While all these games, including Unreal Tournament 2004, had their strengths, in comparison and hindsight to Unreal Tournament 3’s commitment to both hardcore traditions and advancing the series, it’s easy to see where they went wrong. Unreal Tournament precisely conforms to the remit of the hardcore game, demanding a commitment of time and skill in a concentrated burst, and Unreal Tournament 3 delivers this precisely. Gone are the giant health pickups and special moves, replaced by a series of weapons and tactics that once again require real skill to use. For example, just as in the original Unreal Tournament, the Link Gun doesn’t lock on to its target anymore. Instead, its user must directly aim the particle beam at the enemy, unassisted. With games like Unreal Tournament 3 providing real Hardcore thrills, it shows that the Xbox 360 can accommodate both Hardcore and Casual audiences, without diluting the principles of each through merging them.
In comparison, Nintendo seem to have gone the other way in the switch from the last generation to the current one. The Metroid Prime series, long considered as one of Nintendo’s elite Hardcore series on the GameCube, was considerably downgraded in its third entry on the Wii. Its difficulty was lowered to suit the skill levels of the Wii’s Casual players who were familiar with other motion-controlled games on the console. While these motion controls in Metroid Prime 3 were certainly one of the high points of the game, Nintendo used this intuitive set up as a hook for players weaned on Wii Sports and minigame compilations. The game held onto some classic Metroid conventions such as objective-led exploration, clever puzzling and massive organic worlds, but enemies and bosses did much less damage to the player than in the previous games.
Even the normal and hard difficulty levels present less of a challenge. Perhaps Nintendo were worried that Casual gamers would find the control scheme difficult to use in a fully explorable 3D world, and adjusted the difficulty level of its inhabitants accordingly. Another change that upset Hardcore fans of the series was the inability to go back to a completed game, to explore the environment more thoroughly in order to collect all those elusive energy tanks and missile expansion sets. Instead, upon completing the game, players are taken back to its beginning for another playthrough. This curtails the game’s longevity, a feature that would otherwise give it a long-term appeal.
The result of this merging of Hardcore and Casual tastes is a game that, while it contains features that appeal to both sets of audiences, fully satisfies neither. In the end, perhaps the key to solving the disparity between Casual and Hardcore on current generation consoles is to keep them separate. By creating games with specific audience tastes in mind, and marking them through separate advertising campaigns, games can clearly be signposted as to which category they belong. Capturing the casuals, then, is as much about containing them as it is collecting them.
