The writing is on the wall, folks. Bioware and Ubisoft are doubling down on their own eccentricity, ego, and clueless world perspectives. At a time when these companies should have honed and fine tuned their craft so that the crescendo of their works are launching in the most advanced age that PC and consoles has ever seen, they instead think their own farts don't stink and will continue driving these formerly awesome series into the dumpster. If you continue to buy these games, especially at full price, you are complicit in how dogshit gaming is becoming. Average and mediocre games are fine, but franchises that were once powerful and evocative are now nothing more than vessels for social politics and self-indulgent grandstanding and fantasy with bad design and writing that no one asked for. I mean no disrespect to anyone who has enjoyed these franchises, as I have enjoyed them as well. It is just time to draw a hard line and support it against this crap that is not of the same caliber as the games we used to get.
That's video game companies for ya. There's always a sense of big time egos and if a game does poorly in sales or quality because there's something wrong with the gamers too dumb to understand it. Same goes for actors and movie directors too. So to be fair it's a media kind of attitude where something like art and gameplay is subjective.
On the other hand, if your internet goes down and your ISP is getting grilled for days for downtime, youre not going to get the CEO coming out and saying "Well, relax customers, most of the service around the country is fine. And for those houses with tech issues, maybe youre just not understanding it and all you got to do reboot your router".
In functional kinds of products, you cant really deflect blame like that. A bad product is a bad product and no ISP worker can deflect their servers are down for 48 hours for everyone in a district of town. You own up to it, fix it, and maybe even issue some modest refunds. Game companies rarely own up to that in a similar way.
As for the latter part of your post, I think gamers are pissed or troll for laughs extra hard when they notice a game maker is changing successful formula into modern day drama. No company in any other industry would rock the boat. Once you got a good thing going you kind of milk it and slightly adjust it, or make supplemental products while keeping the existing products. Gaming is different as you cant really sell the same game for 25 years like selling the same orange juice, so it makes sense you got to make a sequel or keep it around with tons of mtx. But the core game should still there.
Instead game companies (and movies) love to do a 180 and make a very different game, but similar in name only. It's their way of changing it up a lot but retaining the name for branding and awareness for easy day one sales. But if it's a bomb you just killed the IP. And redemption (assuming there is one) is 5 years away. So of course any gamer who likes the franchise would be pissed. A lot of people on the sidelines are laughing for laughs and happy they saved themselves buying it.
And somehow game companies dont understand that.
I find it amazing how nobody in business tries to avoid doing a Coke II. But history repeats itself. All they had to do if they really wanted more Coke variants is add Coke II (or whatever it'd be called) as an additional flavour like the million other variants. Not as a substitute.
So when it fails, gamers laugh. Do a bad job and lose your job? Thats your problem for goofing around making a crap game or turning a beloved favourite into something junky.
