Watch Dogs Legion. Watch Dogs franchise in general did some interesting things.
Far Cry 5 had some fun experimentation with the structure of its open world and how story progress worked.
The Crew 2 where you could instantly switch from car, plane or boat as you traveled around.
The Watch Dogs games dipped their toes in interesting, new mechanics but none were ever well executed. By the time Legion released, I had given the series 2 chances and wasn't about to give it a third just to jump from person to person which, from every video I watched, amounted to nothing beyond a skin change. It's even included with my PS+ subscription so I could play it for free - never gonna ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Far Cry 5 was just another Far Cry game. I enjoyed it well enough, but I enjoyed it like I'll enjoy a Big Mac on occasion: nothing new, and not even particularly good, but a bit of a non-committal foray into suicide.
The Crew 2 sounds kind of interesting. But did the switching function like Ubisoft's "Steep" in which you can switch between sub-standard skiing, sub-standard snowboarding, sub-standard wingsuiting in a sterile, joyless environment? It's supposed to elicit the feeling of extreme sports, but I've felt more thrill opening tins of food that have had their label ripped off.
It's what I mean by "solid." It's all well and good having every type of food at a buffet, but if they're all poor, the variety counts for naught.
Either way, when's the last time that a Playstation game had a really solid, interesting, new mechanic in one of their big games? This clearly is not what is making or breaking games in terms of popularity and sales.
It's been a while. The public just largely hasn't cottoned on yet, and Sony's production values are high enough to distract people like jingling keys in front of a cat.
Horizon Zero Dawn was a change of pace for Guerilla and executed 3rd person shooting sufficiently well. It was intuitive and you got to blow up robot dinosaurs. It's sequel? Added status effects and elemental resistance.
God of War was a soft reboot for the series, gave a well established character some actual character, and executed 3rd person combat with some meaty heft. It's sequel? Added status effects and elemental resistance.
Spider-Man 2018 gave us the web swinging mechanics we'd been hungry for since 2004. It's sequel gave us a wingsuit. I expect the next sequel will give us status effects and elemental resistance.
Treating their Japanese studios so poorly was a bad idea that will cost them in the not too distant future.
Edit to the response for the above quote: there's also the fact that Sony seem to have managed to cultivate an audience of embarrassing lunatics of the sort who got giddy when they saw Hugh Jackman in the comic book outfit. This doesn't end well. Not for Sony, and not for their funkopop audience.
I think Ubisoft is definitely facing a problem of polarization in the gaming community, though. There's less and less tolerance for simply 'decent/good' games as gamers only want the best(or at least most popular) and everything else is piled into the 'trash' category. The consistent decline of the AA market attests to this, but AAA is not immune. I dont think $70 pricetags help, either. Further, gamers(and people in general) seem more reactionary than ever, and first impressions seem to be a lot more defining and hard to overcome if they're not extremely positive. The whole tone of discussion of any given game seems to get set pretty early on, often well before they actually release.
I think just in general, trying to shape and navigate the discussion surrounding your game is a lot trickier nowadays. And any general negativity just seems to snowball.
I largely agree. The diminishing tolerance for decent/good games and $70 price tags probably go hand in hand. I tend to find myself playing more indie games than anything these days, and I don't feel ripped off if I've spent £10-£20 and tap out after 15 hours of gameplay. I did, however, feel a bit ripped off after growing weary of Horizon Forbidden West after that length of time.
Part of the solution seems to be bribing influencers.
So long as voting patterns don't change over the time, that the people voting aren't changing their voting behaviour, Metacritic's scores should show increasing and decreasing game quality. Whatever biases applied to games in 2010 would also be applying now and skewing the scores in the same way, so a score in 2010 might not represent the game, but a score in 2024 would represent the delta from that 2010 measure.
Tastes change to effect the personal level. Trends change to effect the public level. Bribes change to effect the professional level.
The polarization mentioned above is part of why I reject numerical review scores, and the only reviewers of anything that I listen to are RedLetterMedia - they talk pros and cons and then say "yeah, it was enjoyable enough, go see it."
That can't translate to a numerical score and were you to try, you'd effectively pluck numbers out of the air at random.