Are videogames easier now or did we just grow up?

I have been an avid gamer since I can even remember. My first game was Sonic the Hedgehog 2, played through an emulator on my father's old computer. It was 1998 and I was 5-years-old, at that time, I was only there because of how good it looked to me. All the colours, the sparkles and how fast you could go. I didn't care for the rings or how many times I could beat Eggman's evil creations.

After some time, I truly realized what was happening and how I could see more of the game by slowly progressing into the story. Drill Eggman was a pain for this 5-year-old to beat and that is the first boss, still at Emerald Hill Zone! (Yeah, I know, kinda lame)

With this in mind, I always question myself: Are games nowadays just easier or I was just not a bright kid? Would I take the same amount of time to finish Final Fantasy XII today as it did back when it got released?

Games did get easier, but for different reasons. One of them, for example, is the lack of tips on loading screens in older games. Most of them (maybe all of them, actually) didn't even have a tutorial sequence. Old games just leave you by yourself to discover the buttons and actions possible. Who, at that time, didn't just start to look at weirdly coloured walls or boxes, waiting for them to be a secret stash of loot or even a hidden passage? I remember smashing all the buttons at the start just to see what I could do. "Oh okay, so the 'x' button jumps. The 'o' button grabs stuff, great!". Nowadays, the tutorial itself works as a way to introduce the plot. It is a clever way to load the game at the same time it shows its name in giant letters, epic music in the background. "Oh, great. You are finally awake!". With unskippable cutscenes, it's even more annoying for the ones that already finished the game and just want to see a different ending.

The other reason is that controllers got better, hitboxes more accurate. Hitboxes are huge back in the day, playing fighting games you could be feet away from your adversary, but they would hit you anyway, putting you at that stupid screen corner just to finish the fight with a "perfect". "Stop low kicking me!". Castlevania featured stiff, blocky characters with weak jumping and delayed reactions. You had to press jump seconds before to get that perfect spot to kill Dracula. Now if your Nintendo joypad has a slight drift, your character goes crazy and it's impossible to even play anymore.

Games had three or four lives and sometimes you had to start from the beginning if you lose all of them. Battletoads, for example. On the other hand, Ratchet and Clank offered you infinite lives, respawning you at the checkpoint.

Another reason was the lack of navigation markers and quest helpers. The quest that you should find something is now sparkly, neon, marked on your mini-map and also you have arrows at your feet showing the direction of the item. On Morrowind (and older The Elder Scrolls games and alike), finding stuff that you needed was quite hard as you had none of that help mentioned before.

Games changed the final goal as well. Usually, the older games were designed to be challenging as the ultimate goal was to win the game. In Sonic, you had to beat Eggman. In Mario, you had to defeat Bowser and save Peach. In Metroid, you had to destroy the Mother Brain. No matter how hard those tasks were, we were focused on that only goal. Now, with the creation of the so-called, "Achievements" your goal is not set, you have multiple ones. The main story is just a way to see the final credits. You don't have any kind of rush to kill Alduin in Skyrim for instance, you can do it anytime, maybe even after that you are level capped and with the best equipment in the game, making it even easier. The true challenge of new games is getting 100% on achievements, getting all the trophies, collecting every collectible available. Gotta catch'em all!

Autosave was not a thing. Resident Evil and Silent Hill featured rooms specifically made for you to save your game, (the infamous "Safe Rooms") but only if you had the right item. Yeah, you should have saved that ink ribbon for your typewriter, now you can't save before facing Nemesis, whatcha gonna do about it? Restart all over again? Yeah, probably it's your best option. Also, you had no clue that you were going to face a boss. They didn't throw medkits and ammunition in a well kept, very suspiciously organized room with a save point at that time. If you saved your game and maybe some extra bullets, good for you.

Games are more inclusive towards children now. And it's not a bad thing. Before games were produced for adults, some of them with very gory, scary visuals and strong language made it not very attractive for children. If you played Resident Evil when young, you probably still have nightmares about (Trigger Warning!) that zombie close up scene. It still gives me the creeps. Horror games or adult themes still do exist but are not the majority like it was before. Pokémon just showed you how to capture them, but back in the first generation you had to figure out the weakness and don't even think about your enemies asking if you were ready to battle, there was no option to refuse a battle. Now your enemy is your best friend, you grew up together and they compliment you even if you lose the battle. Oh, how I miss Blue (Gary Oak in the anime) calling me weak and Giovanni calling me gullible for having Pokémon as my friends, not tools for success. Gosh, even the cutesy, stuffed animal looking villagers on Animal Crossing used to call me fat if I stopped playing for a while. I guess bullying is just not acceptable anymore, eh? That's completely fine.

Some games now offer some challenge, sometimes too much of it. Don't even want to start talking about Dark Souls or Bloodborne. But that's just a matter of preference. You can also change your difficulty and make the game easier if you want to, differently than the older games where the option to change from hard to easy was not possible.

In conclusion, I believe that games are easier but on the other hand, you have more options to choose from now. You can freely choose if you want a more laid back game like Animal Crossing or hardcore top performance gameplay, like Dark Souls. You can choose how your character looks, you can create your plot, you can do whatever you want. Whatever floats your boat, every game is special in its way, so play how it makes you happy. That's all that matters in the end.