Later series being easier - what is the cause?

[Fidjit]

My opinion on Series III:

Team I: Stepped in quicksand... Didn't last ten minutes!

Team II: McGrew was a little late in saying he'll do anything if they'd dispelled!

Team III: That charm was very difficult to use, but never held out hope on them anyway...

Team IV: A winner-to-be, this team had evrything to combat the dungeon... Matthew was quick with spells but they fell off the same ledge as team III did? Curious?

Team V: Quite poor, surely they can see there was no ledge there!

Team VI: Just like team IV a winner-to-be, but just stepped a little too far near the edge

Team VII: Bit slow to start with, but Grimwold made it quick at the end

Team VIII: Very poor no point going on!

Team IX: Walked forward as Scott recovered from his jump

Team X: This team was good but one out of two with Merlin spelt the end of their quest

Team XI: Like Leo and Ross

Team XII: Slow but confident, but lost due to EOS

[Crazedhefer]

Several things made the later series easier than the earlier ones:

1). In the early parts of the quest (level 1 in particular) mercy was shown to teams who made errors, for example letting a team from series 5 (not sure which one) survive despite not taking the token (arrow) to show to Gwendoline. In earlier series, this would have been punished.

2). 'Filler' rooms. In seasons 1-3, survival in almost every chamber was considered an achievement. In seasons 4-8 there were a lot of rooms where it was practically impossible to die, which meant that they were only there to advance the quest. This took away a lot of momentum by eliminating the sense of being constantly on edge that the early series carried.

3). The introduction of scrolls and spyglasses obviously changed things. The idea that scrolls would give cryptic hints as to which clue items to take was great, but spyglasses were too easy to obtain. Teams should have been made to earn them.

4). Finally, one gets the feeling that quests weren't original enough. The biggest problem was that every quest seemed to follow a familiar pattern- get some clue objects, trade one of the objects with a character for a password, negotiate a floor puzzle, find a way to progress to the next level. What happened to "Any knowledge of previous quests will be of little use"?

      Despite this, I don't think that Knightmare ever became too easy.  It was still a prestigeous and rewarding honour to beat the dungeon with that one win per series average maintained.  And lest we forget that in series five, only two people reached level three and three for series six, so they must have been doing something right.



     Jeez, that was long!  Those are my thoughts anyway.

[Quitch]

I think that had a lot to do with no matter how easy you make it, some people still don't know left from right

[Willowherb]

I think there may well have been a change in how they saw their potential audience throughout the entire run of Knightmare, ie. they were shooting for a younger age-group at the end than at the beginning. This idea seems to show in the lighter, more comic atmosphere KM had latterly, with serious characters like Lord Fear becoming humorous (although I don't actually mind that in the case of Mark Knight - there was a really good rapport with Cliff Barry, who played Lissard). But he wasn't the only one - Sylvester Hands was definitely a semi-threatening character when he was first introduced and then gradually just became comical. Also, Treguard in the first 2 or 3 series was on the side of the Dungeon and they certainly weren't providing any helpers for the teams, whereas later there was Pickle, then Majida. Perhaps after a win-free season (series 3) someone on the production team thought that extra assistance was a good idea. Not all of these changes were a bad thing, but it's certainly hard to compare series 1 or 2 with series 8 - and of course, the changes didn't actually create any more winners in the end anyway. So it probably looked easier (and sometimes less interesting) for us, but was no easier for the teams involved.