What Happened to Hard Mode?

Posted on Wednesday, June 1 @ 09:32:11 Eastern by Josh_Laddin

If you played video games back in the '80s and early '90s, then you know what “hard” really is. Many of the old NES games didn’t even have multiple difficulties—they just had one, and it was brutal. Remember those impossible jumps in Super Mario Bros. that took hours of practice to master? Or the endless obstacle course of bullets that you had to wade through in Contra, when one hit meant instant death? And of course there’s always the infamous jet bike level from Battletoads…

No doubt about it, they just made games harder back then. Even “easy mode”, on the games that offered it, was often a lot tougher than normal difficulty in modern games today. Of course, that’s not to say that there aren’t hard games out there now. Every now and then, we see a nice change of pace in games that add a truly hard difficulty level, such as the God, Titan, and Chaos modes in the God of War series or “Dante Must Die” in DMC.

And once in a rare while, a game comes along that’s just hard no matter how you play it, like the under-exposed but wickedly awesome Ikaruga or the die-a-million-deaths Demon's Souls. These gems definitely hearken back to the old school games that tested a player’s skill to the limit, and players like me are thankful for it. But all of these examples are, as the saying goes, the exceptions that prove the rule. 20 years ago it would be nonsensical to make special mention of these games for their difficulty, because that was the simply the norm.

Take a look at the landscape of the industry today, and such games are few and far between. Huge, sprawling adventures are commonplace, many of them offering a story that takes 20+ hours to complete. But they are, in general, a hassle-free 20 hours. I've dumped at least 200 hours into all my playthroughs of the masterpiece that is Ocarina of Time. But there isn’t a single minute in that huge playtime that’s hard enough to require more than a handful of attempts to get by. Don’t get me wrong, I love Zelda to death, but I can’t think of any moment in the entire series (post-NES, of course) that frustrated me half as much as the first level of Contra.

So what happened to the world of gaming that created this change to the overall difficulty of our games? The first and foremost answer to that question is technology—improvements in technology, specifically. Consider the technological limits of an 8-bit or earlier console: It was simply impossible to create a game that was very long. Even the length of Zeldas and Final Fantasies back then paled in comparison to today’s creations within those same series.

With that technological ceiling limiting the amount of content a developer can put into their game, there's only one effective solution to extend a game’s lifespan—make it as hard as humanly possible so that a player has to try over and over to succeed. But with more powerful consoles the ceiling was raised—we got bigger and bigger worlds and save points every ten minutes (which has further evolved into quicksaves at literally any moment).

In the era heralded by the arrival of the N64, Playstation, and Dreamcast, it all became about keeping the player occupied by giving them more to do; making things truly hard was lost as a priority because it was no longer a necessary component of replay value. These days there is virtually no technological limit to what a developer can put in a game, so there’s no need to make something hard to keep the player coming back.

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Comments

wildmario
Joined: Jan 2007

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 at 9:47 am
As stated, I think the amount of people who like mind numbingly hard games and play for the sake of knowing the beat the challenge are almost non existent. People will not play on the hardest difficulty unless they get something other than a pretty ending picture. Also, Most difficulty levels nowadays do nothing but either make enemies have more health or make your attacks weaker, which is a very cheap way of making things harder and don't really push people to try on a harder level when they know nothing changed but the health bars.

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cyberjim2000
Joined: Feb 2010

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 at 10:40 am
@wildmario: There's quite a bit of people out there that loves a challenge. Some even go as far as modding a currently existing game like Fallout 3 to make it even more unforgiving. I personally don't mind a hard game as long as there isn't any cheapshots, and it forces me to use my cunning and skills to beat it.

There's some hard current games out there. I heard the second Witcher even has an "insane" difficulty mode where it deletes your save game if you die even once.

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wildmario
Joined: Jan 2007

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 at 11:19 am
Oh I know people mod their games for an extra challenge, but are they as common as we think compared to the mainstream market today?

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wildmario
Joined: Jan 2007

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 at 11:28 am
I also forgot to say that are having games that are difficult as, let's say Contra, worth it now? Back then, there was no other options for games, so you either played whatever difficult games there were or you didn't play at all. Nowadays, we have many more choices on the kinds of games we want. If one game isn't fun for us, we can just find some other game to play.

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Stickyellowsock
Joined: Oct 2009

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 at 11:31 am
Super Contra........once I got to that Bubble board I knew it was over.

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SweetHat
Joined: May 2011

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 at 12:21 pm
F&*K THAT F*&$ING BATTLETOADS LEVEL. When i was 10 and i first played Battletoads, i had to use a game genie just to get to the cooler levels afterward. Satan created that level just to taunt children in hell!

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UghRochester
Joined: Jun 2006

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 at 1:23 pm
I loved the jet level(reminds me I still have to prove to Chris_Crime I can get pass it). Also, remember the games back then didn't have anyplace to save or pause at. Having the ability to pause and save a game nowadays makes games so much easier.

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Josh_Laddin
Joined: Nov 2009

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 at 1:24 pm
@wildmario: You make some good points, and also get at what I mean with the casual gamers. There's nothing wrong with casual gaming, and it creates a lot more diversity in the range of games that we have to choose from these days. Hard games are not for everyone, and those of us who enjoy them are in a minority now. As such, I'm perfectly happy for the number of hard games that come out to also be the minority - as long they don't dry up completely.

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WickedLiquid
Joined: Mar 2009

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 at 1:28 pm
The only way I was ever able to beat Double Dragon II on the hardest difficulty was to select the 2 player mode where you could steal lives and just spend the first ten minutes beating up Jimmy and gaining a bunch of extra lives, lol.

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sliverstorm
Joined: Jun 2007

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 at 1:38 pm
The purest 'hard' game I've played in a while is Super Meat Boy. The entire game can in theory be completed in under two hours, but will in actuality be completed in 1000+ deaths and at least three keyboards.

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stevedave
Joined: Mar 2007

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 at 5:08 pm
What I hated about the battletoads jet level was that none of my friends could beat it (I could), so the game effectively became 1 player from then on, and it was like the 3rd level. If my friends wanted to help out later they had to steal lives, which there were precious little of.
They should have had a button that let us double up on a bike.

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--Henry--
Joined: Jan 2010

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 at 11:59 pm
What happened to going back to black mode?

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BigTruckSeries
Joined: May 2006

Posted: Jun 3rd, 2011 at 3:15 am
The best "Hard Mode" I've played was CRYSIS 2's SUPERSOLDIER. The enemies will cut you down in seconds if you show your face, but, if you are stealthy and methodical, the game is relatively easy despite it's chalenege.

The worst Hard Mode I've played is Resident Evil 5, Mortal Kombat 9 and Call of Duty anything. The enemies are ridiculously cheap and pretty much kill you from attacks that shouldn't be able to kill you. Has anyone played and beaten Contra: Shattered Soldier on the Hard mode? All you gotta do is memorize the game and you can beat it easily.

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BigTruckSeries
Joined: May 2006

Posted: Jun 3rd, 2011 at 3:18 am
I think alot of NES games were needlessly difficult due to poor programming, but, if you really want some hard games to play, you get a Game Gear or Genesis. Shinobi and even Sonic the Hedgehog on Game Gear were ridiculously hard despite being games young people would be playing. Most of em, you can't beat, so you just abandon them. One game (either Air Fortress or Section Z) made me smash the lid of my NES.

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Kiristo
Joined: Oct 2008

Posted: Jun 4th, 2011 at 2:58 am
I don't miss games being uber hard. Like your rage comic pic suggests, games are mostly just fun now. As I'm no longer a child and have real work to challenge me, I like to mostly enjoy my games. Obviously, there needs to be some challenge, but it doesn't need to be hard as hell and piss you off because of the difficulty like these kind of games tended to do. Yea, there is pay off in beating them, but I'd rather less end-game pay off, and enjoy the whole game.

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