Talking Point: What Happened to This Generation of Gaming? Part 2

Continuing from my first talking point, “What Happened to This Generation of Gaming,” I’ll go into not how the improving of graphics and somtimes controls make a game pretentious, but how also in today’s games, how ‘features’ of a game have become more important than the core experience itself.
To begin with, let me give my definitions of features and core experiences. A feature would be something added to a game that does not improve, add to, or otherwise change the formula of basic gameplay in any way. Such examples of these features, are leaderboards, online play, etc. My definition of a core experience is without all the features I’ve mentioned before, the game itself in its ‘rawest’ form.
Back to my main point, developers are spending way too much time on the features, constantly thinking how they can innovate in that field of the game. Take the upcoming game(at the time of writing) MAG for PS3, as shown at Sony’s press confrence the main draw with that game was the online multiplayer that supported 256 people. Although this kind of processing and programming is magnificent, what about the offline single player campaign? The most likely option reviewers would choose is the online portion since it is the most important part of the game. You really can’t blame the reviewer since that would be what the core audience is interested in.
Don’t get me wrong, features can make a game great, by adding replay value. All I’m saying is that relying on these things alone is detrimental since it may be unique at first, but once it becomes mainstream to replicate this feature it will become obsolete. So another message to gamers and developers, as many people I expect have said before, or will say sooner or later, these are the things hindering the creative ability of games, keeping them all diverse, giving a signifigantly different experience to each one. So I end once more with a challenge, name 5 games you would still buy without all the features I have touched upon.