I think due to the relatively increasing budgets of game development, the risk is simply not placed on the AAA market anymore. It's up to the indie crowd to come up with an idea, upon which the AAA market can then latch onto and try and improve.
I may be out of place, but I think since we've reached a stale position due to the new gen shift, games and mechanics have been somewhat stagnant, but story telling has been on the upshot. The Last of Us, some of Telltale's releases, The Witcher 3 - I mean there's some really deep interactions going on there, involving the player or not. For the games in which story is not important, it has been a non-issue. But where it does weigh, they've been great IMO.
Something like Watchdogs was pretty innovative, they just didn't flesh it out enough and the hype generated didn't match up to the product. I enjoyed it, and could even understand why they still fell back on certain conventions such as gunfights and "radio towers" just to keep some sort of consistency to ensure things didn't go completely down the drain.
Also, in the middle of the last generation, it seems we hit those milestones that were so successful that it became a case of money-printing, because of the "don't fix what ain't broke" mindset. We had CoD 4, and Assassin's Creed. For the last 3-4 years, all we've had are newer iterations of them, each copying from the last (with varying levels of success).
Even Arkham Asylum, which brought something new to the table in open world story-telling and combat. Was doing rather great (with one exception I guess) up until the point they started introducing city-destroying Batmobiles and poor porting.
That's enough points for now I think I'll get back to "work", but it's less than 2 pages and only 1.5 spaced alright?!
Edit: revised for wordiness and added a point on Watchdogs