For me it’s first person puzzle games. I can think of maybe a dozen off the top of my head that came out in the last decade. I especially enjoy when they’re open world. The ability to just quit a puzzle that’s stumped you and go try something else for a little bit is incredibly refreshing.
6th is GameCube/Xbox/PS2. 7th is 360/PS3.
But that was when shooters were getting worse the fastest. It’s when we started getting chest-high walls everywhere, regenerating health, auto aim, and a general slow down of the action.
I mean, a lot of my favorites were slower than Quake for sure. Faster isn’t automatically better. Regenerating health was preferable to health packs, but we also had the likes of Doom 2016 to show that it didn’t have to just be one or the other. Games like Halo 2 and 3, Call of Duty 2, 4, and Modern Warfare 2 (the first time), the Timesplitters games, the 007 games of that era (Agent Under Fire with moon gravity and Q Claw is some of the most fun you’ll have with three friends on the same couch), Half-Life 2 and its episodes, Crysis, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2; and getting into third person shooters that were of a similar design philosophy, Metal Arms, Gears of War 1-3, and the much better Star Wars Battlefronts than the ones EA put out with basically the same titles.