JA2 is probably the best game I have ever played. It certainly has the best combat. A new game will not be JA without the TB combat. In JA2 you could control 3 six man squads if you wanted to. How the heck can you do that with some kind of a RTwP system. How could you possibly keep track of all the events in a JA2 battle with simultaneous action system?
Those are good questions. The answer is you can't, really. Welcome to yet another game being dumbed down. It's a shame they have to do this type of thing to existing titles, but they know, even if they can't muster up an idea thinly veiled as original, the importance of name recognition.
The gaming industry, it seems to me, is going through the same kind of thing the movie industry did as it increased in popularity, leading to the rise of big studios and Big Hollywood. Games are becoming more popular, more of a mainstream entertainment medium. That means action for games — pretty pictures and cheap thrills. ( A quote from some producer or something for Dragon Age 2 always encapsulates this well for me: "Every time you push a button, something awesome happens." Personally, I'd rather not have something awesome happen every time I push a button, but I'm kind of an old guy.
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Generally speaking, the masses want popcorn movies. They want the roller-coaster ride. They require some kind of love story thrown in and a happy ending. And the gaming industry, chasing the biggest chunk of change, will cater to the masses, just as Big Hollywood does.
That said, I don't consider myself an elitist or anything. I like the occasional popcorn flick. Hell, the game I've been looking forward to the most these days is Two Worlds II, and that isn't exactly highbrow stuff as far as I can tell. I just wish there were more variety. Perhaps there will be once the Hollywood-style gold rush calms down. Perhaps not.
I imagine there will always be games that are interesting and challenging and cater to archaic turn-based tastes like mine, but you'll have to hunt for the unpolished gems, just as you have to scour mostly independent films for the same kind of quality, something that ventures outside the most simplistic and hackneyed forms of story telling. There will be mainstream exceptions, I'm sure, but I'm pretty sure they'll be fairly rare, too.
That fact is, your neighbor has discovered that video games are fun, too. That's great, but let's face it: Your neighbor is kind of a jackass, too.