I disagree. This is the strategy taken by AAA games and is the reason why the AAA games are in such rough shape.

A game that tries to appeal to 100% of people will, at best, be a lowest-common-denominator mess, and very likely manage to turn off everyone because it includes something that they actively don't want in their game.

A game that targets a specific niche while not caring about others does not have that problem. Because the target audience is smaller, it can't support enormous budgets, but enormous budgets don't usually mean the difference between a good and bad game. And a game targeting a niche takes less money to develop, anyway.

▲

dudeinhawaii 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not sure it's the niche or targeting problem. I think we're getting games with flat out fewer features and smaller scope than earlier entries in the series because _so_ much energy is disproportionately put into graphics. DA:VG was trimmed and had vastly less complexity and depth than any previous DA.

I'm not certain if that's time/budget versus "simplifying the game for everyone".

It's easier to balance a game with 10 "sets" of armor + weapon - as opposed to having a myriad options of armor per body part and weapon combos/etc. DA:VG was the most beautiful but shallow Dragon Age game.

	▲	SyzygyRhythm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Graphics is part of the problem, certainly, but at least it's moderately independent of the rest. You can scale the quality up and down without affecting the rest (within limits: having many armor variants, etc. are more costly with greater graphic fidelity). As far as the rest: all of these different gameplay mechanics have a complexity cost. You can try to add everything, but then you run into balance problems and/or it just feels too complex for most people, not to mention having a high development cost. So something needs to be simplified, and that means either reducing the depth or reducing the mechanics. But if you've already decided to include something for everyone, that necessarily means that everything is shallow.