With Hollow Knight: Silksong’s huge launch in full swing, community debate about its qualities and flaws has gone back and forth, with some players insisting their criticisms about things like the game's difficulty are valid and shouldn’t be instantly dismissed as "hate."
There might also be a generational divide taking shape. People my age grew up with “Nintendo hard” and the industry was all about making games seem longer by making them extremely difficult to beat. Our options were to get better, cheat, or give up.
These days the industry is all about mass appeal, and all the problems that we see with games having massive budgets and having to make sure as many people can like them as possible. Indie games have different incentives, and so when a game comes along that was made with priorities that aren’t in step with what we’re used to, it tends to ruffle feathers.
I know my kid doesn’t have any sense that games should be difficult, or that a challenging game can be satisfying. Even FromSoft games are trending towards less difficulty, despite having the fans who famously chant “git gud”. Bigger studios might know something my generation doesn’t get about younger gamers - maybe games like Silksong are having their swansong, so to speak. I hope not, but it’s hard not to notice once it’s been pointed out.
“Nintendo hard” isn’t about difficulty it is about entire games being based around knowledge checks, like having to remember to pre-swing when you jump particular gaps or get knocked into the gap in og ninja gaiden for instance.
When you’re a kid with no understanding of game design, no internet, and no subscription to magazines that explain it, all those dirty tricks that we now rightly put to much rubbish did have the power to make you think “I suck at this”. They didn’t have to be clever back then to give us this insane need to be punished by game designers just the right amount so that we can finally just try really hard, get really annoyed, stick with it way too long, and eventually get to say “yes, fuck you, I win!” For a certain kind of kid from that generation, that’s almost a healing fantasy.
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There might also be a generational divide taking shape. People my age grew up with “Nintendo hard” and the industry was all about making games seem longer by making them extremely difficult to beat. Our options were to get better, cheat, or give up.
These days the industry is all about mass appeal, and all the problems that we see with games having massive budgets and having to make sure as many people can like them as possible. Indie games have different incentives, and so when a game comes along that was made with priorities that aren’t in step with what we’re used to, it tends to ruffle feathers.
I know my kid doesn’t have any sense that games should be difficult, or that a challenging game can be satisfying. Even FromSoft games are trending towards less difficulty, despite having the fans who famously chant “git gud”. Bigger studios might know something my generation doesn’t get about younger gamers - maybe games like Silksong are having their swansong, so to speak. I hope not, but it’s hard not to notice once it’s been pointed out.
“Nintendo hard” isn’t about difficulty it is about entire games being based around knowledge checks, like having to remember to pre-swing when you jump particular gaps or get knocked into the gap in og ninja gaiden for instance.
When you’re a kid with no understanding of game design, no internet, and no subscription to magazines that explain it, all those dirty tricks that we now rightly put to much rubbish did have the power to make you think “I suck at this”. They didn’t have to be clever back then to give us this insane need to be punished by game designers just the right amount so that we can finally just try really hard, get really annoyed, stick with it way too long, and eventually get to say “yes, fuck you, I win!” For a certain kind of kid from that generation, that’s almost a healing fantasy.