BioWare: We’re pampering gamers too much

In this huge world of ours, there are things that happen roughly once every second: Somebody is born, somebody dies, and somebody complains about how easy videogames have become. The latest to worry about easy gameplay is Mass Effect developer BioWare. The studio seems concerned that we gamers have become “pampered.”

“Sometimes I think we’re pampering gamers too much,” says Mass Effect 2 producer Adrien Cho. “Just recently, a game like Demon’s Souls is fantastic because when you die, and you fail, it’s not because the game was cheap it’s usually because you didn’t do something properly.

“It goes back to that learning mechanism of ‘Well, I tried this — it didn’t work. I’m going to try something different.’ And I think that’s going to be something in Mass Effect 2, we don’t want it to be a cakewalk, you want a challenge.”

It’s a thin line between being challenging and simply hard for the sake of hard. Demon’s Souls was a fantastic example of challenge, one that was logical and did not simply rely on throwing around a ton of enemies with cheap shot attacks to create the illusion of difficulty. If we can get more games like Demon’s Souls, then that’ll fabulous. If we get more games like the latter, then I’ll stick with being pampered.