Honestly I'm not sure you can make a AAA game in a brand new franchise and have it succeed in the current market. Nobody wants to pay the big bucks for something completely unproven, especially not when there are so many huge but familiar games around.
I'd make a joke about the pistol having repeatedly fired blanks over the last couple of years, but I think that's the point of a starting gun isn't it?
GTAV has had quite a bit of polish, comparatively. Of course, I'm sure that if they weren't mostly doing it to keep GTA Online looking vaguely fresh it would still look like a PS3 game.
Part of me wants to argue that the games industry has a long-standing history of under-compensating workers, which makes being within the top 25% not particularly impressive, but instead I'm just going to admit that you caught me ragging on EA with an easy jab.
They did lay off a shed load of workers earlier this year mere days after announcing record profits though. Still, they're not quite the miserable black hole that they were in the 'EA Widows' era when they were forcing unpaid overtime on a straight up illegal level.
Honestly, I think SNW is in a pretty decent position for a larger episode order. Heck, having more episodes to create more space between TOS character guest appearances would probably do the series good.
The past few Titan Quest DLCs were made by Pieces Interactive who are currently working on yet another Alone in the Dark remake. Titan Quest II is being made by Grimlore Games, who made the Spellforce 3 trilogy of RTS/RPG hybrids.
Not sure how much of an improvement that is, but it's not quite the worst-case scenario. So that's nice.
Folks tend to say that Kirk is too much of a cowboy, but that's not really who he is. He's very much invested in the rules and hierarchy of Starfleet, but he's also driven by a sense of justice.
Spiritfarer is utterly excellent but also extremely sad (the entire game is a hospice care allegory), so if you go into that one keep in mind that at least one of you will probably be crying your eyes out at some point.
It has some mild horror elements and I believe Maddy mentions getting drunk to deal with her problems at one point which is what gets it a higher rating than you'd expect. It's absolutely a great game to play with her, though as it's a brilliant game that deals with themes of self-acceptance and perseverance!
The fact that a 20th Anniversary Edition of BG&E exists leaked today, so you might want to wait for that to be a thing.