Runehamster: 2: I'm damn sick of this culture that says games have to be hard to be fun. Every game should have some challenge, but that doesn't mean it has to brutalize you every time you play. There are those of us out there that can't play an FPS on anything much harder than Easy, for instance. Besides, I thought Legendary (or whatever the second to hardest one was) was just perfect for a dungeon crawler.
I think that, on the one hand, it's true that difficulty is not necessarily a prerequisite for fun. Nor does being challenging necessarily make a game good. In fact, challenge can sometimes act as a thorn in the side of otherwise good games. I think that The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is a perfect example. I'm not afraid of hard games, by any means. But I found that ALttP's difficulty to be a HUGE barrier. I loved the game, and marveled at how well-designed it was. But at the same time, I got to a point where the frustration just wasn't worth the payoff. I was no longer enjoying the experience.
But on the other hand, I think that there are a lot of cases where decreased difficulty can have a severe negative impact on a game...especially if that game is part of a series. Core game mechanics have the possibility of being lost. Imagine if the Thief series had made it easier to survive combat, for instance. Would anyone have bothered sneaking? Or imagine if Fallout was more forgiving about its character creation and choices. Imagine if every character would have been just about equally competent (oh wait... you don't have to imagine that). I can totally understand people who decry the casual push of today's games. There's so much good that is lost when the experience turns from a challenge into a rollercoaster ride.
