Well the thing is that I feel that not beating a franchise to death is not a bad thing. With some games the idea of a sequel works. In other cases the game is beautiful, self contained, and comes to a pretty decent resolution/closure.
In many cases when dealing with a really good, self contained game, people want more. BUT ask 10 differant people how they should do a sequel, and you'll probably get 10 differant answers, all from people who think tey are ingenius, but actually hated by everyone else. The company rolls along, sees the money to be made, listens to the fans, and produces a sequel based on ideas they hear. The result is usually a turd that comes out like a piece of bad fanfiction because honestly that's what it's based on... bad fanfiction by commitee.
Also when it comes to certain game series, I think they produce rabid fanbases that are very vocal, which give the people in those fan bases the impression that they are more numerous than they actually are. The fact that these guys might always be demanding a sequel to something on a company's forums does not mean that there is really a huge demand for it.
On top of this it's also interesting to note that the game industry is almost as incestuous as 60s and 70s bands. With people jumping around between differant development companies and teams continuously. Sometimes with a project you wind up with a situation where like 10 differant people own rights to a given game (one character and it's design belongs to this guy, another one to this guy, the central world backround to another writer, the original game engine to this other guy... etc...) making it nearly impossible to get everyone back together again, or assemble all of the myriad rights you'd need to make a sequel.
In some cases you see situations where someone DOES manage to gather the scattered rights to a property from which all the developers have moved on, leading to a sequel being developed by an entirely differant group of people (usually fanboys themselves to some extent). This almost invariably leads to a giant turd being generated (there are a few exceptions, but people DO tend to panic when they hear a favorite game franchise is being developed by someone else for some pretty good reasons).
Sure there are some games I wish I had more of. Like pretty much any RPG where I could create my own party and had more potential character classes to pick from than there were spaces in my party. Then of course there are things like Jade Empire (for all of my politics, I think more "Oriental Adventures" type fantasy RPG/Action-RPGs could work. If not a Jade Empire 2, something in a similar vein would be nice), Master Of Magic (old turn based strategy game), and others.
Oh and for the record they DID do a sequel to Wasteland it was called "Fountain Of Dreams" very, very obscure, but some Abandonware sites have it. It is however very short, and not all that great. I also personally hold to the belief that Fallout is a PREQUEL to Wasteland or at least was to begin with. The idea being that Tandi (the girl you rescue in fallout 1) grows up to lead the California Republic in Fallout 2, and inenvitably the California Rangers turn into the Desert Rangers organization you work for in Wasteland. There were a few other things I picked up here and there that gave me this impression. Lots of people disagree, but I've been sticking to my guns on a number of forums.
System Shock had a sequel (System Shock 2) which was superior to the original and is the game most people think of when they think of System Shock. I do not think it was especially successful, until after the fact though which is how it got on "Home Of The Underdogs" as abandonware once upon a time, and why a sequel was so long in coming.
That said a System Shock 3 would probably be a bad idea because the story pretty much ended and pretty much finding a way to resurrect SHODAN yet again and have it play cat and mouse with another character would be pushing it. Changing the setting was probably not a bad idea.
As ironic as it is, if any of Origins old properties need a new game it's actually the good old fashioned single player Ultima games.
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