LogInAre games becoming easier or it's us who's changing?
Bethesda
I'm sure there are tons of "old-school" gamers who complain about modern games becoming easier every day, fondly remembering the time when you had to actually read quests to figure out where to find that lost NPC or a shiny treasure. Nowadays, you have hundreds of markers on the map and can safely skip dialogues without worrying about missing something.
But is it such a bad thing? Would people even want to go back to a more complicated gaming era? The Elder Scrolls Online director Matt Firor doesn't believe so. In his opinion, players have less patience for being lost now, and few would play Morrowind-style games with no hints to hold their hand.
"If you play that right now – there is no compass, no map, literally the quests are like 'go to the third tree on the right and walk 50 paces west'," Firor told Rock Paper Shotgun. "And if you did that now, no one would play it. Very few people would play it. So now you need to give them hints and clues, and because nobody wants to really devote that much time to problem solving. Like they want to go and be told the story, or enter or interact with another player, or interact with an NPC."
While Firor loves Morrowind, he thinks its storytelling techniques are "a little out of date for the type of gamers that we have now, where they're not all hardcore, they're not all PC or generation-one console diehards." Now, developers have to take care of both "hardcore" players and those who don't have much time to play.
"You can see this balancing act in the forthcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows, which opts for a looser quest format where players can narrow down the vicinity of a target by eavesdropping on NPCs."
Ubisoft | Assassin’s Creed Mirage
I am one of those players who enjoy the challenge of figuring out my next steps, but I can totally see why many players would not appreciate having to think for too long. Life is too short to spend it reading quests, after all, but it would be great to have an option to "level up" the difficulty in this way, although I suppose it would take developers twice as long to release the game.
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