Sorry, I wasn't trying to springboard. I was saying (poorly) that games like God of War, even with their difficulty slider cranked, aren't "hard" in the way that older games were. The difficulty slider is basically just an HP-and-damage dial; the fundamentals that make modern games "easy" are still there. My point is that in many modern games, the cost of failure is minimal.
Games that are unfair just to be frustrating are just horribly designed, no doubt. But, modern games are frequently guilty of reducing the cost of failure in order to keep from frustrating players, sometimes at the cost of one of the biggest rushes in gaming - overcoming something that is genuinely hard-but-surmountable, which requires awareness and timing and cunning and careful use of resources.
I like easy games; I really enjoy the experience of traipsing through a story without too much impediment. But I also really enjoy the experience of getting my butt handed to me over and over because I got impatient or sloppy, and the feeling of accomplishment when I overcome that. Dark Souls is among the best modern examples of that sort of game - it's brutally uncompromising, but you're given all the tools you need. The combat design is extremely precise, but in return it asks for a lot of precision from the player, and it harshly punishes failure; in this way, it's very reminiscent of older games, rather than belonging to the new breed of games where falling off a ledge respawns you on that ledge, or fighting a boss has four different phases, with a checkpoint at each phase.
I'm not advocating for the game being a jerk to the player just to frustrate them. That's never fun. All I'm saying is that the difficulty difference between old games and new games is in how they punish failure, rather than where the HP and damage sliders are set.
Games that are unfair just to be frustrating are just horribly designed, no doubt. But, modern games are frequently guilty of reducing the cost of failure in order to keep from frustrating players, sometimes at the cost of one of the biggest rushes in gaming - overcoming something that is genuinely hard-but-surmountable, which requires awareness and timing and cunning and careful use of resources.
I like easy games; I really enjoy the experience of traipsing through a story without too much impediment. But I also really enjoy the experience of getting my butt handed to me over and over because I got impatient or sloppy, and the feeling of accomplishment when I overcome that. Dark Souls is among the best modern examples of that sort of game - it's brutally uncompromising, but you're given all the tools you need. The combat design is extremely precise, but in return it asks for a lot of precision from the player, and it harshly punishes failure; in this way, it's very reminiscent of older games, rather than belonging to the new breed of games where falling off a ledge respawns you on that ledge, or fighting a boss has four different phases, with a checkpoint at each phase.
I'm not advocating for the game being a jerk to the player just to frustrate them. That's never fun. All I'm saying is that the difficulty difference between old games and new games is in how they punish failure, rather than where the HP and damage sliders are set.