100% Holy Writ Truth, but I gotta add a few things to complement it.
It used to be those jaw-dropping advancements in a facet of gaming (say in cinematics FFVII -> MGS1 -> Vagrant Story) were BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM because the cost angle hadn't grown so much diminishing returns. Only in the largest, costliest leaps (FFVII, Shenmue, WoW) is this noticable from the ground, but it happened all the time there; Konami was right there with money to go and not much needed to spend to get MGS right on the heels of FFVII a year and change later. Quake and Unreal were competing and neither Id nor Epic could rest on their laurels or declare themselves King of the Twitch Competitive FPS.
With Gen 7 and HD development, asset cost ballooned, leading to the devil's bargains of rote design mimicry, accessibility, and gamer bribery, which fought or lured away the player from novelty and revolutionary designs. Those first landmark titles of 2004-2007 (WoW, CoD4, Uncharted 1, Gears 1, etc), didn't gain a temporary victory in a long war with their competion, they gained complete domination. You can't NOT design your shooter to be nearly similar to CoD, CoD got huge sales from being that way and this game cost $40m,
you need to get grandma interested in your game to break even
even if following those design queues "to be safe"
still leads to an abattoir of death and misery for gaming.
This is why Gen 7 was a misbegotten demon-haunted madhouse of a console generation that actively muffled novelty, innovation, competition, and advancement and why Destiny took so much money to give something actively next-gen from top to bottom: it's extremely costly.
And now, with Destiny's ~$350m sales not being enough to soothe shareholders, those successful example games that existed in Generation 7 may not exist in this generation as we knew them since Generation 6. The money behind it simply doesn't WORK even at that extreme level. We're going much, much smaller. For it to be a shocking revolution at that price tag is asking more than Acti-Blizz and Bungie would or could do.
That is why those of us used to that endless avalanches of advancement from 1983-2006 and/or crave novelty innately hated Gen 7 and pine for that in the smaller titles gaining ground collectively now. Kids? Yeah, they get a good bit of that rolling revolution now, but it's in PC/Mobile. Maybe they'll see it in consoles once the overshadowing AAA behemoths go the way of Coleco. Maybe not, but they do kinda get a taste of what it is, even though it's a different flavor.
Danny continues to be the fucking man.
Danny "The Fucking Man" O'Dwyer shoudl be on his business cards and mailing address.
