I just stumbled across this article written by Felipe Pepe, the person in the process of assembling his CRPG Book Project.
The Ministry of Hype: The danger of letting the gaming industry curate its own history
I'll refrain from posting too much of the article, but I encourage you to read it. It makes a lot of solid points about what is an unfortunate part of this industry.
The Ministry of Hype: The danger of letting the gaming industry curate its own history
Recently I was asked to give a short lesson about CRPG history in a game design class of about 30 students. I started by asking how many had played Skyrim. All raised their hands. Then I asked how many considered themselves to be really hardcore fans of the Elder Scrolls series. About 60% kept their hands raised. The next question: "how many of you played Oblivion"? Now only 20% still has held their hands high. Only two hands remained in the air when I asked about Morrowind, and none at all when I asked about Daggerfall and Arena.
When I confronted them about that, they were somewhat embarrassed, but also claimed that those were old games, that had dated badly and were outclassed by newer releases. Now, let's stop here for a moment.
None of them had ever played Arena or Daggerfall. They don't have any first-hand experience on its gameplay and couldn't come to that conclusion by themselves. So where did that prejudice come from?
Let's be honest here - the gaming industry is hype-driven. Every new release is the best thing ever and will blow your mind. No secret there, you can see the same thing in movies, books and music - no one releases something saying "this is my new X, it's not as good as my previous one but please buy it".
But the gaming industry has one unique trait: It's the only one that will attack their previous release to make the new one look better.
The good folks at No Mutants Allowed made an interesting article about this back in 2006, when the Fallout 3 previews began to appear. Although the press had loved The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - 94 on Metacritic -, less then a year later they had come up with a wave of new-found criticisms, of things they now considered broken in Oblivion and supposedly fixed in Fallout 3.
I'll refrain from posting too much of the article, but I encourage you to read it. It makes a lot of solid points about what is an unfortunate part of this industry.