I've often felt this most with the Grand Theft Auto games, there was a level of visual abstraction in the III series that IV and V lost and trying to take in the world moving around you is too much.

Art is born out of limitations, if you only have a PS2 to work with you have to get creative to make it look good. Now you can just dump whatever you want into the game.

Having game designers rather than film school hacks might have something to do with it.