I wouldn't say I found any FPS extremely difficult since many of them have not really progressed past the doom level of engineering, theres been like maybe 5 that I've actually enjoyed in the last 15 years, 3 Being Unreal Titles, The other being Red Faction because of their use of the destructable enviroment, and Hidden & Dangerous. other then that, its heres 9 weapons go kill a bunch of crap the only challenge really being the speed at which your capable of moving the mouse and knowing the weapon physic's. I think the only real difference's in the game in the last 20 years has been the addition of weapons with alt fires, and vehicles. so basically more weapons to use, I find the FPS genre of games more of an interactive way to test your PC's capability's rather then an actual game simply because there is no real depth to them,. course Its just my opinion. I really would have liked FPS to evolve more in the last 20 years, I meen at least the original Counterstrike had some difficulty and challenge to it.

Didn't think this would go this far. Many games may have been utterly dumbed down for console but that dosn't mean pc games of old were perfect.

Its not about difficulty. Games never had to be difficult. I and many others enjoy games that make us think, or force us to learn. Challange us at timing, or tactics or stratergy or design or knowladge, or memory or whatever.

The things I liked about games when I started 'gaming' remain the same, my tastes might be more refined as I discover new things and discard old things that nolonger fill a purpose anymore.

A good example is when I was say 12 I had ideas of grand sci-fi battlezones with huge open areas and hundreds of indavidual units... Oh looky Operation Flashpoint and Planetside (WWII online dosn't have the features for my interest - I like getting in and out of my vehicles thanks). There were several games I used to 'fill the void' before these games were out. Always wanting more from games like UT.

I REALLY enjoyed Prince of Persia (new one), I even collected all the light seeds the reason because I like the platform action - but I UTTERLY HATE redoing crap I've already done. I don't make a mistake in MS Word and freaking delete the whole last paragraph! Another reason I liked it over the Original Proper 3D Remake (sands of time) is the characters are WAAAAAY more intersting, not standard good-ass naive idiots who blunder into traps as a freaking JOB DESCRIPTION!

Anyway, Remove the TEDIUM - Retain the Challange, the Depth or whatever it is that your game does. That is what I want developers (PC at least) to follow. MMOs are a great example. I purposly AVOIDED EQ1s horrible game design, I was there for EQ2s however and it was an improvment but after WoW was released it MASSIVELY changed. They suddenly had good ideas about game design! Funny how it takes Blizzard to take thier ideas and remove the stupid bits for them to realise what exactly people PAY FOR.

I hated Dizzy. Oh how I hate Dizzy - No save points? No way of PROGRESSING? "What. The. Fuck." That would be todays average gamer's response to Dizzy and many other games mentioned in this thread. I Don't like that kind of gameplay. Not many people watch a DVD of say, X-Files and every FREAKING time they stop watching, they are forced to go right BACK TO THE START and watch all those endings with no explanation AGAIN! A-freaking-GAIN!! NO! BAD!

I doubt anyone will read this, never mind this far but this turned into a rant so I should probably complete it.

I really like the direction of modern PC game design. Stuff like Mount and Blade, ArmA2, Stratergy games like Sins or Elemental, MMOs like Age of Conan (If only just for face meet hammer moments). And loads of other PC focused stuff.

The console port stuff is good fun also but they rarely are as exciting to play. (One big excepetion is Batman, wow such production values! Loads of gadgets and IT STILL HAS BUGS! Just like a REAL PC game! )

To sum up, no gamers are not soft, they are just more inteligent with the expenditure of thier time now. And for the other, side, issue of PC gameing dying... WTF? PC Games are just starting to get REALLY good.

(I went so massivley offtopic in this rant.. lol... Anyway My point about most of this is with a bit of creativity you can get the level of challange you want form most things - I duoed most of WoW including even level group zones with a badly equipped tank/healer combo (me and a friend). These were WAY more interesting and much harder than the heroic dungons with a party full of morons OR awesome players. Staying in a dungeon, trying and trying until we are victorius for hours on end is FUN for me, maybe not your anyone else but no one can say that wasn't difficult because it was for ME. It was exactly what we wanted from the game!)

An interesting point about Arma2 and DoWII is that the puzzles you solve in these games are tactical puzzles. How to defeat the enemy in an open free form world. Thats what makes those games (stretching right back to before UFO: Enemy Unkown) so good, and is why Arma2 can't be conidered a 'shooter'.

The thing about Shadow of the Colossus and Ico is that they were more created for people with Lit majors (like the friend that introduced me to them) than anyone else, who may or may not be into gaming. As such, the challenge was low and the game lasted just long enough to tell the story. Anways, these are more the exception than the rule.

However, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself in my zealous fanboy rush to defend SotC and Ico. The way I see it is that there are multiple types of 'hardcore' gamers, who all have different opinions of difficulty, 'good' gameplay, and storytelling. Different breeds require different blends of each, and while ZehDon and I tend to agree in our preferences, there are plenty of people out there who decide quite differently, as Legacy was quick to point out. As an example, I feel that changing an enemy's health and damage to make the fight difficult is an example of "artificial" difficulty increases. Clever AI, challenging puzzles, and ammo conservation, on the other hand, are more interesting, a source of a real challenge that doesn't feel frustrating, or, quite frankly, stupid. However, the flip side of that coin is that there are many people who feel that this is a perfectly reasonable way to increase a game's challenge, and indeed gimping the AI or removing some puzzles in easier difficulties would serve only to limit the depth of the game for the less-capable crowd. There are also those who find very little place for a puzzle in an action game, and indeed in many games (Gears of War) a difficult puzzle would feel out of place.

[A brief history of the Evolution of Videogames follows, be warned that it slowly devolves into a rant. Please use multiple sources when researching gaming history ]

Back in the olden days of the arcade, a game was designed to be difficult in absolutely any way possible (pleasing the second type of person I described in the previous paragraph), because as soon as you died you had to put in another quarter if you wished to continue playing, hence the term "quarter eater" for a remarkably difficult game. As time moved on, games appeared less and less on arcade machines. Difficulty became less of a necessity, but remained in games because AI was easy to code, games could hold very little information (lasted maybe a few hours), etc.

However, as time went along its merry and irreversable course, games became more complex. AI programming took a sharp difficulty increase with the introduction of 3D and FPS game types. Games became able to hold longer campaigns, multiplayer slowly poked its head into the doorway, and more and more 'casual' gamers entered the mix. However, during the time of the SNES-PS1, gaming was still relatively small compared to other industries, and so difficulty remained moderate.

However, with the advent of the Diablo and Diablo II, we saw a change in the way difficulty could be produced. A game could be stretched into a "super RPG" through the use of long "grind" sessions. Now mind you, Diablo was an amazingly difficult game on the higher difficulty levels (to anyone who's played Hardcore mode, R.I.P. R.I.P. R.I.P. R.I.P. R.I.P. R.I.P. R.I.P. R.I.P. R.I.P.) Many MMO's took the grinding aspect of Diablo and similar games, and used it to replace the actual challenge of combat and weaponization. About this time, the first generation of Hardcore Gamers began to find less and less time for gaming. Enter the next console generation, epitomized by the XBox.

It was with this generation that we found the major cases of what I would like to dub "EA syndrome". That is, large numbers of easy, bad games designed for mass consumption. Part of this was the advent of the casual gamer, part of this was games taking the same difficulty curve as the standard MMO (remember that recent and popular MMO's remained fairly simple until one hit max level and started doing "epic" quests), and part of this was the simply the fact that many games were produced unfinished or badly done, with half baked AI and outrageously bad level design. As these games became more and more normative, particularly for liscensed games or those designed for children, companies that did not care about the quality of their games began to not only limit the amount of skill required to complete the single player campaign (with the added excuse of online multiplayer for many FPS, strategy, etc type games). Sadly, we come to the current console generation with many games that are half baked ripoffs and sequels.

I'm sorry if this sounds a bit bleak, but perhaps that's because the majority of the gaming industry, like the majority of the publishing and film industry, simply doesn't care about quality. If you produce enough, some well-meaning grandparent will buy it. So where does that leave us, the hardcore gamers?

Fortunately, just like blockbuster film crews and good authors, there are good game developers and publishers. Stardock is clearly one of them. Provided we choose games we enjoy, which we feel do not epitomize the threat of the decline of the industry, and shun those which clearly do, we will always have a few good and difficult games which we can lean on. [/end rant]

Somehow I imagined being hardcore would feel more... I don't know... Pimpley?

Very true!

I...I think this is the first time anybody has described me as being ultra-hardcore

What if we played Diablo 1 without duping a GPoW?  Is that ultra-ultra hardcore? 

I played and loved Diablo 1 and 2. I do not consider myself a hardcore gamer as I am not such a snob that I feele the need to label people in such a way. I think the ability to scale difficulty now is great, and have no regrets about that choice for the industry. If you want to be punished, scale it up. No, we're not getting soft. There are more choices now and for some reason, that makes some people really unhappy.

Except that is entirely subjective. True Challenge? What challenges me and the type of challenge that challenges me isn't going to be the same for you. I really think people are just looking for nostalgia moments from the days when you could get halfway through a game and either hit the game over screen or your mother would yank the plug? It's not the pursuit of a true challenge that I object to but this ridiculous termonology. Hardcore gamer. Casual Gamer. Nonesense. There are games that are casual games. There are games that are really difficult and gamers play either or both. We're all gamers.

And many don't feel that way. When I gew up playing video games, it was not a given that if i talked to someone about a game, they would have even a slight idea as to what I am talking about. Now, almost everyone I know has given a game or two a try. My aunt plays video games every day, 2-3 hours a day, they are casual games she plays. Under your definition, she is a hardcore gamer. One of my great aunt's plays even more than that, she likes poker games, guess she is a hardcore gamer too. Some nights, I don't play at all, other days all day.

These are dumbass labels that don't even have agreed upon defnitions. I am sure you are going to change your definition now so they exclude the other too which is what everyone does. You point out how someone who plays Pogo.com for 2-3 hours a day, loved the Rollercoaster Tycoon series too fits a definition of hardcore gamer, then chests puff up and, fists get pounding and the definition has to be changed. They're stupid labels.  And many players missing the glory days of their youth is not most players. I think the real problem is that mainstream games don't challenge some of you, and rather than be satisfied with games that arent' as mainstream, not WoW, not Sims, not Guitar Hero, but the thousands of other games available, it's just more fun to sit back and label other gamers and bitch about it.

For the benefits of this discussion, let's agree on the following definitions:

Gamer - Someone who plays video games. Also, a bad movie.
Hardcore Gamer - Plays video games all day, every day, often neglecting other aspects of their life to do so.
Core Gamer - Plays video games as their primary source of entertainment. They play games like most people watch TV.
Casual Gamer - Plays video games on an infrequent basis.

You can argue that these are incorrect labels and seek only to divide people, however I call them fair and honest assessments - I don't want to play a multiplayer titles with little boys and girls who can't keep up in a game of Demigod or Counter-Strike any more than they want to play a game they have no chance of winning, much in the same way that I want a 3,000 hour RPG Epic where each and every piece of furniture has 50 pages of lore to explain it's existence, while they probably want something digestible in small chuncks that they can actually finish.

Much in the same way as TV Shows have their core demographic, video games have their demographics. Some companies and individuals harbour the belief that the entire Industry is a single demographic - look at Australia's complete lack of an R rating for Video Games, for example - and by targetting this magic group of people you suddenly make billions of dollars. However, in fact, the Video Game industry is probably made up of more demographics than any other entertainment medium, thanks to the efforts of companies like Nintendo, targeting the Casual Gamer who used to be neglected, and companies like Blizzard, who cater almost exclusively to the Hardcore Gamer.

The problem has arisen, and the existence of this thread is evidence to this, that too many companies have begun targeting the Casual Gamer demographic and begun neglecting the Hardcore and Core Gamers. I've discussed this multiple times, but basically Casual Gamers often purchase newly released titles, play for a while, and migrate on to another new release. They see everything the game has to offer, or get bored, and move on. Core and Hardcore gamers often find a game they really, really like and play it until they've worn the installed sectors off of their hard drives. These Core and Hardcore gamers keep communities alive and prospering, because they make the fan made content and are there, night after night and day after day, playing the games they love. The lack of these gamers causes many games to experience short lived bursts, like SPORE which has seen a dramatic drop in player made content after the initial hype and release wore off.

Now, we have a problem here when Casual Gamers believe that every game should cater to them - they've spent their hard earnt money and they should have the right to be able to finish it. The simple truth it, they don't. This is like watching an homage to silent films of the by-gone film era and then complaining that the movie is in black and white and has no sound. There is more money to be had from the Casual Game demographic because it's simply a larger Demographic, however titles that appeal to the Casual Gamer do not often appeal to the Hardcore Gamers and vice versa - thus we're currently experiencing a shift in the industry and it's causing issues because the Hardcore gamers are tired of games that need to be accessible and easier to appeal to the vast majority so that their developers can make some money, and as we were once the Golden Children it feels a little cold that now that Video Games are mass market and popullar - well, nearly - the people who brought it from the basements to the leading entertainment medium on the planet are being neglected in favour of profits. Yes, we still have titles catered to us exclusively, and always will have, the problem is that in the process of becoming 'accessible' our favourite games and franchies which have a fond place in our memories are being destroyed so Casual Gamers can 'enjoy' them for a few minutes before they move on to the next release.

You can argue that these terms aren't real, and that we're all Gamers - and it's true, we are all Gamers here - the problem is that now everyone is racing to compete for the Casual Gamer's interest to make their money, and in doing so they're failing to provide for the rest of us. Video Games have become Hollywood.

Before I begin, the hostile tone to your posts isn't really warranted at all - no one is attacking anyone here, and I'd appreciate it if we remain civil towards one another in this thread. If this is simply impossible for you to do, then I'll request that this thread be locked because I'd rather this didn't devolve into a flame war.