Every generation from 1-6 was experimenting on how to make games better. Sure, some were stinkers, but even the less well-known games had value and ideas that were revolutionary. Jedi Knight mixed a dueling system with an FPS system, while Revenge of the Sith (the game tie-in to the film) created a fighting game that was also an adventure hack-and-slash game a la God of War. Shadow the Hedgehog (the game) had a morality system that determined which levels you played and what ending you got, giving you more endings than even most RPGs with morality systems.
The 7th generation was when they finally found niches that could be extremely profitable, so they got stuck making games less risky and more based on blockbusters that made bank. That's why you had a ton of FPS games and later, open-world games, because games like Halo 3, CoD Modern Warfare 2, and Skyrim made so much money.
The gaming industry has been treading water since the mid-2010s. I saw the Xbox One announcement and realized the forward-thinking phase of gaming was over. From then on, Xbox and Playstation would compete with the PC and lose, while Nintendo stayed at the nostalgia/party/family games niche and kept it due to sheer staying power. That is still the case today.
A game like Stellar Blade would've been not much to write about in the era of Bayonetta, Soul Calibur 4, Mortal Kombat 9, and DOA 4, where sexy girls with big tits were as common as water. But in today's sterile, puritanical culture? Stellar Blade was an example of how basic competency was the equivalent of seeing the face of God.
What I liked about the PS3/360 era is that The Discourse hadn't really happened yet. Games were still allowed to be fun. You were still allowed to hire actual talent to make a game, like most studios were still concerned mainly about whether or not a game would be successful, not whether or not enough dangerhaired fat chicks were involved in making it pander to woke tropes about niggerfaggots.
It was the last era when gaming was still seen as niche. You had games like Mass Effect and Metal Gear Solid 4 trying to ape movies because the movie industry was still more culturally dominant than the gaming industry. After a few blockbusters in that era, though, gaming slowly started overtaking the movie industry in terms of cultural relevance and hard cash earned, so the dangerhairs started paying attention to the gaming industry and started wondering how they could twist it.
"Diversity" in gaming during those days meant the occasional ethnic minority and "empowered women" with big boobs kicking ass, not lecturing the world about how white people suck. Especially when half the games featured white, buzz-cut soldier boys. You'd see characters like Sergeant Johnson from Halo or Bayonetta from, well, Bayonetta, be badasses while still appealing to white and Asian guys.
As for the "niggerfaggots", given how many times people used the word "NIGGER" in voice chat slurs, I'm sure there were tons of blacks and other ethnicities in the player base long before the SJWs got involved. People were calling each other "NIGGERS" all the fucking time. Like say, when one of your teammates fucked up and cost you the match, or when some asshole blows your brains out from halfway across the map.
