LordTerminal said:
Maybe now we'll finally wake up and realize that AAA is just some stupid marketing term for games that have huge budgets but waste them on hype rather than making the game good.
Well, I think most gamers (of the 'follow what is going on in the gaming industry, actively look towards what is being developed and take an interest in who is developing it' variety) are well aware of that.
The trouble is that the heads of the likes of EA, Activision, Eidos/Square Enix, indeed any big multi-million dollar publisher only see bottom lines.
That is to say. They See that Call of Duty makes X amount of money. They want to replicate it as much as they possibly can in order to keep the money flowing in. They don't actually care about making anything artistically worthy - they want something that Joe 12 pack will buy, because for everybody who genuinely cares about the experience of gaming, there are 30 'average' people who will buy a game because it kinda looks like Call of Duty, Batman, Generic Sportsgame, etc.
I'm not articulating myself particularly well here...
TL;DR: People do realise, unfortunately those people aren't the ones who make millions from AAA game releases.
I miss Thief and Thief 2... Along with Tenchu: Stealth Assassins and Metal Gear Solid on the PS1, those 4 games were the epitome of stealth based gameplay in that era.