By that logic, I could argue that you lower your standards to help justify the $50 you waste on games that aren't very good (like Spore).

No one likes a person who complains about a free meal.

I like to think of being "jaded" as simply expecting games to have at least the same depth, challenge and sophistication that they had a decade ago. That said, if I praise a new game, there's a very good chance that the game doesn't suck.

They sell more copies by making it more accessible, meaningful choice doesn't mean anything if it isn't enjoyable. If game production budgets weren't 20 million dollars then perhaps they would be more willing to take a risk. Maybe if more people like you bought the game instead of torrenting it then they might have some leeway to take risks. Many developers sit on the razor's edge of making and losing money and basically just hope to continue the next project.

Finally, you have the advent of consoles taking on many of the capabilities of the PC. Unfortunately memory remains a constraint and their video capabilities are well below an average gamer videocard. This prevents many developers from going through with "meaningful choices" or "complexity" as the entire market is shifting towards cross-platform games. It's easy for you to say "well make the PC version with a different team" but you aren't the one who has to pay a staff of 30+ to do so.

Half of the projects at PAX for the PC were MMO games, how do you design meaningful choices in that genre? Honestly it sounds to me like you aren't really a PC gamer anymore anyways, you might as well just give up. You can sit around lamenting that there is no Baldur's Gate 3, that you can't murder some anonymous quest NPC, that the dev's didn't let you have skill stat progression in your FPS or you could just attempt to enjoy the games for what they are.

Now, don't you think you've trolled FC2 enough? The game comes out in a month and we can all judge for ourselves.

This comment was edited on Sep 10, 08:24.