[Raapys]

What you're promoting here is game design by committee.

One of the greatest games of all time(subjectively, as with everything else), Fallout, used a total of 14 designers, numbers from Mobygames. Baldur's Gate 2 used 8 total.

On any given day, thousands of people make posts to gaming forums that copy the opinions of other people so that they will feel accepted by the other denizens.

If I wanted to feel accepted, wouldn't I be agreeing with you? Someone had to come up with those opinions too. Couldn't I be one of them? Or would that be too inconvenient for your arguements?

An unlimited list of features will take an unlimited amount of time to complete. Trying to implement every single feature you might initially want means that you will never release your finished product.

And putting alot of your resources and time into graphics means you will have a very short list of features indeed.

What is wrong with that list of features you just presented?

Nothing, if you want to make just another clone to milk some cash out of the market. In other words, it's good for the guys selling it, but bad for the customers. "Bad how", you ask, "They're getting a game they can enjoy for 10 hours!".
Well, it's not really bad by itself. But do some comparing.

Baldur's Gate 2 offers, what, 100-200 hours of play to finish it, depending on play style? Add to that the ability to create different character, have a different party, do the quests another way, etc. Then take your regular Joe First Person Shooter with shiny graphics. You play through it in 5-10 hours, someday you might even go through it again , so you get 10-20 hours out of the box. Now, one would think the price difference between these games would be huge, since they offer such widely different amounts of content. So, is it? No. You pay the same, but what you get can't even be compared.

Who says that they aren't? There's no benefit in adding features to a game just for the sake of adding features.

Of course not. It's about adding features for the sake of gameplay and depth, a missing concept in today's games.

So what's wrong with the length of HL2?

It's too short. Heck, even Deus Ex, a game that has *far* more gameplay elements and features than Half-Life 2, was over twice as long as it, and even more enjoyable to play.

Why don't you present some actual examples of games where the stall and diminish then.

TES Oblivion, Age of Empires 3, Civ4, Deus Ex 2, Might & Magic 9, Heroes of M&M 5,
the unlimited amount of Doom clones, not to mention the C&C clones, etc.

Now, of course, you wont agree with that at all, because if you did we wouldn't even be having this discussion. So let me just say that I think all these games have been 'victim' of one or more of the following, you don't, and let's leave it at that: dumbing down for mass appeal, lack of innovation, too much focus on graphics, console conversion, lack of vision( i.e. just want to make a game that sell, no passion behind it).

The strategic layer of Mount and Blade is little more than a simplified version of Pirates!, a game first released in 1993

"Note that there is absolutely no requirement for innovation for a game to be considered a good game."

As for SEIV, to me it's already a great game: far greater than uncountable high-budget ones. The modding part of the game is a feature that definitely helps keep it fresh, but the best part of the game is the crazy number of gameplay features it offers, compared to any other game in the genre.

you might want to go play some Autoduel. You must think it's one of the best games ever.

Never tried it. I regularly play oldies, though. For instance the adventure games from Lucas Arts, Pizza Tycoon, X-com, Daggerfall, Imperialism, Capitalism, Reunion, System Shock, and many more.

You do have access to the games of the nineties.

Nevermind my point that games from the 90's blow the water out of today's.

Or are you going to tell me next that Dune 2 is a better game that Rise of Legends because the graphics are worse in Dune 2.

If I was gonna tell you Dune 2 was a better game, graphics wouldn't even enter in to the post. That's how much I care about them. There's two things that enter in. Gameplay and atmosphere/feeling. Now, graphics does enter in on that last point, but not the technical quality of it, but rather what mood it creates, how it fits the game, how it works with the music, etc. Daggerfall, for instance, is one of the most immersive games I know of( much thanks to the music), even though the graphics were considered average 10 years ago.