but this is the start of a new generation!
Consider me schooled.
Seriously though, I just don't like the direction that games are going in. I've built up a mighty library of games over the past seven years (holy fuck! Has it really been that long!?), but the more recent the games are, the bigger the increase in trends I dislike. And I don't see any sign of them being halted--especially not with EA controlling most of the market share.
Don't get me wrong. I like the more environmentally friendly tropes we're treated to nowadays. I'm very happy with the fact that wall-hugging, strafing, climbing, and third-person perspective are becoming more standardized. But more and more often, I'm finding that developers feel that they can just work on these presentational aspects and forget about everything else. What ends up suffering the most in this arrangement is the story. In which case, I've had my heart broken way too many times this gen.
I'm sure everyone is familiar with the problems I had with Mass Effect. I tend to see the same problems from that game manifesting in other franchises that I find are suffering. Individual franchises seem to just be passed through too many hands throughout the development process. And what's more, their developments become way too dependent upon extraneous pop-cultural shit and producer decisions to be coherent products.
The Mass Effect trilogy was developed over the better part of a decade in the midst of a gaming culture that was still discovering new mechanics, which were evolving according to fan popularity. As a result, the genre became more confused the more the mechanics changed. Compounding this issue, the franchise switched writers three times and changed owners once. To that end, Mass Effect 1 cannot be compared to Mass Effect 2 cannot be compared to Mass Effect 3 cannot be compared to Mass Effect 1.
A more recent example of butchering is going to be Hitman: Absolution. All the modern tropes (and then some) are applied and then bundled with a shitty derivative story that just jettisons the relevance of the previous games. And I was never a big Splinter Cell fan, but even I could tell that Conviction was a fucking slap in the face to all the iterations that came before it.
It is for this reason the I'm going to attempt to move away from franchise-based games and more towards one-shots...God willing developers are able to invest time in such animals. Naughty Dog's The Last of Us has potential as that type of game.
