I think another great exception is the elder scrolls series by bethesda. Every time I see new physics engine, better AI, or better graphics, I think, 'What can Bethesda do with this?'
I agree with Bonch here: Oblivion is one of the worst examples of this very trend: it was stunningly beautiful (especially if you had a monster machine), but for that it traded animation (crappy, especially the faces), scenario, originality, gameplay (though I'm sure the consoles objectives helped there), …
Apart from the graphics, the shipped game was lifeless and uninteresting, Morrowind was orders of magnitude more original, more interesting and (even though it was on a half-dead continent) more full of life than Oblivion.
You think Besthesda is an exception? Oblivion was pretty crippled in features and gameplay compared to Morrowind and Daggerfall despite having physics and "realistic" faces. The AI was embarrassing. Bethesda is one of the main culprits in trading gameplay for graphics as well as latching onto "next-gen" marketing hype.
Indeed, I see Besthesda as a not-so-shining example of the case that squidsoup is making. Morrowind was brilliant - it had great freatures, great gameplay, a great storyline etc.
Then Oblivion came along and they switched their development focus (or at least a fair amount of it) onto the graphics. And the result? Poor gameplay with a cop-out 'auto levelling' system, a 'fast travel' system which was 'click this button to travel anywhere in the game World', etc.
Sure it might have looked pretty and thus sold well, but it was a step backwards in terms of gameplay.
Crysis 1 is another example of this. Amazing graphics, amazing physics. But the storyline was non-existant and at times the gameplay was poor.
Totally agree. Oblivion was 80% hype and pretty graphics.
Beneath the eye candy, Oblivion was an extremely boring game really. Sure, the world was huge, but it was empty and repetitive. Each cave looked like every other cave[1]. Each dungeon, castle and fort looked the exact same[1]. Every tomb, crypt or ruin looked the exact same[1]. Each oblivion level looked the exact same[1]. The rest of the world was more or less filler to link these places together. Also, sometimes I found an interesting area only to be disappointed that there was no history, no reason for it being there, nothing. (Eg, if I find a ruin waaaay out in the middle of the mountains, I wonder why its there, why is it a ruin, what happened to the people etc etc - Oblivion made no attempt at answering any of these questions).
Besides that, each quest was written as if it was the only quest in the game (ie, the world may as well be paused until you finish the quest) and, besides the hype about the AI, everything revolves around the main character - if you stop and sit on the side of the road for three days, the world is pretty much paused until you do stuff again (besides trivial NPC schedules).
Having said that, the world was quite beautiful and some of the quests did interest me (eg, the assassin quest where you get locked into a house), but overall, the game was dull, lifeless and, besides its grand size and scale, empty.
[1] On the inside. Sometimes there would be a really cool looking (from the outside) structure that got me excited, only to be shown the exact same interior level that I'd seen a hundred times already yet another time.
