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I wanted to select two games I have personal experience with as a long-time player, as I hope that my insights are more useful this way. I chose Diablo 2 and CS:GO to examine as these are my two favorite titles from their respective genres. 

When Diablo II came out, it had a positive reception receiving roughly a B grade from the community. The game was successful enough that an expansion was created, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. This expansion added a new act, new mechanics, two new classes. The game is beloved by many, and was played throughout the years eventually gaining the notice of Blizzard much later, causing them to revisit it through creating Diablo II: Resurrected. Prior to this release, and possibly the motivating factor for releasing the Resurrected edition, many mods filled the gap of lack of updates and bug fixes. Median XL increased the usable class diversity. Path of Diablo borrowed elements of the successful Path of Exile ARPG and brought them to the Diablo II universe. Project Diablo 2 sought to retain the initial vision, while balancing class diversity and adding quality of life improvements such as a greatly enhanced player inventory with dedicated charm storage to avoid players having to make a trade-off between quality of life and character strength. 

Unfortunately Diablo II: Resurrected is more of a presentation based product. The artwork was enhanced, network improvements were made, and the game definitely feels more modern. However, it’s essentially Diablo II from the past, without any consideration seemingly made to the player communities efforts to improve the fundamental game logic. Even the improved art may be criticized by long-time fans, as they’ve grown accustomed to the classic artwork and some of the new monsters incorporate different styles that don’t seem to fit in with the existing vision/style the original had. The game seems to have been designed simply to create attractive screenshots and videos for marketing purposes, while avoiding issues that may cause people to want a refund (such as glaring networking issues, etc.) 

If one plays both Diablo II: Resurrected and Project Diablo 2, one can’t help but feel that if Blizzard were to incorporate aspects of the player mods, or allow for modification, that the game would usurp and replace the original version. For example, in Project Diablo 2, the developers have managed to add the ability to move items from the player inventory to the stash similarly to Diablo II: Resurrected. However, there is a delay as the game is working around the original game logic and it wasn’t an intended feature by design. In D2R, there is no delay and the engine handles things smoothly, so the proper logic is in place. 

The issue really seems to be a disconnect between experts and community leaders. The experts mostly listen to their bosses, who have a good view of the issues but take very few risks. They likely are seeking the minimal level of improvements necessary when remaking games which will appease peoples' sense of desire for the update. However, they run the risk of the community simply maintaining the vision for the players as modding becomes more difficult as the codebase changes and insights into how to mod it are lost. 

This trend seems to be continuing in other game’s histories as well. In the case of CS:GO, for example, the developers chose to stick with the engine the game mechanics were designed for, improving them as necessary, but failing to allow more creative designs into the game. CS:GO Danger Zone, for example, is built with the engine limitations in mind, thus the map is much smaller than competitors battle royale offerings. This caused it to fail, and most people still play the classic game modes the engine was designed for. Perhaps if they had simply created larger maps and blamed the lack of powerful enough hardware, the hardware industry would have gone in a better direction for them. They could have marketed the game then as a powerful benchmarking utility for PC builders, with the caveat that the game mode isn’t meant to be playable yet. 

Obviously one can conclude that game design is a highly difficult task from the successes and failures in the marketplace. There seems to be too much risk aversion to truly create greatness. For some reason in the past, this didn’t seem as much of an issue. Perhaps it was because games were a newer market, and companies trusted the developers to create something good. Software developers, unfortunately have their creativity dashed by hardware limitations. They are trying to create games which other developers have paved the way for, and they end up being similar to them as a result. Software is about enabling endless creativity, and working with what you have. It’s the trade-off which makes it a challenging industry to work in. Software developers imaginations are already limited by what software they’ve seen, and they know if they see something in action, it’s possible to accomplish. It’s only a matter of discovering how it’s done which enables them to do it themselves.