Has that really changed recently? Different people have always enjoyed different things, and some don't like puzzles. That was as true a hundred years ago as now.
Yes. But modern games also evolved to appeal to people who don't like to be challenged and look for a casual rewarding experience.
It becomes quite obvious when you play a game of the early 90s and compare it to gameplay of today.
If you couldn't identify(!) and solve the puzzle in a LucasArts Adventure Game, you were stuck, if you repeatedly died in Super Mario / Sonic the Hedgehog you had to restart from Level 1.
No need to feel sorry. I never had a NES, I was actually thinking of Super Mario Land on GameBoy when I wrote this, but ultimately wrote it a bit more generic...
I do however have a vivid memory of LucasArts' Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where I got stuck in a cave under a Venice Cafe for days, because I didn't know that I need to talk a guest out of his Wine-bottle using specific sentences, and use the wine to soften the mud of a lever in a wall...
But I guess that's too specific for anyone to relate to...
I don't know about "recently", but things have certainly changed.
Even when there was information available in the past, it wasn't always easy to access or understand, and more critically, the willingness and pace of shared knowledge has increased tremendously.
If we look back, admittedly through the lens of nostalgia, at games like WoW:BC, then strategies took weeks or even months to bed in and disseminate from the top guilds to the wider public. RPGs, even in the gamefaqs era, took weeks or months to feel "solved".
Whereas now games are released and are often "solved" in beta before their official release. Game knowledge is spread so much faster now.
Even when we had early youtube back then, and we had IRC and gamefaqs, the knowledge just wasn't spread as fast. It's hard to know if that's just the sheer numbers of people involved now, or a greater willingness to share that knowledge.
Yes and No,
i think modern games lead more people to be like this. Because quest markers and gps navigations and hints and creative/story modes. Also a heavy emphasis on the rewards rather than the quest.
I notice this myself when going back to older games like Final Fantasy 7 or 8 and misremembering how complex and complicated the UI, Menus and systems are.
You just get used to these things, but i also think they are a bit immersion breaking and shift the focus a lot on the destination and not the journey.
Some game devs don't even want to risk the chance that players might have to stop and explore a little bit before they find the right path to continue the game.
That's not the fear. The fear is that the player will get stuck and simply stop playing because it's frustrating instead of fun.
The way that devs determine where the line is for "most people that play get frustrated and give up" and "most people figure it out and keep playing"
It's certainly possible to design a game where the intuition of the player matches a less contrived looking world, bit it's a lot harder. On the other hand, having a convention that climbable surfaces will be blazed yellow, and teaching it early in the game is comparatively easy.
There's also aspects of pacing and focus to consider. A game that ebbs and flows in it's intensity often feels better to play than one that's high intensity all the time. So if your game is mostly about combat, you'll want to break up big fights with lower energy experiences. But those lower energy experiences really aren't "the game" in a sense, they're a kind of filler that makes the high energy experiences feel more fun. It can't be completely boring, but it should be easier than the primary gameplay experience and also have lower stakes. That's a big reason why do many actiony games have blatantly obvious climbing and puzzles. It keeps the player lightly engaged while letting them catch their breath before the next set piece.
It's not the only way to build games by any means, but it is a generally effective, and consistently reliable, template.
But this is exactly one of the problems of today. Everything uses UX metrics to base their design around. It makes the end result boring and predictable and the opposite of immersive.
I agree that there needs to be pacing, but there are great ways to do that.
GTA and RDR are great examples. You drive somewhere and get a funny conversation, or something happens on the way to the objective that pretty naturally distracts you in a way that makes sense to the world the game is playing in.
Ubisoft games are basically full of these boring filler activities. What point does a huge open world have, if it's just the same 5 things copy and pasted all over the place?
I'd much rather condense those 590 busy work tasks to 5 really nice side quests like in The Witcher 3. At least they give you an experience and not some UX concept of "the user needs to go climb a tree now".
it's a very interesting divide when you have games that worry about this, and then genres/subgenres like the "soulslike" that take pride in its difficulty and precise maneuvering involved just to beat a boss.
It becomes quite obvious when you play a game of the early 90s and compare it to gameplay of today.
If you couldn't identify(!) and solve the puzzle in a LucasArts Adventure Game, you were stuck, if you repeatedly died in Super Mario / Sonic the Hedgehog you had to restart from Level 1.