Alright before I start I know this might sound very opinionated of me, but I bet a number of you reading this would think the same after you read this. This is something I’m finally glad to get off my chest as it has been bothering me for many years.

I use the term “casual gamer” very wildly in recent years. There has been a large rise of the amount of people playing consoles recently which has started to create a change in the game’s universe . With a lot of games the challenge has almost  disappeared and even past games that use to have an element of difficulty has been changed and adapted to suit the new gaming community (I’ll go into this a bit more later).

Let me start from the beginning. I believe everything started to change when gaming was in it’s hey days. The Xbox had just been brought into shops worldwide, PS2 was up and strong and the GameCube was under-rated but not the less enjoyable. There were plenty of causal and hard-hitting games to keep the entire gaming world entertained. Now I’m not saying that people who play for games are wrong, I know not everyone wants to play a game for serious aspects, they play to have fun and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Now when online gaming was new to the console world only more serious gamers would tend to play, I remember my early Xbox Live days playing on Time Splitters Future Perfect (which I achieved a world-wide ranging of 14^th best). Back then leader boards actually worked and displayed the best players in the world accurately. Not everyone who played back then were all there to show that there the best in the world. A lot of people loved the challenge but also the fun of the games.

I think everything changed when the next-gen consoles arrived and gaming was taken into the future. The new range of consoles brought a new audience but also created a nightmare which we still haven’t overcome.

At first it was hard to notice the next line of happy-go-lucky games that were appearing during the early days of the Xbox 360 and PS3 (I haven’t mentioned the Wii here as I strongly believe that it is a console purely for the casual gamer, expect for a few select games) but not all of them were bad. I have to admit I even enjoyed Viva Piñata, there was something I liked about creating a garden full of wild Piñata’s and trying to upgrade them while keeping the evil creatures away by smacking them with a spade. When Little Big Planet was released it created something new to the gaming world, a game so simple kids could enjoy but had the challenge and durability or a game like Sim City. Sack Boy was a lovable protagonist that anyone could get behind. I could spend hours creating level after level and having my Sack Boy try to conquer it, I don’t know why I enjoyed it so much but I did and I’m sure you did as well.

Xbox Live was at its peak, games were enjoyed, fun and challenging what could be better, unfortunately the worse had yet to come. Now I don’t intend to offend anyone by what I say I’m mainly giving my opinion on current facts. I believe the gaming world changed when Call of Duty 4 was released. It was a good FPS, one of my favourite in recent years but it brought a plague along with it, once the game’s popularity hit younger and younger gamers, they lingered on to it like flies to well you know what. There were countless times playing on Xbox Live I found myself in games with kids that were nowhere near old enough to play the game swearing, shouting, trying to give me orders on what to do and how to play the game. I don’t think I went through an entire game on my Call of Duty 4 career without a young person in my game. I know not all young people who play older games are like this, but the availability of consoles and the growth in the internet has encouraged snotty, pre-pubescent teenagers to go online.

Each year when a new Call of Duty was released it was the same story, but it didn’t just stop with Call of Duty. Playing just one FPS isn’t enough for this new breed of gamer, they need a different type of game to play opposite to shooting people so they go for the other yearly game, what a take a guess which I’m taking about… it’s of course FIFA. There’s something about FIFA that they loved, I don’t know why they mainly played these two games when so many other good games were soon to come out, maybe sometimes they’d venture into playing something else for a while but they’d always stay loyal to Call of Duty and FIFA.

At first I didn’t think much of the new breed, I didn’t play FIFA as I’m not much of a football fan and I could play other shooting games that I thought were better than Call of Duty (Battlefield and Gears of War), so I thought let them play there two games a year, I can happily play any other game that comes out and have fun and enjoy the challenge. The future games that were coming out kept me very interested but things about them had changed. They were ‘adapting’ to fit not only the new breed but the old casual gamers, since motion sensor gaming had become a big thing for a lot of casual gamers and with the news breed fixating them on the same two games developers had to do something, and their decisions have ruined many upcoming games for the rest of us.

There are many examples I could use but I’m going to talk about one I was really looking forward to playing but not so sure now. I have always loved the Hitman series, I loved the story, characters, game play, everything. There were some of the most difficult games I have ever played but that’s what I loved about them. Since I finished Blood Money I have been waiting patiently for the next one in the series to arrive in shops and now we have Absolution but I fear my wait was for nothing. The challenge that made the series an essential purchase for me seems is all but gone. A new ‘instinct’ vision lets you see enemies movement through walls, which in my eyes has ruined the game even before its out. The point of Hitman was to monitor your enemies and work out there patterns from working to what they do whilst working out a path to the main goal, but by using your new vision mode you can see where they are through a bloody wall.

Developers have made these changes to bring in the new  gaming community, times are-a-changing, with technology changing and the FIFA and Call of Duty era still running strong, it’s difficult to still predict the future for the rest of us that don’t fit these two groups. But there is still hope there are plenty of games coming out that we can play and love. We can’t give up hope we have to keep going and hopefully when motion sensors take over from controls (it’s only a matter of time) develops will make games that we’ll all enjoy and not just Call of Duty 48 and FIFA 2064.

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