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Games made in the early 90’s were made for cartridges and floppy disks with limited memory and couldn't contain a lot of content so difficulty was used to increase playtime.
Nice theory, but no. Just look at WoW as a perfect example. When it launched in the early 00’s, overland content had a bit of a difficulty curve to it. It was clearly intended to be somewhat challenging overall.
Other MMOs that followed had the same thing. ESO being a perfect example. In many places, and I recall it well- just doing side quests was risky. LoTRO is another good example.
Then over the years, the player base whined and the developers caved in to appease what was and still is called: “the care bears.”
The vocal majority of players that got tired of the grind and the difficulty, and whined their way into changing the overall feel of games to be winnable under the easiest of circumstances, and the last amount of time.
ESO is a soloable joke of a game and WoW is a cartoon. Now, difficult games are a niche novelty.
When an MMO launches it normally has little content and uses difficulty to pad playtime, especially subscription MMOs like WOW and pre-one tamriel ESO. Typically an mmo reduces difficulty of old content over time, when new content becomes available.
I do agree that the effect is much more pronounced the more popular a game is. LoTRO at least added some of the overworld challenge back with an optional difficulty slider after community backlash, and I'm not sure that a less niche game would have bothered.
With all due respect, I think that a load of excuse mongering. Everyone knows that casuals complain to developers all the time. And that they get their way because they threaten to quit/cancel their subs.
This isn’t a giant secret. It’s pretty well known in a ton of games.
it is a well known industry standard design philosophy.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/09/too-much-of-a-good-thing-mourning-the-slow-death-of-the-retail-game-store/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard