Nowadays all you can hope for are games that play without bugs and crashes, esp on the PC platform. Asking for better gameplay has taken a back seat to patch requests. It's as if it's not even a concern anymore. There's just not enough quality beta testing anymore.
You know it's pathetic when you can sum up the status of the industry in one paragraph that just highlights almost all the worst qualities. The reason there isn't any half-decent beta testing, is for two reasons. Number one, they don't want to pay for beta testers to come in and play the game and tell them they have more work to do, thus adding to the mounting costs of writing these huge and ever more complex games. And number two, they don't want to beta with the public (even though that would be free and would net a substantial amount of bugs,) because they're afraid that people will just continue to use the beta if it's stable enough, and not pay for the game, or use the beta to figure out a way to patch the final version of the game for pirating. They don't want to give out too much of the core code in order to prevent early piracy.