TotalBiscuit (TheCynicalBrit) drops some knowledge

No, our expectations have just gotten higher. There are some bad games out there like MOH Warfighter but they will be forgotten in gaming history. There were a lot of horrible games in "the good old days" too, we just only remember and talk about the good ones. This gives the illusion that things were better in the past, when this is not the case.

So with higher expectations comes hand holding in games? Or no secret areas? TotalBiscuit uses Crysis 2 as an example in here of a game that was modern but almost brought back that feel of exploration.

Singleplayer FPS has turned into first person script tech demos where the devs try to show how good they are at making scenes where the player can't do anything else than press x to survive. That's why I rather call those games wanna-be movies, not FPS games.

Granted, there are bad games in the golden age of shooters. But those games at least thought the player to be "a gamer", not an idiot who plays games to not play games aka rather watches generic terrorist being killed with a QTE. Even a bad old game could be more entertaining than a decent modern FPS when you had to find out how to get past an obstacle without hearing "Ramirez, grab that missile launcher and destroy that turret!" and having a dang waypoint showing where you can pick it up. It felt like the games respected you at least a little bit.

There are many other things wrong about the current situation of this genre, but I'll simply say yes. It has gone backwards when developers decided to stop respecting.

Alot less time is spent on Gameplay mechanics nowadays.