My lasting PS3 memory is creating tons of characters in Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, Soul Calibur and Dragon's Dogma and developing players on PES 2009's Master League, the only "shooter" I played were Metal Gear Solid 2, 4 and Peace Walker. I'd say I had a good time
I mean yeah, I didn't play much of the games I didn't like. I didn't even dislike all the games that could fit under that aforementioned description. I enjoyed Gears of War well enough, the game that kicked off both this topic and the popularity of cover-based shooters, which would spawn quite a lot of uninspired imitators. That said, I was still attuned to what the trends of the industry were at the time, and that's the memory that sticks with me. There was just so much of that ilk. So much bleak grit with muddy colour palettes and companies trying to bend into things they just weren't, especially in Japan.
It's like in the 90s, when every company wanted a Sonic. And some of those mascots were better than others, but there sure were a lot for a minute there.
I found the following push to make things more open-world to be more tolerable than trying to ape games like Halo, Gears, RE4 and especially CoD, which that gen was big on. Open-world innately stresses freedom, which gives more leeway for series to mesh their existing sensibilities with the newer direction. Plus Japan once again slowly realized that being Japanese wasn't a bad thing. I'm not totally into the more narrative and cinematic movement that continues to be spearheaded by Sony, largely off of the work of Naughty Dog, but those kind of games take such a substantial budget it's hard for there to be that many.
And then there's GaaS.
But no matter what trends are being bled dry, no entire gen is going to be completely devoid of variety. It's just what's being oversaturated at any given time.
