That's my main question regarding a lot of games these days - why make it so hard ?
The audience for a game is so much larger than it was back in the 1980s, which is where this kind of mentality originates.
Games developers should do the kind of audience research Valve does. They track where players are getting stuck, what level they were playing where they gave up playing and did not come back. It is that research, for instance, that caused them to patch Half-Life 2: Episode One because they found people were giving up playing when they were stuck on the part where you have to wait for the lift to arrive in the dark (with all the Zombies attacking you).
Bizarre Creations, also, found that some players were not seeing large amounts of the content (tracks, cars etc) Project Gotham Racing 2 had to offer because progress was too difficult so they left much of the game unlocked when PGR3 arrived.
The answer is to make difficulty settings mean something again. Easy should be easy. A casual player should be able to pick up the game and have as much fun as a hardcore player. In fact, the game should do the work itself. It should adjust itself to make sure the player is having fun. Otherwise, what did they spend their £39.99 for ?
