Back when I was in high school, I was involved with a regular D&D group. We’d bust out our 2.0 edition books, roll up some characters, and go on what was basically a glorified dungeon delve hack and slash. The story underpinning these adventures was never very in depth; there were never any deep political machinations, no secretly evil NPC waiting to turn on us, no damsel to be rescued who was actually working for the evil wizard we were fighting. Everything was very black and white. Hell, at one point, we were actually fighting a gang boss who had named himself “Mayor McDemon” (who we were pretty sure got elected through some sort of vote fraud). It doesn’t get much more straightforward than that. We were dudes who liked killin’ baddies, and these guys were the baddies we were gonna kill.

Because of this, and because of the fact that as a group we can’t go ten minutes without being cynical or sarcastic about something, it became a running joke in the party that we, as players, would wonder aloud what the monsters in these dark rooms were doing before our stalwart heroes burst through the door. Would they be thinking of the next strategy to pillage the local town, or would they be huddled over a lab table, coming up with new sources for renewable energy? Was that design on the floor a sigil to summon a dark lord? Or was it really just a diagram for how to best plant crops so that the town could have a self-sufficient food source? It didn’t matter to our party, because we were heroes, and they were monsters. They had to die.

Fast-forward 15 years to present day, and that idea still sticks in the back of my mind. As I embarked on my “New game +” of Nier, it made its way back to the forefront.

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A recent look back at some nemesis games raised one question over and over again: have games gotten easier recently?  Now, some may inclined to simply make the argument that we, as gamers, have simply gotten better at games on average as time has gone by, but that dodges the issue.  Instead, to really analyze this question, we first have to ask “what makes a game difficult?”

There are, of course, many answers to that question: intricate puzzles, tricky jumps, and twitch timing are all elements that can contribute to a game’s overall level of challenge.  At core of the matter, however, is something more critical.  In general, the difficulty of games can be broken down into two fundamental categories: challenges that, when encountered and failed at, a gamer says “I know what I did wrong there” vs. those that, following defeat, a gamer says “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

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Last time, we looked over some of the games from the days of yore that dealt with issues of morality. This time, we’re going to hit the more recent past and deal with some titles that have come since the turn of the century.

Let us begin in a far-off time known as 2003. War was in the air, the Hubble started deep fielding the universe, and the first-ever (non-pen&paper) Star Wars RPG was released: Knights of the Old Republic.

Now, as any Jedi worth his salt can tell you, the moment you bring the Force into the equation, one must invariably face the issue of the Light Side versus the Dark Side. That said, the previous 15 years of Star Wars titles had managed pretty solidly to avoid ever doing that. Either you didn’t play a Force user, or you played someone locked into the side of “Good” with no questions asked.

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