It's An Acquired Taste

For me, easy difficulty setting are for when the story's good. One of my worst habits is letting my ego get the best of me and cranking the difficulty up, I end up farming XP and gearing up instead of progressing with the story line. You're probably right about the consoles influencing the hand holding UI. But I think part of it is the size of today's games and the shear number of games on the market. Developers really want players to see all of their content, instead of getting bored or frustrated and moving on to another title. Not to mention to ease of getting a new game. We can get that shinny new thing without even getting out of our chairs. But on the flip side, old games had us studying a manual because every game had a different control scheme. I played many a game with my arms crossed because all the keyboard commands were hard-coded:). What I'd really like to see is optional UI elements, and a more detailed, updating log of what we need to do.

I'm the same with mods, I like to see what the developer has done the first time through and see their vision as they saw it. The only exception tends to be for anything game breaking which for me can involve things like FOV locked to be too low or say broken mouse sensitivity. Regarding game length I think the CoD franchise popularized this where by only a tiny number of people would ever beat the game and so singleplayer lengths dropped to something closer to 4-6 hours. I think game difficulty dropping is due to consolization as well, when your target audience is casual and may have never picked up a controller before then you have to have a consideration for that. Back when I first got involved with PC gaming it was an extremely harsh learning curve with the keyboard and mouse and PC gamers all made that sacrifice to get good, the modern generation have much shorter attention spans I feel and need to be able to pick up a controller and get instant gratification. Ultimately the best balance I think is to cater for everyone and for them to put a bit of effort into allowing gamers to tailor their own experience, I remember the last Deus Ex (Human Revolution) leading up to the games release, showed off things like obnoxious door highlighting and objectives on the radar and all sorts of really in your face UI elements to essentially hold your hand, and of course the Deus Ex fans of old were used to a very deep and challenging game so this caused somewhat of a backlash. And respect for the developers because they added in a huge swath of UI elements you could toggle in the menu, they really went to town to please the PC audience and allow them to remove the hand holding. And that game appealed to both audiences which is win-win-win for everyone. I'd like to see more of that out of the box from other developers.

If you finish Ori you should tell us what your final death count is. I'd like to know how I compare. (I died many many many times).

I don't mind developers making games easier to reach a broader audience and make it easier for gamers to see the ending. What I hate is if games don't have options to make it harder, like having difficulty levels, turning of UI elements, etc. Assassin's Creed is probably the ultimate example of that. You can turn the UI off, but even then it is way too easy in my opinion. I'm playing Mad Max right now, which also doesn't have difficulty options. There was a gate that I was supposed to destroy, and I was starting to wonder how to do it and then the main character just blatantly says: "I gotta use the harpoon". That's so frustrating.. I play games mainly to be challenged, and some developers go out of their way to remove that. Anyway...this PC elitist will be playing Forza Motorsport 6 on Xbone this weekend, with a radar! Please don't kill me.