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[Man of Paper]

Casual Morrowind: Remove unused weapons such as spears and crossbows, and a few other skills. Merge axes with clubs. Remove skill and stat requirements for joining guilds. Add constant mana regeneration. Add aggressive auto-balancing. Shift design direction from large amounts of text to a shorter story with less dialogue and all of it voice-acted. Reduce number of player choices in quest style.

Casual Oblivion: Remove stats. Merge all weapons into two categories. Add constant health regneration. Shift design direction to a shorter story with less dialogue. Add stoy justification for most NPCs liking the PC on sight and cooperating with him. Reduce number of player choices in quest style.

Casual Skyrim: Remove skills. Merge all skill checks into a single "level" stat. Remove bothersome "Health" and "Mana" concepts. Story consists of "There's some bandits over there." and "Thank you for killing the bandits!". PC is the one hero destined to save the world, and every single living person likes him. The other multiplayer PCs are also the single hero destined to save the world.

While I can't speak for Morrowind, Skyrim is already a casual game.  Its designed so that you can go anywhere and not have to worry about how hard the enemies will be (level scaling), the difficulty is low unless you build your character a certain way, there's no punishment for death and your character is a crazy ultimate hero that can do pretty much anything including leading multiple guilds that are opposed to each other.  Oblivion is essentially the same game but harder and less balanced.

On top of that, the whole experience is pretty cheerful.  Yeah if you pay attention to the plot there's some depression stuff going on, but the experience as a whole involves a lot of success for your character, and a lot of bright colors and cool looking landscapes.  Compare say the Witcher where everything is drab, everyone is racist against you, and every decision you make leads to some depressing outcome or another.

I dunno if you got the joke, but just to clear up what I think's going on:

PTTG is making the sad honest joke that Oblivion casualized Morrowind, as Skyrim was to Oblivion. You probably got that, but I figure I might as well make sure everyone gets it.

EDIT: WAIT! Does the last bit refer to the MMO? I haven't kept up on it, but that'd be the icing on the cake.

[wer6]

How to casualize aliens, colonial marines

Make the xenos look cute, remove guns and instead so that its A rock siccors paper deal, where xenos swallow humans  hole, predators slice up xenos into Sushi, and humans hug the predators to death, you can use rocks to kill those who can kill you, but it is very hard to aim.

[EnigmaticHat]

I dunno if you got the joke

No, I didn't get the joke.  :/  To be fair, I started the series at Oblivion, so I didn't have that much data to work with.

I thought PTTG was another poster here who thinks that casual = simple and stupid while hardcore = good.

[Soadreqm]

Casual Daggerfall:
Make the map smaller. The world being the size of Great Britain* looks great on the box, but no one walks to walk across that. Instead, dump the procedural generation and built the map by hand to get more interesting things in a smaller space. Cull some of the less useful niche skills, like etiquette, climbing, medicine and all the separate languages. Streamline character generation by axing the special advantages and disadvantages. Also remove random rolling for attributes. Remove the effects from time passing, and the requirement to summon Daedric princes on specific days.
*Estimates vary from half the size of Great Britain to twice the size of Great Britain. Suffice to say, it's big.

[Nighthawk]

Hardcore Minecraft Survival Mode:
- Furnaces must be made out of smoothstone, not cobble. That is all.

[Sergarr]

Casual Daggerfall:
Make the map smaller. The world being the size of Great Britain* looks great on the box, but no one walks to walk across that. Instead, dump the procedural generation and built the map by hand to get more interesting things in a smaller space. Cull some of the less useful niche skills, like etiquette, climbing, medicine and all the separate languages. Streamline character generation by axing the special advantages and disadvantages. Also remove random rolling for attributes. Remove the effects from time passing, and the requirement to summon Daedric princes on specific days.
*Estimates vary from half the size of Great Britain to twice the size of Great Britain. Suffice to say, it's big.

So, casual Daggerfall is Morrowind, right?

[itisnotlogical]

Casual Daggerfall:
Make the map smaller. The world being the size of Great Britain* looks great on the box, but no one walks to walk across that. Instead, dump the procedural generation and built the map by hand to get more interesting things in a smaller space. Cull some of the less useful niche skills, like etiquette, climbing, medicine and all the separate languages. Streamline character generation by axing the special advantages and disadvantages. Also remove random rolling for attributes. Remove the effects from time passing, and the requirement to summon Daedric princes on specific days.
*Estimates vary from half the size of Great Britain to twice the size of Great Britain. Suffice to say, it's big.

I actually wouldn't mind more hand-crafted content in Daggerfall. It gets frustrating to navigate when every single town is made up of the same handful of buildings plopped on the ground with no rhyme or reason. And culling the useless skills (not climbing, but definitely the languages) would be a welcome change. That, or make language more useful.

Casual Halo:
Halo 2.

Casual Quake 3:
There are now cover mechanics. All platforming elements (jump pads, rocket jumping, bottomless pits) are removed, so the maps are now flat planes with some obstacles on them. The Gauntlet is actually useful, turning melee combat into a one-hit-kill quick time event. All the interesting characters have been removed, so now it's power-armored space marines versus other space marines. All modding support has been removed, the game is now closed-source. There are no more bots.

[Sergarr]

There are no more bots.

Now explain to me how that's casual.

[itisnotlogical]

There are no more bots.

Now explain to me how that's casual.

I dunno. I got caught up in removing features and didn't really think it through.

[qwertyuiopas]

Hardcore Minecraft Survival Mode:
- Furnaces must be made out of smoothstone, not cobble. That is all.

So, you have to make an iron pick from zombie-dropped or dungeon ingots, mine enough diamonds for a pick and enchanting table, and then grind enchants until you get silk touch? Or just go off and search for the nearest village with a blacksmith?

More interestingly, the Better Than Wolves mod, especially after recent updates, makes the game far more difficult to start out, but so much more rewarding once you finally get a good base set up, so it would actually qualify as a hardcore Minecraft. Unlike quite a few of the hardcore game variations described in this thread that are basically tedious or impossible to play, and nobody would ever actually find fun...

[MadMalkavian]

If you want to make any role-playing game, first-person shooter or any other game that may require you to save during gameplay hardcore or even more-so, enable permadeath and delete the save once you die. Furthermore remove any and all quicksave and/or autosave features. The permadeath bit could also be done to any game which gives you multiple lives, like Super Mario Brothers for example.

Also someone on modthesims.info suggested a challenge for The Sims 2: Seasons where you make a sim, have them purchase the biggest plot of land available and build a farm with the rest of that while only allowing yourself to eat what you grow and only make money by selling crops. I tried that once and it was hard but doable.

[WillowLuman]

Permadeath minecraft on the highest difficulty (aka the default "hardcore mode") is fairly challenging but rewarding. Hunger becomes a major, major threat...

I'll agree that most of the Hardcore/Casual variations presented in this thread have been on the extreme end, likely either for humor or bashing the concept of hardcore or casual.

[exdeathbr]

Hardcore chess
No 2-step rules/ enpassant
No threefold repetition rules
No castling
No check/mate rules
The game ha 500 move rule instead of the 50 one.
You can only claim the 500-move rule, after it happened, if you are going to make the move that will make the 500-move rule happen you cant request a draw at this same turn.

Casual Chess
If the enemy attack you but would not be able to capture because this would put his king into check, this doenst count as check.
King can also castle with queenside knight.
Pawn can move to or capture on any of the three squares immediately in front.

Will try to make a zillion of games version of the games.

[Sergarr]

Hardcore chess
[snip]
No check/mate rules

Wait, what?

[Grakelin]

I assume you have to actually murder the King in person.