In this huge world of ours, there are things that happen roughly once every second: Somebody is born, somebody dies, and somebody complains about how easy videogames have become. The latest to worry about easy gameplay isMass Effectdeveloper BioWare. The studio seems concerned that we gamers have become “pampered.”
“Sometimes I think we’re pampering gamers too much,”saysMass Effect 2producerAdrien Cho. “Just recently, a game likeDemon’s Soulsis fantastic because when you die, and you fail, it’s not because the game was cheap it’s usually because you didn’t do something properly.
“It goes back to that learning mechanism of ‘Well, I tried this — it didn’t work. I’m going to try something different.’ And I think that’s going to be something inMass Effect 2, we don’t want it to be a cakewalk, you want a challenge.”
It’s a thin line between being challenging and simply hard for the sake of hard.Demon’s Soulswas a fantastic example of challenge, one that was logical and did not simply rely on throwing around a ton of enemies with cheap shot attacks to create the illusion of difficulty. If we can get more games likeDemon’s Souls, then that’ll fabulous. If we get more games like the latter, then I’ll stick with being pampered.
