Streamlining and making your games accessible to a wider audience is an art in itself. The terms 'accessible' and 'streamlining' have powerful, negative connotations, but only because so many developers have gotten it so damn wrong.
In theory, there's nothing wrong with doing this. If anything it should be done. In an ideal situation, a developer will have enough mastery over their design, and knowledge of how that design is experienced, to ease players into the game, subtly teach them mechanics, without ever being transparent and, most importantly, without losing the spirit and philosophy behind the game's deepest interactivity. It's a hard thing to do, but it can be done.
Instead the quick and dirty approach is taken. Make it easier. Remove features. Cut content. Minimise interactivity so players have to do less for the reward. Guide the player through the experience under the guise they're playing when really you're controlling and directing everything, because god forbid you give them control.
This is, based on what we've seen so far, largely the problem with Hitman: Absolution. The demos they've shown so far are over scripted, compartmentalised, and feature stripped, and in terms of the content it has it seems to be adhering to a different philosophy than that which fuelled the originals. Greater encouragement to kill and engage in shoot-outs. New voice for Agent 47. No Jesper Kyd on the soundtrack. And so on.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a good (though far from perfect) example of retaining the spirit of an original franchise while streamlining a sequel. Human Revolution still made some dumb decisions and some stuff didn't work, but the ideas are sound, and the gameplay depth is authentic.
So I don't so much feel we need to see developers going back to 'old school' gameplay, as seeing less emphasis on removing features and over simplifying/directing gameplay in order to make titles accessible and enjoyable to lots of people. We need a bigger focus on balance: taking those older designs, looking at where they work and what they need to have, and where they need to improve. Nintendo is pretty good at this, as is Valve, but I'd like more developers to follow through.
