>>723216425
I've been thinking about this recently. The skeleton of the game design has stayed the same as the 7th generation but there have been some weird changes.

Games stretch themselves thin to a retarded degree. There is about 10 hours of good game there (and 7th gen games knew to stop there) but it's stretched the fuck out to 40 hours or more to provide a "better deal". I know why they do it, and I hate everybody who treats games as a dollar per hour investment who is responsible for this. It was awesome being able to play through a new fun experience every week on Xbox 360.

Aside from content bloat there is also mechanical bloat. Nothing is really direct anymore. You can't just do a thing you need to take multiple steps. Crafting systems in fucking EVERYTHING for example.

Player control has actively gotten worse. This is noticeable in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Resident Evil 4 Remake with their wobbly shit aim easily but its present in seemingly every game to some degree or another. It was like "PS2 jank" was solved but then they had to reintroduce pseudo jank but in a "polished and realistic form". Somebody needs to deep dive on this because it's really fucking weird.