When Dark Souls came out last year, it was hailed as one of the most difficult games ever made. Boasting brutal mechanics and punishing scenarios, Dark Souls was a rare return to the challenging button mashes of the past, in which luck and repetition had as much to do with success as the player’s skill level.

One of the reasons that Dark Souls garnered so much attention is that difficulty in games has effectively died out. Games just aren’t as hard as they used to be—there’s no denying this fact. There are several reasons for the change; games are longer, control mechanisms are deeper and more people play games than just a select few hardcore gamers. But one of the big reasons appears to be that developers just don’t think about making things hard anymore.

Most games have some sort of optional “hard” mode. However, it’s rare that snapping a game into hard mode has any real effect on gameplay besides making your character easier to kill, and enemies harder. Unfortunately, “hard” has become a loose translation for “cheap”; no real care seems to be placed on balancing the varied difficulties to present a meaningful difference.

Games need to be harder, but developers need to actually create experiences that are challenging. Cheap doesn’t cut it. Simply bumping an enemy’s health pool up and reducing accessible ammo isn’t any sort of fundamental change. I’m sure you can think of more than a few culprits when it comes to the hard/cheap boundary.

Devs need to step it up, or they risk losing the hardcore crowd.

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