Opinion: Gaming is getting easier, and this is a good thing

Nintendo has announced that the newest entry in their Star Fox series will be getting a new mode in which you will be invincible. The idea is that novice players will then be able to enjoy the game without the teeth gnashing frustration that can come when they just can’t make it past a section. This is not a bad thing, no, this is a good thing.

Invincibility modes aren’t a new thing, normally hidden behind cheat codes, debug menus or action replay carts; back in my youth I indulged in quite a few of these because at times it just made the game more fun. There’s only so many times you can bang your head against a wall before you decide that it’s just not worth your time any more and you just give up. Cheat codes allowed us a way to get past ridiculous difficulty spikes or even skip levels altogether meaning we got to see more of the game that we paid for instead of giving up.

Cheat-codes these days are pretty much dead, very few games have them and when they do they normally only enable a big head mode or infinite ammo, invincibility or level skips rarely feature these days and optional ways to unlock content are offered to us as purchasable currency or DLC.

The problem is that all it takes is an errant difficulty spike to put someone off of finishing a game, a game that they could easily have paid £50 for. This then gates much of the game’s content from that person, which can be unfair. Not just this, but the work-life balance of many people doesn’t grant them the time to devote to finishing a lot titles these days, especially with many of them being 50-hour magnum opuses. When a game is that long, portions that feel more like a slog than fun can put many people off, so having measures against this eventuality would be very beneficial to many.

Nintendo is a company that has taken steps to ensuring that anybody can get into videogames. They had huge success with the Wii thanks to its Wiimote controller that simplified game control schemes. This lowered the barrier of entry to people of all ages, especially pensioners, with many retirement homes installing Wiis for the residents to play on to keep them entertained and active.

Nintendo followed this up with their ‘Super Guide’ system. The idea was a simple one, if the game notices that you’re struggling to get past a certain section it would offer to play that section for you, but with a reduced reward at the end. This had two main benefits:

1. It allowed players to get through tricky sections they couldn’t manage
2. It showed them the solution to it, so that if they wanted to go back and try again they could.

It was featured in New Super Mario Bros. U, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Donkey Kong Country Returns, all games that are renowned for their challenge.

We’ve also seen a move to open up end game content to other players in quite possibly the biggest franchise there is. Call of Duty: Black Ops III allowed players to skip levels, even allowing them to go straight to the end if they so wished. They called traditional campaign progression ‘an archaic mentality’ and made the decision to allow players to play their game how they wanted to do it making Black Ops III the most accessible Call of Duty title yet. The game also saw a reversal of fortunes for the Call of Duty brand with sales being up on the titles from the previous two years; while the change to campaign progression probably isn’t solely to thank for this, it’s likely that it did help even just a little.

And then we come to Star Fox Zero, a joint Nintendo and Platinum project; Miyamoto is a designer that prides himself on creating experiences that are enjoyable for all and he explained his reasoning for not just limiting this new title to just easy difficulty levels in an interview with America’s Time magazine: “One thing that I think is a misunderstanding, is that I’m not very supportive of simply making a game easy so that people who don’t play games can play the game themselves,” he said. “Obviously part of the fun of taking on a challenge is that the challenge has to be a hurdle that you overcome. Simply lowering the hurdle doesn’t necessarily mean that the challenge will be fun. What’s fun is you mastering the skill and having that sense of accomplishment-of achieving something that’s difficult.”

The option is there to help novices learn what is there with the option to go back later and try it on regular difficulty, the step up from Super Guide here is that you will be actively taking part in it, learning what is there and figuring out how to do it when you turn the damage on. Even if players don’t go back and do it again it means that they’re not locked out from the rest of the game.

The thing is, there’s a terrible elitism in the gaming community, where a struggle to get past something is supposedly what you have to put up with otherwise you’re not a ‘true gamer’ and if you can’t do it, then it’s your own problem. I remember when Nintendo first introduced the Super Guide and there was moaning that they were dumbing games down and the same murmuring is occurring now.

There’s nothing wrong with adding options to make videogames more accessible for people to play, in fact these measures generally lead to more sales. It’s a risk free way of increasing a title’s appeal and making sure it reaches the largest market possible, but for some reason elitist shitheads just can’t seem to get behind moves for gaming inclusivity, while simultaneously moaning about why gaming isn’t more accepted within the mainstream.

Gaming is getting easier, but optionally so and this is a good thing. People who prefer a challenge will still find their masochistic thirst satiated with stupidly hard difficulty levels, that element isn’t going anywhere. But as gaming grows up and companies want to encourage more people to take part in it they have to look at avenues for it. More people playing games means more games for us all and measures taken to do this should be encouraged, not lambasted.