I do not care ifthe games are AAA, indie or whatever. Big publisher, small publisher, that is void to me.
What I am pissed off about is that the actual game designers stopped frying their brains about game mechanics. These days, they just build a normalized frame, pop a smoke and give it to the next guy, JOB WELL DONE. I understand why games such as CoD 365 will sell as kids grow up and are subjected to this content for the first time, unlike us. Given the fact that 90% of todays market tends to be unimaginative graphics whores who refuse to play these older games with slightly less polygons and not HD ULTRA SUPER DUPER textures, I am not surprised the trend is as is.
If only ONE person in the company can be an actual gamer with years of experience and actual passion for gaming and innovation, by the gods it has to be the mechanics designer. Everyone else can do their job just fine without actualy touching a game. Coders will bitch and moan about the implementation for certain, but 90% of the time they can actualy pull off making mechanics work. And I am not counting testers since they are either outsourced or, more commonly, the customer tends to be the QA tester.
What I am seeing now, "game designer" is just a title. No wonder we have not yet seen asymetrical balance pulled off with perfection in a game without the community calling it "rock, paper, scissors" balance.