obscure information as hard and have a good amount of technical polish. My problem is when people say they want old school difficulty, they don't realize we have that in games today. Its just those games removed as much of the tedium and frustration as possible. People seem to conflate tedium and frustration with difficulty. Which is why you see fromsoft games being popular ''hard games'', despite not being actually that hard.
True enough, though to play Devil's advocate, I think a lot of the difficulty of a game like Castlevania for example is that in order to beat it, you can't just manage to get lucky and beat the bosses -- you have to have a consistently good 'run' over the course of the game in order to make it from beginning to end. You have to be at the top of your game consistently, whereas games today are less punishing if you get lazy and don't pay full attention.@@siyzerix
@@gnosis_gaming What I see, is games today let you pick the difficulty. Do you want brutal difficulty with perfect play? No problem. Want something easier to learn the game? Sure thing. If the default difficulty of doom eternal was master level's at ultra nightmare with minimal tutorials, do you think that would be good game design? Thats basically what these older titles are doing.
Yes, and I used to use trainers and cheat engine just so the game could be reasonably fun to play. Now I don't need them anymore because I can just turn on easy difficulty or something, and enjoy the game the way I want without having to use an external program.There is good challenge like for example BG3 I did not cheat or even think about cheating it's just pure fun even through and through. Then there's other games that just want to waste your time either grinding for EXP/material or practicing some nonsense skill that's only useful in this one game why would I want to do that? they're not fun of course I would cheat to skip them.
Grinding for EXP was extremely normal back in the day. Even as someone who LOVES old JRPGs, it's too much for me now. That's why I didn't replay Shin Megami Tensei 3.
Game design getting fairer and more reasonable is part of the reason why I think the older games were harder, because they were often unfairly difficult.
Games were harder sure but the average difficulty has settled where it has for a good reason. The average difficulty has to be accessible to the majority. We still have plenty of games that are just hard for the sake of the challenge but you have to kind of seek them out now and you know what you are getting into.
I think of it more like natural balance. It just kind of settled here. You get feedback from the general mass about games being hard or easy and things just ended up in the middle where the most players are at. The internet really made this possible also. Back in the old days we couldn't just hit social media to complain LOL
@@Corpsecrank I think it was more common for people back then to buy strategy guides as well. Some games expected you to refer to them or even use information in the instruction manuals.
The old nintendo racket LOL. Sell you the hard game and then also sell you the solution. Again no internet to just point it out to everyone made it possible. Literally a lack of communication keeping consumers in the dark.
