All the Next gen games are ... average IMO
Is it just me or are the current glut of games more about tech projects than, you know, games?
I have recently bought Wolfenstein: The New Order and Watch Dogs. Guess which one plays better? Wolfenstein. Guess which one has more innovation? Wolfenstein. Guess which one (seriously now) is the more grown up? Wolfenstein.
Watch Dogs is GTA V with half the ambition, 100th of the cast list, poor visuals, some seriously dodgy car physics and one new innovation that, admittedly, is incorporated everywhere and well. Wolfenstein is an FPS blaster with carefully integrated stealth and cover play to the core game mechanic of ferocious blasting, it has a better script, is actually extremely grown up for a game that mechanised Nazi dogs in it (especially in the way it handles sex), better voice acting, better use of (excellent) music and much better location and character design/animation.
Wolfenstein takes an aging genre, one that has been abused over the past few years, and shakes it up a bit, polishes the core mechanics, seamlessly adds a handful of new features, shamelessly bringing back the great bits we all loved from the past, and applies a decent, well produced story with a distinct production design. On the surface it's a retro-blastathon, but it's much more than that.
Watch Dogs takes a single interesting mechanic, and reduces it to a single button press, then throws it into an open world sandbox where most of the stuff you can do, you don't want to. Who thought it was a good idea to put "Augmented Reality Games" into a video game which, by its very nature isn't real? Why would I want to play poker in a video game where I can nick money from any character on the street with a button press and an ATM. Why is my character such a noble person when I've just made him happily gun down a few hundred pedestrians on a ferry?
So why is Watch Dogs the poster child for the next gen? Because it's an impressive technical achivement to get all of these different systems to work together effectively and well.
But Wolfenstein is the better game.