hmm, I'd say that the lack of the True Game Designer is what causes the lack of creativity and the repetitiveness of pretty much all of today's games.
Indeed the small houses (where the Indie atttitude still rules to a degree) have retained some of that and typically produce the original concepts which are then taken and copied slavishly by the big ones where the "designers" pretty much limit themselves to giving new artwork and the occasional twist to existing ideas created by others.
As a result 90% of what we see these days is a mix of concepts from Doom, Civilization, and Total Annihillation, and the other 10% comes out of the Indie and other small development groups.
