kirbymuncher posted...
Is hardcore gamer vs casual gamer really a question of game difficulty
I always thought of it more as level of seriousness towards gaming as an activity. Casual gamers play games in their spare time, hardcore gamers create time to play games in
It's definitely this for me.
Gobstoppers12 posted...
It's definitely true regarding large studio projects. Look back at the old days of MMO development for another example. XP and Gear loss on death used to be the norm. Ever since WoW came out and got mainstream popular, those functions have all but disappeared. For the better, if you ask me, but hardcore people liked there to be 'consequences' for playing poorly.
Even within WoW, which was already casual compared to MMOs of its day, the difference between the initial release (classic) and the current game is insane. It skews way more casual in the modern game. Faster leveling, easier leveling, easier gearing, barely any travel time, etc.
I don't think changes like that are because of "casual" gamers though. A lot of that was just tedious for the sake of being tedious. Removing it made the games less of a hassle to play.
Like back in the old days of MapleStory, when you died, you lost 5% of your exp bar. And at higher levels, it started to take 1 hour to get 2-3% of that bar. So dying once could cause you to lose 2+ hours of progress. For a game that was already insanely grindy, mechanics like that just weren't respecting your time.
And has been said already, old games were hard because they were trying to mask how short they were. Gaming didn't suddenly get easier because of "casuals" developers just stopped needing to hide lack of content with difficulty.