Its got nothing to do with advancement of technology and everything to do with mass production. We're like sheep, we eat everything they throw at us and so they come up with techniques to make games faster. If they can pump out a game that will sell well every year they would do it in other words. Look at Assassin's Creed for example: the game was initially supposed to be a trilogy and each entry was supposed to pit you in a new era, suddenly they turned it around to limit resources and reused a lot of stuff from AC2 to make Brotherhood just so they add online so people get hooked (much like what the CoD series accomplished except I doubt AC will touch CoD in terms of success) and now they're putting out another AC game soon...this is in the span of what? 5 years max? that's what ruined games.