This is not really a rant rather than an observation that no doubt lot of us have shared, and intends to collectively ponder on the reasons why.
This trend involves many more titles than the few that I am about to list, but should you agree with the notion you are welcome to add to it.
Titles that I've personally been rather upset about: ME from 1 to 3 consistently getting dumbed down to a remarkably unimpressive experience.
As much immersion ME3 might've lacked, for me it did not compete with DA2 which I found to be an utter and complete waste of my time. Given how much I truly enjoyed DA:O (fck it, its DA1 for me, end of story) I am willing to forget about the bust sequel and pretend everything will be fine with the third.
The whole Aliens and AVP series: I have played Colonial Marines, and regret the space it took on my hard drive. Articles from this year discussing Obsidians Aliens RPG that got flushed in 2009 are partly to blame for this thread.
Star Wars RPG line: SWTOR was-is an utter, unimmersive and uninteresting mess of mmo grind randomness, seasoned only with the abundant bugs I experienced daily when I played it.
Having not played latest Hitman, I can merely rely on the feedback that seems to indicate this enduring franchise followed the same path.
For many reasons, DX:HR and TES series seemed to have followed the very same pattern, but in both cases the previous release was so bad that they actually managed to improve upon that, breaking the linear decay of content playability.
Now, many gamers seem to have agreed with this without me having necessarily spoken up about it. I see complaints about ruined franchises all the time, but when it comes to this type of trend then the feedback seems to be absolutely overwhelming. The very few that are completely happy about where the titles have ended up at must feel very special, but gaming community is hundreds of millions, not to add a zero there, and you cannot disappoint absolutely every single gamer.
But, I wonder, why is that? Regardless of the typical elements of improvement developers have to try and follow (cheapest ways of pushing new titles next gen without it being next gen ) it is quite obvious that for them to have hugely successful sales (which AAA titles naturally target) they must have some kind of understanding of player base preferences. *Why* is it that in spite of all the corporate data mining and analysing capacity the majority could agree the titles are being dumbed down? Am I missing something here, such as something like the intended target customer lacking capacity for literacy?It is also rather impossible to blame the average console gamer or the involved tech handicaps here since several of mentioned successful titles were only ported to PC to begin with.
Why is that games have been consistently going shit past.. decade? Increase in gaming populace aside, is there a crucial mistake the developer predictions have made, or does it really do just come down to that? Super expensive games that push shinies (and often failing at that) but completely disregard the rest of the content.
Ragnar Tørnquist argued against George Lucas' comment about games being not nearly as involving or immersive as movies currently can be, stating the complete opposite. After experiencing many fantastic games, I fully agree with that, but yet I see the trend actually taking after Lucas' opinion of games. Games that are supposedly revolving around story are becoming quickly inferior to movies (or in some cases they are becoming movies!) which is *not* why I started playing games to begin with.