The D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas is a time where game developers come together and celebrate the year's achievements with awards and speak on innovations in gaming for the following year. It is also a time where developers get to speak their mind on certain game aspects.
Electronic Arts chief creative officer Richard Hilleman spoke about game difficulty in current games, and he wasn't speaking on them getting easier or being intuitive – he spoke on the fact that games are just too hard these days.
"Our games are actually still too hard to learn," Hilleman said during an on-stage event. "The average player probably spends two hours to learn how to play the most basic game and asking for two hours of somebody's time–most of our customers, between their normal family lives… to find two contiguous hours to concentrate on learning how to play a video game is a big ask."
Hilleman's perception of difficulty in games is interesting. Nearly the entire fan base of both Demon Souls and Dark Souls adore the game for being more difficult than a number of current games. Not to mention, nearly every game starts off with a tutorial – Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2's campaign began with a boot camp-like tutorial. BioShock explains how to use Plasmids as you receive them.
In my opinion, games are pretty straight forward these days. What do you think?
