If you're looking for the Quake brand of arena shooters, I feel like you're getting a lot of those these days. If you're looking for the era just after that, which Halo would fall in, I'm also looking for that type of game, so the nostalgia that fuels indie game design is probably only a few years away from delivering us that sort of game again. Maybe that new TimeSplitters or Perfect Dark game will be good.
First-person shooters, the way they were made in the 6th and 7th gens. A campaign, probably co-op, probably with split-screen or LAN, with some versus multiplayer that repurposed some slightly-remixed locations from the campaign that you can play with approximately 4-8 players. That's all you need. Sometimes we still get some great FPS campaigns, like Half-Life: Alyx, but I haven't really gotten the kind of co-op or versus multiplayer I've been looking for for over a decade. Not everything needs to be a live service. It can be a flash in the pan multiplayer that's so good that you break it out when you have a few friends over or in a Discord call. Not every multiplayer FPS needs to be an e-sport with an online population of tens of thousands of players to matchmake with in ranked.
I also don't really get racing games for me anymore. Star Wars: Episode One Racer, Burnout Revenge, and F-Zero GX truly spoke to me, and there were a few others that were close, but for the most part, if your racing game isn't basically Mario Kart or full of real licensed cars in real places, it doesn't get made. And the ones that aren't Mario Kart don't usually get split-screen multiplayer either, which is a must-have for me. I did get Trail Out in the recent past, which is very good, and there's that game Aero GPX on the horizon to potentially give me my F-Zero fix, but the actual racing games I'm looking for are so few and far between.
Fortunately, this list used to be much longer, and all the other holdouts, like Advance Wars-esque tactics games, Resident Evil 1-esque survival horror games, Commandos-esque stealth tactics games, and a few others have all gotten their itches scratched.
The upgraded mobile chip they use will likely be as powerful as our current Steam Decks but with better power draw, since they're mobile architectures and not x64. That said, you couldn't pay me to buy another Nintendo console at this point.
I'm neither assuming that a game is perfect or that the designer's vision is always correct, but the designer is intending for you to experience a game a certain way, and it's often most fun that way. If certain strategies are dominant such that they invalidate large portions of the game that are there, it usually results in that game being boring. Your mileage may vary, of course, but that's how these things tend to go. The Witcher is a much more interesting game for me when you utilize potions, oils, and monster manuals, and I found the combat to be quite boring when I didn't know how to interact with those systems and instead just reloaded saves for better dice rolls. By forcing you to play a certain way, like by omitting certain save systems, they're making sure you play the way they intended, and if the game is as good as they hoped to have made it, it will result in the most people having the best time.
Here's another example. Batman: Arkham combat is an amazing replication of what Batman is in video game form. It's one man taking on dozens of others, usually more lethally armed than he is, with some athleticism and a bunch of gadgets. You're incentivized via the scoring/XP system to never button mash, use every move in your arsenal at least once, never get hit, and to take out every enemy in the room in a single flowing combo. However, it didn't steer most players into playing that way very effectively (at least on normal difficulty), and many leave the combat system disappointed that they can beat it just by attacking with X and countering with Y.
I guess the combat was the weakest part, but it composes such a small part of the game that it made plenty of sense. From that perspective, I found it weird that it had any boss battles at all.
I found Death Stranding to be a game that, even though it has combat in it, it's a solid demonstration of how many different types of mechanics we could be building a game around besides combat, even with a story and high production value.
I mean, if you're knowingly turning on cheat codes in a game, you know you're deviating from the intended experience, but if you're doing something the software lets you do, that's something the designer is trying to tune to steer you toward having a better time. Often times you can take a dominant strategy and think less of the game for it being too easy or one-note, which can and does happen when you can exploit a save system like this. I got through the first Witcher game mostly by save scumming, and I didn't think particularly highly of it, but the sequels did a much better job of introducing me to the potions, oils, and monster hunting mechanics that would have made the game easier and more solvable without save scumming. Had I known for the first game what I knew of the sequels, I might have enjoyed the game more, but that first game especially didn't force me into learning those systems.
Doom was interesting because it was a solution to both of those problems at once. Doom shouldn't be a cover shooter, but hunting for health packs is not action packed or fun, so the enemies became health packs.
The annoying part in Zelda was where you'd acquire and destroy your weapon in just a small handful of swings, like the kingdom of Hyrule had the world's worst blacksmiths.
Have you ever tried Skullgirls? You can form a team of up to three characters, and you can select just about any move they have as an assist, forming some wild synergies.
There are online modes in most of those games, besides Sekiro, that difficulty options would have an effect on, particularly invasions. Fortunately, invasions have been getting scaled back as time goes on, and the games have gotten easier in general, so we might converge on a game with difficulty options.
Traveling in Death Stranding is the game though. Enemies are only one part of the challenge; there's also terrain and how much cargo you can carry on the way, even if you've taken that route before.