Summary
The HD era officially began in 2005 when Microsoft beat Sony and Nintendo to the punch with their Xbox 360 console. Because of this, they got an advantage over Sony at least, although Nintendo would pull their own weight with the success of the Wii.
Sony did struggle but eventually got out of their lull a few years in to catch up to the Xbox 360 in terms of sales and quality of games. Even though the Wii is not an HD system, it will be included in this breakdown of the trends that started around 2005 and 2006. This examination will look and see if those trends are still being felt to this day.
8Digital Games
The Rise Of Indies And Returning To Classics
Indie games have existedas long as the Internet has been around, but it wasn’t until this console generation that they were easily distributable through digital storefronts.Braid, Castle Crashers,andSuper Meat Boyhelped pave the way for indie games on the Xbox 360 console.
Players could eventually download full games from digital stores and even get demos too. For classic game fans, there was even a way to play their favorite titles from their youth, from PS1 games on the PS3 to NES games on the Wii, and all of these trends are better than ever on current consoles.
7DLC
Furthering Your Quest In-Between Sequels
The digital store shelves also allowed companies to update games with free patches and paid DLC. This made games last longer in lieu of companies creating a sequel right away. It didn’t start well becauseThe Elder Scrolls 4: Obliviongot panned with its horse armor.
However, eventually, there were somesolid DLC campaignslikeMinerva’s DeninBioShock 2andUndead NightmareforRed Dead Redemption. DLC is also alive and well, for better or worse, on modern consoles.
6Cover Shooters
Gears Of Win
Cover shooters could be seen to have started in arcades in the 90s with games likeTime Crisisor for consoles,kill.switchon the previous generation of consoles.Gears of Warlaunched for the Xbox 360 in 2006 and reclaimed that mechanic for its own, and now most cite it as the game thatpopularized cover mechanicsat the very least.
Other notable games from this generation include theUnchartedandArmy of Twofranchises, which bled into the next generation a bit. While cover shooters are not as prominent today compared to normal third-person shooters or FPS games, this still pops up occasionally.
5Walking Slowly Through Transmissions
And Audio Diaries
There was a habit in games likeGears of WarorWarhammer 40,000: Space Marineto slow down character movement while they received a transmission, and it was about as fun as the quick-time event boom of the previous console generation.
This trend has thankfully almost gone away, except when remasters come out. There was a better audio-based mechanic via audio logs that clued players into additional lore, like inBioShock. This was sort of an evolution of finding notes in games likeResident Evil,although notes are still the primary environmental storytelling device that developers use, while audio logs have mostly faded away.
4Motion Controls
Sony And Microsoft Chase Nintendo
Perhaps the wildest thing Microsoft and Sony did during this generation was chase themotion control boom that the Wiiintroduced when it launched in 2006. It took both companies until 2010 to jump on board with the Kinect and PlayStation Move.
They did not find the success that the Wii had, but motion controls evolved. Motion controls have helped create immersive VR experiences, like with PSVR, and Nintendo still technically has motion control support via their Joy-Cons on the Switch and Switch 2, but it’s not really a supported trend like it was during the first HD era.
3Yearly Sequels
Move Over Sports
Waiting for a sequel in the 80s and 90s was torture because most games never had an EXACT release date like they do now, and also players couldn’t look things up online. Sometimes it took years, but the one type of game that players could count on in the 90s to get yearly sequels was sports games likeMadden. This remained true for years until the HD era.
Call of Dutywasn’t very bigwhen it launched in 2003, but starting withCall of Duty 2in 2005, which was a launch Xbox 360 game, Activision made sure there was an entry every single year, which they have not missed since 2005. Another game that started small wasAssassin’s Creed, which was released in 2007. Its sequel was released in 2009, and up through 2015, Ubisoft remained steady with sequels, too. Both of these franchises proved it wasn’t just possible for sports games to make sequels every year, but unfortunately, tedium did start to settle in.
2Rock Bands
Going Beyond Guitars
Guitar Herowas released not quite in time for the Xbox 360 launch in 2005, as the first game was exclusive to the PS2. While it and its sequel saw success, it wouldn’t be until 2007 that an all-out declaration of war broke loose viaRock Band.
A year later,Guitar Heroanswered back with their ownband equipment gameviaGuitar Hero World Tour. Konami chased the trend too withRock Revolution, which was panned, and Ubisoft gotRocksmithup and running for those who actually wanted to learn how to play just the guitar. This was a wild time for plastic instruments that burned hot and had an encore in the next generation, but it wasn’t met with as much praise.
1Open-World Games
The Dominant Genre’s Birth
Open-world games evolved heavilyin this generation thanks to the consoles having more computing power. Players got world maps in RPGs or sandbox cities before titles likeRed Dead Redemption, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim,andFar Cry 3absolutely destroyed their scope of what it meant to be free.
Beyond digital storefronts, open-world games are probably the biggest genre trend from this HD era that hasn’t gone away yet. There is some fatigue, though, as not everyone can play ten massive open-world games and finish them in a single year, but so far, the crash hasn’t fully happened yet.
