I can’t stand the way they’ve been dumbing down all new games 
Got that new XCOM on PS3 and was driven nearly insane by only being able to have one base, and being unable to shoot your guns at anything except a hostile target…
On the other hand, while not roguelikes exactly, Dark Souls and Demon Souls are pretty punishing, dying is painful and living is even more painful 
Yet they did well in todays baby-powdered market… I can’t really respect a game whose hardest difficulty settings still provide no challenge.
Could have cried when I saw how they merged/murdered skills when moving from Morrowind up to Oblivion (Medium armor, blunt/axes, jump height, also the lack of levitation). Most of what draws me to the RPG genre in general is the presence of complexity (in gameplay direction and character building) that you find in RLs… Blizzard apparently thought that I’m now too idiotic to distribute a couple stat points on levelup in Diablo 3, all of a sudden
On a side note, I didn’t like the newer Elder Scrolls games because your character doesn’t really feel grounded to the world, combat doesn’t exactly seem as epic as it should, not to mention the tier setup of the weapons and armor (made worse by removal of medium armors). Almost unimportant, but most of the ladies on Oblivion and Skyrim are pretty fugly 
I remember a female shopkeeper saying (in a young-sounding voice) “You must be wondering why a pretty young thing like me is doing working in a shop like this?”, and she looks like she just won a hard battle against thirty years of crystal meth addiction
As far as how much work makes a game: I play these hideously intricate RPGs with varied large zones that generally serve as areas between the next “mission objective” location (and in the great majority of games these are areas you’ll never even see again)… In the end, you can take a small number of areas, and with the help of many random events and dynamic monsters a whole amazing experience can occur on a very small number of maps. Monster Hunter series comes to mind… Just by switching out items/monsters/bosses, the same maps can be used over and over again, and can express a whole gamut of feelings from harmless to beyond threatening…
Wonder how many total games have been played on just the office map in counterstrike And the map never even changes. Imagine if random traps, random weather and time of day, random building collapses, randomized structure damage was implemented.
Basically, randomization and variance can grant insane depth and life to even the simplest games, and doesn’t take tons of effort to accomplish…
