I played a decent amount as a kid and a lot as a teen. A few years after college and I stopped for a long time. I've started playing again, mostly online with s

I played a decent amount as a kid and a lot as a teen. A few years after college and I stopped for a long time. I've started playing again, mostly online with some friends once or twice a week. I mostly do it for the social aspect. I feel like most of the games are unoriginal garbage these days. Companies appear to be coasting on franchise reputation to make money. Halo is an excellent example - 343 took over from Bungie and the campaign storyline isn't great (although the format and mechanics are mostly nice) while the multiplayer has sucked and they cant even figure out how to fix it. Games like CoD, Rainbow 6, and Ghost Recon have been terrible recently too (Ubisoft, wtf happened to you?). The Spliter Cell series had similar issues towards the end and seems to be finished off completely now. The mechanics and graphics have gotten better but the stories suck and you can tell many of them are being dragged out just to make another game. A big part of the fun is being exposed to something new, different, or better. I supposed the more exposure we had in the past will make it more difficult to meet this criteria in the future. Perhaps our tastes have largely been set by the "classic" games (depends on your generation for what those are) and our expectations are outdated. Maybe I just grew up in the golden age of gaming (95+ PC, consoles from NES up to the Xbox 360, some online play but also some in-person and LAN parties). Maybe it will never be that good again. Maybe we'll have ethernet cables crisscrossing the nursing home halls, playing the classics.