I never expected games to become all about being more like movies and reducing the video-game elements (aka rules, goals, etc). I was disheartened by the big discovery that the vast majority suck so bad at gaming that they drag gaming down... tragically. When developers/publishers in focus groups had to remove fun bits from games in order to sell big numbers because true gamers (there is such a thing, aka you want to control mario jumping + running + fireball, vs have the computer automatically the level for you).

I never thought I'd see JRPG's dumb down the battle system in mainline final fantasy games, which proved to me most JRPG developers don't know what is fun about their games. There was a time when random battles and leveling/grinding was fun (because it was new) but they (japanes developers) proved over the years they were one hit wonders with battle systems. I'd love to see some more development and R&D into improving the fun of JRPG battle systems. I used to love stocking up my characters in Final fantasy 1, but that love for fighting ended as they kept releasing sequels but not knowing how to make fighting parts of the game interesting. The best system I've seen out of Japan is Final fantasy tactics, that shit is like crack when you first get it.

Almost all modern games hide their lack of gameplay with "being in the movie inside the game". Wolfenstein: The New Order is everything that is wrong with modern AAA games. It's just one big thee pork movie set-piece.

While these are fresh experiences for new gamers, for someone who grew up without movies in games.

I also never expected the industry would become so corrupt and that most of the gaming masses were so horrifyingly stupid and tech illiterate to the point of enabling gross criminality because they don't understand technology and are just idiots generally. The whole mobile F2P/MMO scam artistry that took off once the internet hit the masses. I never thought a DRM online game like league of legends could ever make money because you never own anything "you purchase" you're not purchasing anything because the game is never yours, the whole model relies on sub human levels of intelligence.

I thought we'd have much more in depth games by now, starting around 2000 many mainstream games were made that were horrifying casual/bad.

I was never a fan of grand theft auto series, which to me is just a collection of genres/mini-games smashed into a game to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I first picked up my first GTA-like with Saints row the third and while enjoyable it wasn't anything I hadn't already seen.

It was just a giant level where you go from mini-game to mini-game and there were bits that were awesome sure, but between the story missions the main game is just like a collection of mini games.

I expected games to get better/deeper and had way too much faith that game developers had any clue what they are doing. As I get older I realize there are special people (developers/gamers) who have unique brains and can see (with huge amounts of hard work/time/dedication) to bringing fun back to older game designs by reworking them to figure out why older designs went stale (aka JRPG battle systems). There is a reason why a game you once loved went stale and it has to do with weaknesses in the design, finding those weaknesses is hard.

I thought cell shaded computer graphics would be much better by now, pretty much Beauty and the beast disney quality.

I thought we'd have more cartoony looking games, like the transformers games taht are rendered just like in the cartoons (but better). But the modern tranformers games are pretty good despite the video-gamey look.

I also didn't expect starcraft 2 to retcon starcraft 1, SC2 feels like a whole different game (story wise) taking place in an alternative universe from SC1 because the original Starcraft 1 team is long gone. I guess thats what happens when world of warcraft (projected to sell 400,000) blows up into a big thing.

So many sequels to old games were big disappointments. The biggest for me was the loss of story from starcraft 1, everything I liked about SC1's story was lost in SC2, sc2 is just so bad story wise I wanted to barf. There was just so much shit out of character/hackneyed about the story in starcraft 2.

Lastly, I never thought I'd become disinterested in games because of games going mainstream (aka catering to the stupid set). The fact that most gamers aren't really "gamers" in the sense of knowing what makes a good game from a bad game ends up with a tonne of shitty games getting praise.

So many "new" games are half baked and get excessive praise because of newer generations not having played all the past games and so have no basis for comparison. Hence there can never be "objective" game reviews because historically if you were born in 2000 and haven't played all the old games, your view of modern games will be skewed unless you got what I call "the gaming gene". AKA you will know that many older games rock when you played them because you prefer gameplay over hollywood cinematic bullshit they use to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Skyrims half-baked melee combat takes the prize compared to so many other games that do it better.