Naturally, you'd misplace your laptop of course! :)

Actually I know a number of people who literally loathe The Witcher 2 even though they loved The Witcher 1, myself included. :P

I think it's less a shift in what "people" want but an indication that games have reached the mainstream, making the audience of "people" bigger and more diversified. That's a good thing if the results are more - and more diversified - gaming options, but it can also be bad and sad if it makes developers and publishers cater only to common denominators and mass appeal and forget about that specific old core audience with a preference for PC single player games that's become a niche in comparison to the new mass audience. With the rise of indies and the oversaturated market, I don't really see that scenario yet, IMO there's still something for everyone, but I can also understand why someone would perceive the new developments as a threat to what they love.

My personal pet peeve is that it's become harder to search for "games" that might interest me, because of a lack of clear distinctions between various preferences and systems. Someone interested in "games" doesn't automatically like any "game", regardless of system, device or playmode. Lists diluted with mobile, multiplayer, F2P etc. are useless to me if I'm not specifically looking for those types of games. But that's not really a new problem, just try looking for "best RPGs" and have fun sorting PC from console, CRPG from JRPG, etc. ;)

I'm also sceptical of statistics describing how many people are gamers or play games nowadays, because I think there's still a big difference in whether someone is e.g. a PC gaming geek or if they just play Sudoku apps on their phone on the way to work, and often these statistics don't really make those distinctions.

(Of course, none of the above is mutually exclusive, there are lots of people who like single player and multiplayer, who play PC, console and mobile games, love CRPGs and JRPGs etc., but you can't automatically assume that everyone does.)

If you ask me, while sequels are indeed tricky there's a very clear concept on what to do on a sequel: polish. Take the Hitman, Heroes of M&M or Worms franchises for instance: they polish their game on every iteration, making it simply a better game despite not being as fresh. Problem lies on what to do once you reach an almost perfect state (Blood money or Armaggeddon): do you repeat ad nauseum or do you try something else? In either case, the key thing to do is not to forget what makes the series what it is.

I could keep ranting on this for a long time, tons of examples and discussion to be had but I'll pass for now. It may not be the thread and I don't have time right now. Maybe later.
It's a good game, just a really bad MGS game.

I've played every single one, excluding Bloodborne, and enjoyed them all. It's true that Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 did some things better than the sequels, but DkS 2 & 3 also had immense improvements in certain areas. Overall I find it very hard to pick a clear favorite.

As for the general problem, I think it's largely based on unrealistic or highly specific expectations prior to launch. That, and I get the impression many gamers can't differentiate between their own preferences and the objective quality of a game. It's perfectly fine not to like certain game mechanics, or to feel disappointed when a personal favorite game series develops in a direction away from its original roots, but none of that necessarily results in a game that is objectively bad.
Funny, because the amount and length of the cutscenes in MGS was exactly what many people complained about in the past.

Very well put. I'm ok with companies continuing series with new titles if they continue to do some combination of polish, technological improvements as PCs and other hardware grow in capability, and gameplay/story improvements and new ideas - but the new games have to still ultimately be fun. They don't even need to be mind blowingly new and unique either. Look at Tomb Raider for example. Tomb Raider 2, 3, 4, and 5 are essentially the same game engine over and over again. There are small improvements in what you can do in the game, the story etc. but they're all decent classic games. The 6th game was a big change and while visually much more appealing they made other changes to the game that irked fans of the franchise. I haven't played them all enough to know where I personally stand on the issue mind you.

What irritates me, is when a new sequel comes out where the developers make major changes to the game that take away what made it a great game to begin with. That is often the result of completely different development teams doing the sequels mind you, but sometimes even the original developers lose sight of what made their great game so great, and in their effort to "improve" it they ruin it instead.

Or, they try to milk a franchise by turning it into a cookie cutter.

Almost everything, I could easily write several pages on what was messed up in TW2 in my opinion. But to briefly list a few things:
1. The world. The first game, like the books, felt very much like it was based in a genuine medieval world, with all its dirt, all shades of brown and grey, just with folklore beliefs being real. It really felt like as much if not more effort had gone into developing a believable world with millions of meaningful subtle details as the actual events happening during the game. And you just had the story events unfold inside this world. With TW2 I did not feel it at all. It was more like the focus was on the story and the world was an afterthought. And seriously, the way the world is presented it felt more like fanfics written by people who only had a very rough idea of the universe and only based on impressions from the first game rather than the books. So the game starts with Assassin's Creed plus a dragon (gotta keep it fantasy, right?), then you have a chapter set in an area that would fit into ANY generic high fantasy RPG, then you have a chapter set in an area that's just... there, without any remarkable features. I just totally couldn't dive into the world in the second game.
2. The combat. The first game's combat wasn't great by any means but it wasn't really bad either and on harder difficulty levels it was very much about using alchemy, a very well-developed aspect of the game. The second game's combat is CRAP. It's like a shitty Souls clone developed by some tiny Eastern European shovel ware studio. The devs totally didn't get what this kind of combat is about and the technical execution is a disaster with some of the worst collision checking I have ever seen. When it's hard it's frustrating, when it's easy it's unsatisfying. It's just shit. And alchemy was so nerfed, it's not even worth the effort to go through the menus. Which leads us to the...
3. UI. OH GOD THE UI! The first game's UI wasn't exceptional but it was solid. TW2's UI, dear Lord! Unresponsive, a chore to navigate, extremely unreadable and illogically set up. Whether you play it via mouse or gamepad, it's a nightmare to use. The quick menu is anything but and the inventory and character screens seem to have been designed by a four-year-old. And combine that with an extremely extended crafting and loot system and you're constantly frustrated.
4. The game structure. The game is extremely downscaled, you have these tiny regions which are just large enough to frustrate you when dealing with quests without a quest marker. Even though the regions are a tad more open than in the first game everything just feels so tiny and condensed, all the quest givers are stuck together and outside of the pathetic towns/camps there's just nothing, just large regions with the same monsters with a few points of interest. It feels super linear, you do quests like going through checklists like in any other RPG, gone is that extremely organic design from the first game where you often feel as lost as Geralt himself but just naturally stumble upon tons of interesting things and make progress as you simply discover new characters and places, gone are these details like being approached by a generic NPC because he recognises you from events that happened many years ago etc..

So yeah, that's a few of my gripes. All in all TW1 felt like the most ambitious old-school RPG ever created, highly experimental, at times awkward but generally brilliant and set in the most developed universe I have ever seen in a game. TW2 feels like an extremely shoddily executed modern wannabe AAA game which imitates all the big games but failed at everything other than the writing and presentation. Oh, AND it failed to make good use of its universe. It looks good on screenshots but seriously, the moment you put your hands on it it feels like something created by utter amateurs. It's a feeling I couldn't shake since I first tried the game.

That said, I'm still looking forward to finally playing the third game. From what I understand they finally managed to properly execute the things which they botched in TW2 and they made better use of the source material.

Thanks for your thoughts. I enjoyed what I did play of part 2 which wasn't much, but I didn't have time to fully acclimate myself to the various changes in the UI/gameplay etc. so I was just going around mostly like a doofus just trying to see the first few hours of the game, planning to go back and restart to be more serious later. I did have great difficulty with the controls, but I did with the first game also. I find for myself that sometimes these sort of games just need some time to learn how the controls work and adjust to them for a while and then they're not too bad, but the learning curve and adjustment can be a little painful at times too. :)

Witcher 3 controls were mostly decent I found, however my one complaint about TW3 control-wise is I am a keyboard+mouse player, not a gamepad player, and I didn't like the radial wheel thing to pick spells/weapons/bombs etc. It makes total sense for a gamepad, but not for my play style. There are hotkeys also, but they are not instant-cast which annoyed me as you have to first select the sign you want and then hit Q to cast. That made me have to spend more time thinking about pressing keys than being immersed in combat. Not a massive issue as I would have adjusted over time I'm sure, but I wanted single-key sign casting ultimately. My solution was to implement it as a custom hack written in LUA with Logitech Gaming Software. I ended up with single-button sign casting on my G600 mouse side-button pad, which was _awesome_. (I posted my config in the forums here)

The 3rd game is IMHO with very little flaws, at least from my perspective. Best game I've ever played. Only a small number of irritating quirks like the sign casting mentioned above, and the others have been either resolved in future patches CDPR made for the game, or they added options to configure things, or there are mods to tweak the game for.

I vastly prefer the open world of The Witcher 3 over linear type games, but I can enjoy a good linear game too if it is good enough and has a compelling story and fun dynamic. If only there were more hours in a day... :)

Change...

Change never changes. ;)

For what it's worth, I enjoyed Witcher 2 more than Witcher 1, and Witcher 3 more than Witcher 2.

The first one has great atmosphere and story-telling, but various aspects of the gameplay felt kind of clunky to me.

Although I have to add, I actually like the character development/ level-up system in Witcher 2 better than in 3. In 2 each level-up felt exciting to me, since almost every new unlocked skill had some significant impact on gameplay. It was also much easier to create a good hybrid build character. ( I finished as a Fighter/Mage hybrid, and managed to unlock the best skills in both skill trees. ) In Witcher 3 it seems the character development is much more stretched out, due to the length of the game, and individual level-ups don't have as much impact. You're also forced to invest most points in a single skill tree, due to the point requirements of the later, more powerful skills/tiers.

Fallout comes to mind.

this. bottom line is how much money the franchise is making, if its still going on in whatever form there is a player base liking it enough to funnel funds into it, but we dont hear them posting as much as the whiners.

The problem is you're jumping off in the middle of a historical point in gaming history, many games DO get worse and if you didn't experience the games history from the beginning your opinion will be ignorant and backward to say the least. Lastly you're taking a huge diverse range of people with opinions that are not the same and trying to treat it as if they were. Gamers are not a homogeneous group. You're trying to stereotype a group of people from your vague and statistically irrelevant samples of game criticism.

Your perceptions aren't reality. The reality is the average gamer is dumb as a bag of hammers, the reason gog.com exists is because the average gamer is functionally retarded in terms of how not to spend money and reward bad business practices. It's why we have mmo's/drm out the wazoo because the vast majority are stupid.

... wut?