There's a real element of "they changed it, now it sucks" in this, isn't there? This must be a horrible position for the developers to be in; change too much and they get comments like this, not change enough and they get accused of stagnating or recycling the same game over and over (like what happened to id in the late 90s).

I don't have a lot of sympathy for a lot of game devs....because so much of what they get wrong is so utterly obvious, it seems that they must be doing it deliberately to piss players off.

Such as:

Unbindable controls
Fixed FOV
Un-disablable headbob
Unskippable intro movies / adverts
Unskippable dialogue / cutscenes
Bad save points before such cutscenes
Bad save points related to boss battles
Missing or ineffective skill settings
Onscreen instructions still with console button hints
Wasteful design requiring invisible barriers to herd player.

All of which happen too much in modern games, and almost all of which were the sort of things we could take for granted in older games. Quake I can rebind my keys to play with my dick if I want, just from simple menus. Quake2 if I wanted to skip the intro "cinematic" then I could just do with without editing a fucking .ini file. Unreal if I wanted to save right before fighting a Titan because hey common fucking sense I might die and not want to replay the whole level, then I could.

I know this isn't the main issue, but when a major dev releases a full finished game, that apparently has been playtested, and does something as amazingly fucking stupid as put a savepoint before a long cutscene before a tough arena battle, and somehow thinks that having to rewatch the cutscene every time you reload is a good idea....They deserve to have a horrible time. 

 

Bad save points before such cutscenes.

I think there's a special cauldron in hell for devs that place a savepoint before cutscenes. 

In the 90s games were made for PC dorks that probably had to have a lot of patience and some technical skill to even get the fucking thing to work in the first place. Game design could be more challenging, non-linear and exploratory because you had these people's attention by the very nature of them.

Games these days are hugely expensive to make and designed to sell to a casual mass market that will get bored in the first ten minutes unless you hit them over the head with easy, non-confusing, visually spectacular fluff.

You are not going to see a big-budget game made with 90s design sensibilities. You might still see it in the indie scene.

Or just shut up and play Dark Souls. 

Very insightful thread about a topic that was never discussed on func before. Surely it will invoke constructive and interesting discussions. 

In the 90s games were made for PC dorks that probably had to have a lot of patience and some technical skill to even get the fucking thing to work in the first place.

I find it's worse today. The amount of .ini hunting and editing you have to do to get basical functionality like FOV 90 or something...!

The rest of your post....maybe... 

as machinegames and avalanche studios still manage to make proper games (wolf: tno, tob or mad max respectively). i think it mostly depends on a studio and on how people in there motivated to make certain title.
if they're under top management press to produce boring bollox (even if it's franchise but they're forced to make it as being said) there's no hope, if they're passionate of what they're making and have certain freedom then there's good result.
so i think it's getting harder for big studios with big publishers to make something original nowadays due to costs and pressing from indie devs with their originality.

ps. mad max fanboy here. 

I find it's worse today. The amount of .ini hunting and editing you have to do to get basical functionality like FOV 90 or something...!

Ah yes but you're not supposed to be changing the FOV. Configurable FOV is never part of modern game design and probably hasn't been since, I dunno, 1999? In fact, only someone who was brought up on Quake would even think of doing that. It's a dev feature at best, like all the hundreds of other obscure tweaks and cheats you can muck around with in that .ini file. 

Quake was a 4 person/5 person team of kids making a game. Kids still make games today.

Some of them are incredible:

Check out Unturned made by a 16 year old. It is a zombie survival game with crafting, vehicles, deathmatch and coop, a myriad of items.

Video: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/2032712/movie_max.webm?t=1402962994

http://store.steampowered.com/app/304930/ <--- notice the 160,000 ratings. The game is $5, but there are purchasable items.

This isn't the only example, but is exceptionally notable because it was work of a 16-year old. 

Stop hacking, hackerfuck 

several modern games i played recently had fov slider! (still sadly limited by 100 or even 90 degs) but yea, general trend sucks.. 

In spite of their many flaws, I've really enjoyed the trend of a few modern games (like Resident Evil: Revelations 2 and Alien: Isolation) to rely on the thematic roots of their respective franchises while still being treated as modern releases.

Sometimes that works really well. Revelations 2 plays in every way SO much better than RE5 or RE6 and is still a spooky and goofy third-person shooter, and we'll see what the RE2 remake will be like - while sometimes it doesn't work so well, like Alien, which, as much as I loved it, was yet another stealth/craft/shoot AAA title that a lot of people didn't bother to finish. 

I definitely play more modern indie than AAA games but that's mostly because my newest console is a PS2 and my Macbook has Intel HD graphics (and frankly at this point even new indie games are starting to outstrip my system). I might as well get a PS3 at this point but the only games I care about for it are Demon's Souls/Dark Souls and Deadly Premonition. The Last of Us is great too (despite some flaws) but I already played it on a former roommate's console.

Indie games are cool because there are tons of young devs out there with lots of news ideas, as well as people who are making loving "retro" titles, usually in the vein of 2D action games and platformers, adventure games, or vaguely Earthbound-ish RPGs (Undertale, Lisa, OFF, etc.). Then again there's a glut of arty-farty games with really terrible writing that get heaps of praise for some reason, Dear Esther and Her Story being the worst offenders imo.

Unfortunately you won't see much nowadays like the games Shambler mentioned, afaik but hey�there's always mods and custom levels. Do you *really* need a Thief reboot when there are lots of quality fan missions out there? Still, I'm waiting for a small team to do the equivalent of a Cave Story or Shovel Knight for old school FPS.