Is racewar seething at my posts by any chance? I've got him on ignore.
We're not talking modern day laziness or indian-coded, poorly optimised cookie-cutter slop, this started in 2008, the industry was, as far as I'm concerned, all over bar the screaming come 2010 and Kinect and the move towards a new revenue stream of gamers that were consooomer addicted paypigs was no coincidence.
The industry wanted to sell slop to the cattle because they would eat it up without question. 15 years later, here we are.
That doesn't excuse what happened to the quality and scope of games. How many open world, proper open world, games came out last gen? Bethesda and R* skipped an entire generation after supplying multiple games in the previous gen.
It's fair to say that Unreal 5 has caused a homogenisation of games, like the piss-filter and "everything is brown" during the xbox 360's latter years, however that doesn't discount or discredit the fact that with more power than ever before, we are unable to match the quality and ability of 20 year old games, let alone the writing, AI and physics.
"line must go up" and incompetence counts for some of it, for sure, but all of it? Look at the GTA remaster/remakes or Resident evil remakes or Saints row remakes or Halo or Gears of war or Oblivion. Dragons Dogma 2 doesn't look far different from the original but melts top end PC's because of the CPU restraints.
And when was the last time a game pushed every boundary in the industry? Where are the half-lifes and the crysis games? Lack of want or desire is a bullshit excuse considering there are more gamers today than there ever have been in history, yet the relatively tiny numbers of gamers kept the industry thriving for three decades.
Not that data scraping is a conspiracy theory when both EA and Activision had presentations leaked from 15+ years ago stating how they change the difficulties and match-ups based on the emotion of the player, all collated through tonality, rhythm speed and pitch of voice, play style, play pattern (are they changing tactics due to anger and fatigue) all to sell you more DLC and special offers.
Which is no different from phone companies using your location data and location patterns on your phones to detect if you're asleep, hungry or bored, so to spam you with better targeted ads'.
Which is nothing compared the routers that can accurately map your house in real time 3d and sell the data so above companies for better marketing.
If anything, the conspiracy should be; knowing all of this, why the fuck aren't more people mad?