Do you guys remember when the majority of the challenge with a fancy new game was finishing it? It's one of the things I find quite striking about this cancerous 'modern game design'. It's almost like with advertising online where the goal isn't to engage you with something genuinely interesting it's to practically force you to at any cost to keep you clicked onto something or watch something.
So as long as big studios see numbers go up and their player count being maintained, they're happy. Doesn't matter to them if they get 100,000 negative reviews on steam they'll just chug along going "Well those people might all be complaining but we've got 300,000 players durrr". Which is another example of how people who don't fucking play video games have taken over this industry.
The first descendent and once human seem to be classic examples of this mentality and explains to me at least a bit of why the studios refuse to give a shit. No peasant, how dare you demand good gameplay in a game, you're supposed to become a mentally ill skin addict and grind for hours to keep our numbers up or pay us money if you can't be bothered doing that.
Oh and of course I can't forget the cancer that is skill based matchmaking.
Yeah, that's been a big dissuader of mine in trying any new online only kind of game.
They do not put any value on the player's time to collect all those items or do all those dailies or whatever. Instead of just being fun and unique and interesting, it has to have a checklist of all the same things every other online game has to keep you connected and hopefully spending.
Too much stick to carrot ratio. From this player's standpoint, it's hard to justify every single online game having a to do list bigger than the real one I'm avoiding doing, just to play video games in my free time.
I don't know whether that's just the state of the medium right now due to pressure to make more money, or the state of those who are paid to be in it and make games who would rather be doing something else and are on the same auto pilot as the players. Or maybe both.