So one thing I've noticed recently is how much trouble I'm having with recent fast-paced shooters. I had a lot of trouble with Wolfenstein: TNO on medium difficulty and would die often, and I have yet to actually finish the final boss in The Old Blood (even after lowering difficulty to easy). But the game that's really doing me in last few days is Doom Eternal, I've barely started the game and I'm finding it very hard going. It's something about the gameplay where you need to keep moving constantly and get health pickups from dead enemies that really annoys me, I much prefer the gameplay of old Doom. Playing Doom Eternal for a few hours and I did not have much fun, all I could think about was getting back to some slow-paced strategy/RPG game.

Is it just my age? I don't remember having trouble with action games when I was younger, or are action games actually getting harder?

Not harder at all.Skills degrading,it happens when you near 100 or so.As for the game it never interested me as it's just a fast paced shooter,end of story.Just my opinion and you can take it or leave it,it matters not to me.

I don't think they're getting "harder" just more annoying. I don't own Doom Eternal but I've heard that a lot of people don't like it for forcing you to play in a specific way (they dialled the "glory kill" thing from Doom 2016 up to 11). Most modern cross-platform FPS's are designed around controllers so Quake 3 levels of "practise, practise, practise accurate unassisted shooting with a mouse" certainly isn't making a comeback.

Likewise, the older Doom games are still hard as hell if you play on Nightmare or Ultra-Violence with the -fast switch on. Eg, even by Mission 7 of Doom 2 (Dead Simple), as soon as you lower that start wall, you are dead in literally 2.5 seconds if you don't immediately move. The new Doom 1 Episode Sigil starts the same way even in the first level E5M1. Most new shooters still don't come close to that level of throwing you in the deep end difficulty. Instead they often fake difficulty by requiring you to do gimmicky things like the "glory kills" in order to "play properly" whilst still very much being "designed for controller auto-aim" for regular gameplay.

One way to find out: Fire up some of the old classics and see if you can still do it :-)

Speaking for myself: My skills (reaction times and precision) have degraded horribly, but I think it's not only the age, but simply lack of practice. Back in the day I could play for hours on end and first person shooters were my favourite genre for years. Nowadays I don't have that much time to play, and then I now prefer slower, deeper games like RPGs. A friend of mine about the same age, without a family and also with gaming as main hobby still plays shooters often and still plays - and beats - all the games on hard.

Another thing is that gameplay flow has changed considerably since the classic era of Quake and DN3D. The old games were optimized for mouse and keyboard, requiring to turn around in the blink of an eye when monsters appeared right behind you, and circle-strafing the big guys. Modern games have to work with controllers where those moves are hard or impossible to pull off, so they demand different movement patterns, more like popping in and out of cover getting a few shots in while moving laterally, while enemies appear mostly in front of you. It's a "different dance" so to speak, and sticking to the old movement patterns when the game wants to be played differently could also make it harder.

Also the "playing ground" has often been reduced considerably. In older games you would often backtrack through the whole level picking up leftover health- and ammo-packs you saved. Modern games usually shut off the way back rather quickly, the only way is ever forward. So when, in old Doom or Quake, you wouldn't pick up a health pack +20 with 88 life, because you'd waste some, in modern games you take it, because a few rooms later it's impossible to get back to get it anyway. And lack of quicksave in many games also adds to a perceived increase of difficulty, even if the fights themselves aren't really harder than in other games which have it.

And a last thing I noticed switching between old and new(ish) games is that the level of detail in modern games can also add to difficulty. The levels and areas are way more "cluttered" with stuff. All those props and decorations not only block your view but also hinder movement. I never got stuck between an office chair and a potted plant in Quake ;-)

I pretty recently finished W:TNO too (on medium), and didn't find it that hard tbh. Only the last boss fight was a bit frustrating.

Most probably a mixture of both.
As we age, our reflexes and eye/hand coordination are degrading - that's just natural.
Also: we usually don't have the same "level of practice" anymore as we had when we were kids/teenagers.
Real life obligations of a grown up simply get in the way of hour long gaming sessions.

In regard to the "are action games actually getting harder?" part: yes, they do.
I assume, that has something to do with the fact that no other words in this post-"Dark Souls" world plant more fear in the hearts of developers around the globe, than the words "too easy", if put in reviews.
Being seen as "too easy" seem to be the worst fate, any post-DS-game can succumb to. Good idea in general.
But the controls of the classics might throw a wrench into the gears of this measure of checking.
For me personally, the hardest part of re-playing my old favourites, is actually getting used to their archaic control schemes again.
And of course that makes it hard (at least at the beginning) to play through the levels with the same "ease" as I did play through them 15 to 20 years ago.

Really? Controls in PC shooters have been by default, or can be mapped to, WASD like... forever. I played DN3D, Quake and even Doom this way - well actually I used SZXC back then, coming from Ultima Underworld and System Shock, but that's really a small difference.

What irks me is that in modern games use is most often by default on "E" - which some games need for "Lean Right".

It could be. Usually, a person's vision and hand/eye coordination and manual dexterity in their hands all deteriorate as they age.

That's why most eSports pro players are in their 20's. Because once they get older, they naturally lose the high degree of physical aptitude in their fingers that is necessary to play at a pro level.

As for are shooters getting harder: I don't know, but they are sure are getting dumber are more silly and way more fast-paced than they need to be or should be... it's like they were made for players who are constantly hopped-up on the illicit street drug called "speed." FPS games like that make me cringe.

And so too does DRM, and all of which aforementioned factors have kept me away from playing the latest two so-called "Doom" games (but they aren't at all like the real/original/legit Doom games anyway, so that's no big loss).

I certainly have a lot less patience with games than I did 20+ years ago.

There are games that I know I completed that I wouldn't dream of replaying today. I can no longer imagine throwing hours upon hours at sierra style dead ends, replaying the game just to look for that one different pixel.

Similarly I expect I would have spent hours practising/replaying levels in shooters, but I have no memory of doing so.

For me at least, rose tinted glasses are part of the answer.

one thing that can be said of aging is that, in the most common of cases you are more aware of all kinds of dangers and take precautions based on that experience.

screaming waaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh running through hall ways placing your bet on a gamesystem that expects you to behave like an idiot will most of the time become more harder on older levels until you find the realization that it A not dangers you in any way, B the system is written in a idiotic way, C berserking can be quite fun

We do start to get slower before age 35 or so but experience and practise can hide it well.

Getting slower may be the first sign of some disease, severe or not. Maybe look into that.

Gaming is a skill and it can deteriorate like any other skill. If you aren't playing FPS games as much as in the past, then the cause is simply lack of practice. Age will make for small differences, but you suddenly won't become useless at FPS games because you got old.

With enough practice, you can play whatever. Just load up some Unreal Tournament, play a deathmatch with bots and go at it.

Great insightful post! IIRC, in the original Doom (if you don't use 3rd party software) you can't remap controls, at least not in-game. I've played through Doom (1993) a few years ago using the default keyboard controls without mouse - arrow keys, Ctrl for shooting, ALT for strafing, number keys for weapon switching, Space for doors - and after an initial phase of getting accustomed to it, it worked perfectly fine. But that's also because Doom doesn't require precision shooting and has some sort of auto-aim, too. (It was actually a good game to play on my laptop while traveling or sitting on the couch. I don't usually play action games on it that require a mouse for turning the camera because I only have a touchpad on that one.) To be fair, in Sierra games you could save everywhere, so I think you're mixing two different issues here, the hardcore "start from scratch" approach of e.g. old platformers and Sierra's annoying "trial and error" gameplay. But I can totally relate to having no patience for both anymore.

Thanks :-)

You could remap controls in setup.exe (https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Setup_program). I've always played Doom with M+K :-)
Did a lot for my mousing precision since you totally want to avoid moving forward and backward while moving it left and right to turn...
The source ports got rid of that problem since you can either turn off moving by mouse (which feels weird) or is translated to looking up and down (which - in Doom - also feels weird). ;-) Fast-paced in the sense of in-game kaboom and scripted sequences maybe, but not in terms of game speed. Gameplay in the original Doom or Quake is insanely fast compared to modern shooters IMO.

If anything I think the old shooters were harder, but they could feel easier because if needed you could just save scum your way out of anything. Shoot hit, save, shoot hit, save, shoot hit save. Until you got the perfect sequence and won. Not saying you always played that way, but you could when you had to. Even a complete nuff nuff could eventually brute force their way through the old shooters by save scumming. But in check pointed games the dev is telling you 'this chunk of game play is your challenge and you have to learn how to do it and if you can't, git gudder or turn the difficulty down".

Edit: The New Colossus they brought back save anywhere...and consequently they had to ramp up the enemies (way more bullet spongy) to make the challenge higher when taking save scumming into account. So TNC feels a lot more like the old shooters compared to TNO and Old Blood.

The key word here is could. An option is always better than forcing something like checkpoints on the player. Nothing like wasting time due to idiotic checkpoint placement or creating inconsistencies because of their weird behavior. If you save scum to the detriment of your enjoyment, you have no one to blame but yourself. Thinking about the save system in Doom 2016 still gives me the creeps... One of the main things that can make me stop playing a game is a horrible save system.

Reading in your post that New Colossus has manual saving, I might actually try that game out even though New Order was nothing spectacular.