It may be just me, but I cannot help but feel that the new games are really lacking. Both single player and multiplayer games coming out recently somehow seem to be shallow and repetitive. Really, aside from Mass Effect, Dragon Age series and Starcraft 2, I cannot remember a single game that came out since 2006 or so and kept me interested for a long time and, most importantly, made me replay it.
All the single player games in this period I tried, I either gave up very soon, or, sometimes, finished the game and forgot it, not even thinking of replaying it. Not much better with multiplayer games: I played WoW (MoP), SWTOR, LoL, Hearthstone for a short time and couldn't stand these games after.
So I switched back to old-school games. I keep replaying KotoR series, Age of Empires I/II, Doom/Doom2/Hexen/Heretic, Diablo II, HoMM III, and playing NWN at the moment.
Hard to say what exactly is lacking in the modern games. But, somehow, they do not feel like well-crafted games aimed for generations to play. They feel more like products aimed to get the customer to pay for them, to play once and forget, or, in case of MMOs, to keep people playing by introducing boring and repetitive raids and item tiers. I played BF3 campaign once and forgot almost everything about it. I didn't manage to even finish the tutorial in Might and Magic Heroes VI and uninstalled the game right away. I couldn't stand idiotic "kill 20 Sith" quests in SWTOR and quit it before finishing Trooper story. I played CoD:MW3 for a while and, somewhere in the middle of the campaign, just stopped playing and don't feel like continuing at all. I played EU3 and EU4 for some time, but, after 3-4 games, there is nothing new to do. I finished Deux Ex: Human Revolution campaign once and it was decent, but it didn't capture my soul for some reason, and the whole story was not really engaging. It was like a Hollywood blockbuster movie: you watch it with chips and cola and have some fun, but, 20 minutes out of the cinema - you forget what you just watched.
What is it that keeps people replaying Quake 2, Baldur's Gate 2, Age of Empires 2, Warcraft 3, Dune 2000 over and over? Maybe it's nostalgia, I don't know. But, still, there is something about these games that makes me play them 15 years after, even despite terrible graphics and primitive mechanics. For some reason, Diablo 2 is a game I want to replay once in a few months, at least, and Diablo 3 is a game I've finished on the first difficulty and have never touched ever since. For some reason, Doom 2 is a game I play from time to time just to throw some monsters around and to solve some puzzles, while BF3 is a boring war movie I've watched once and don't want to watch it again.
So, anyone else feels the same way? Anyone else keeps replaying old titles over and over and wondering why there are no new Doom 2 or HoMM 3 games that will be played even 15 years later?