games

Yeah, StarCraft 2 massively improved the pathfinding, plus it removed the unit selection limit, leading to a tendency towards big clumps of units effortlessly gliding around the battlefield and smashing into one another, since it's no longer a battle against the UI to actually move those big armies around.

This is an idea I actually find very interesting, the "actually, the game needs to be shit in order to be good" principle (well, that's it stated hyperbolically of course, I guess a more proper phrasing would be something like "the game requires a certain degree of friction in order for its mechanics to work"). Another example of this is Deus Ex - the original game infamously had some pretty clunky shooting mechanics, so Eidos-Montréal "fixed" that in Human Revolution - except, they promptly realized that by making the shooting good and effective, they actually just made it the easiest and most direct approach and kind of negated the point of stealth, so they then had to run a fucking surveillance program on ammo pickups to make sure the player doesn't have too much ammo at any given point.

The original Deus Ex didn't need to worry about that and was free to give away some pretty juicy rewards for exploration, because it knew that you wouldn't be able to actually use all that ammo to casually headshot every enemy in the level with the starting pistol without first having invested a substantial amount of points in getting your respective weapon skill up to that point, and weapon mods in improving the gun's stats itself. Removing friction from games, while intuitively an obvious improvement that makes the game "smoother" to play, can in fact have all these weird knock-on effects that mess up some other gameplay system.