I think this is the issue with newer games: the presentation. They've become too comprehensive. A series which followed a similar fate, not many of you may have heard of it, is Sierra's Quest for Glory games from the early 90s. They were point and click adventure games, except your character was one of three (later four) classes and had their own skills and attributes. The game had combat, NPC schedules, all sorts of things. In many respects, the first was the best because the game world was so open. It hardly felt like an adventure game: aside from a few specific things you were to accomplish, you had a completely open world with different ways of proceeding depending on your abilities and class. Many things had to be learned or trained before you could make progress, but that just made things all the more rewarding. One simple example was money - in QFG1, it was very difficult to make money at first. You had to kill enemies or run item errands - a slow way to make profit, but it was still part of the experience.

By QFG4, there was no significance with money anymore. There was a cache that you found in the game, it was almost impossible to miss, that gave you more money than you'd ever need. Instead of exploring the world and fighting to improve your abilities, there was a training area you could just mindlessly visit every day. It was as if the creators were saying "we're tired of the whole character development thing, we know you guys want to get on with the plot - so here's a quick way to bring your character up to speed." <_<