[whywhywhywhy]

The criteria has changed I feel, a 7/10 in the 90s/00s probably meant it had some good ideas, a highly creative setting, an innovative tech or gameplay mechanic so the end product, while 7/10 because one of the parts just didn't hit the mark or it was just very buggy, the actual game was still enjoyable.

The modern AAA mentality has stripped too much of it down to formulas they consider working or "best practices" (e.g the "UbiSoft Towers" phenomenon) or they're literally shaping the whole game to try and force a specific business model that is more important than shipping good content (Bungie Destiny 2).

Difference is when a game built with that ideology doesn't hit the mark it ends up just being insanely dull and has no spark to keep you going or win you over. Instead of Flawed But Fun you get Competent But Boring.

[Cthulhu_]

In hindsight, we spent a lot of time on said 7/10 games, and they were just fine.

But it was a different time, mainly in terms of what was available, how much time you had, and how much time a game took.

Most games we had were copied shareware games from diskettes; on occasion a CD with loads of shareware games, and on rare occasions someone had a copy of the full version of a game like Doom.

But nowadays a lot of games - AAA and indie both - are at least 40 hour games, if not (a lot) more; Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes 123 hours to "do everything" (platinum); I've got over 300 hours in Factorio and about half that in Kerbal Space Program; FFXVI took me 60 hours to finish, I still have outstanding sidequests, and that one doesn't even have that many side activities or time sinks.

And then there's the "live services" (or MMOs if they have a multiplayer aspect, or MMORPGs if it's WoW or FFXIV) which are designed to have great / tight gameplay loops but effectively infinite game. I've got a lot of hours in FFXIV and they keep adding Stuff to it. If I had infinite time there's a few side activities in it that cost just as much time to "finish" as the base game's stories.

[thereddaikon]

I don't know if you can even say competent at this point. So many "AAA" games with their army of developers still launch with performance issues and bugs. If massive teams should be good at one thing, it is making a polished and well running product. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Devs cried for years to get the ability to make their own custom shaders. Now that DX and Vulkan allow it, we find they didn't know what they were asking for and every AAA game suffers from massive shader compilation issues. A problem that never existed when it was left up to AMD and Nvidia. You also don't see this problem in indie games because they never have the bandwidth to even consider writing their own shaders. And that's just one example.