RPG-lite have always been popular, Diablo series sold more copies then BioWare games back in the late 90s/early 2000s and nothing changed since then. The studio who did Diablo (Blizzard) is responsible for MMOs becoming mainstream with WoW which borrowed a lots from Diablo.
When people say "it's MMO-like", in the end it just mean it's Diablo-like (color coded loot, zone levels, quest icons, simple skill trees, etc).
The only change since back then is that gamers now wants a TV/Movie-like feels on top of their Diablo gameplay. That's where ACO and Ubisoft succeeded while BioWare get crucified the moment they try to do it.
Maybe you should wonder why "Assassin's Creed fans" had no issue with total gameplay overhaul of their beloved franchise while "Bioware fans" get pissed the moment something coming from the studio isn't same old same old despite complaining all the time they only do same old same old.
Somewhat agreeing with joxer here, but starting from your last paragraph & working backwards, what you have here is you unknowingly clarifying my point. Yes, Bioware fans have been getting progressively more… upset? for want of a better word? … with each successive release. But this is because their games have a standard of sorts to adhere to, a standard which they progressively diluted over time and with each release. Fans were upset because their games kept getting more and more RPGlite.
Assassins' Creed on the other hand is coming from the other direction. Assassins Creed has always been considered lite, regardless of genre, if it even has a genre with which to maintain any kind of standard. Assassin's Creed has always just sort of 'existed' in the slipstream of AAA gaming releases, never upsetting anyone but never enthralling anyone. Nothing interesting releasing this month? Oh well, might as well wander around the latest Ass Creed for a bit while I wait for something more meaty. Fans of the series aren't complaining because the Ass Creed series is finally making their games more complex. In the lightest possible way, of course.
Do you see the salient point here. One is becoming less complex and people are complaining, one is becoming more complex and no-one is complaining.
Going onto Diablo and WoW, they were considered light version of what an RPG should be. But they still had character creation. They still had limits to what character could choose to do based on the chosen character. They still had loot which could radically alter both your play-style and build. They still had a huge interest in enemy variety.
And also where I tend to agree with joxer is that the main difference in the community Blizzard's games generate is between those who like to grind and those who don't. I enjoy the overall gameplay loop of a Diablo-like, I just get instantly bored and develop a huge sense of pointlessness as soon as the game suggests I could benefit more from grinding. Like that time I kept running back and forth on one road during FableTLC & found myself at level 20 without actually having done literally anything in the game.
I thought you made an excellent reply, don't get me wrong & it's certainly true that lighter RPGs are more numerically popular, I just get the feeling you're drawing your conclusions from a very skewed angle. There's nothing inherently wrong with lite RPGs, it's just been traditional that the main RPG forums tend to not cover them much, because the forums were only available on PCs, and so attracted mainly PC gamers, and the main forums all started around the turn of the century, at a time before consoles became the main platform for RPGs and at a time when the D&D/Gurps licences were widely used, and when games started to actually look as nice as the game setting demanded.
It was all these people, pretty much neglected for a decade, which fuelled the Kickstarter revolution. In the mean time, sure, a lot of people will have been satisfied with the conversion to console gaming, many of the old fans gave up the ghost years ago and left, or even died of old age or whatever & for a long while the only life on the forums was pretty much sitting around and arguing about the RPGness of each successive console release, which now results in the main forum divisions not being whether you like grinding or not, but whether you mostly prefer console releases to PC releases and all the gameplay implications that comes with either choice.
You'll notice that even with Diablo discussions the conversation is usally about game mechanics, such as loot tables, class issues with combat balance and the like, just as with most PC games the conversation is uaually about which class is most OP or fun and which in-gmae choices provide the most XP or rewards and which weapons are underrepresentated and which spells are rediculous or game-hampering etc etc. With console RPGs the conversation is usually everything except game mechanics & it's this core difference in the conversation that results in so much confusion for specialist sites.
You know, someone asks what the character builds are in XYZ console release & the fan of that game instantly feels intimidated, because it dosn't even have any, & so the conversation instantly becomes a very defensive one "It doesn't need character builds" or "It doesn't have much but IT HAS ENOUGH FOR ME" or "Let me tell you about this cool nude mod instead" etc etc. It's hard to have a like-for-like conversation because the conversations are completely different. Diablo was at least the same conversation.