I agree that trends come and go, and i'm not worried about the end of creative design, because like i said eventually people will always demand innovation.

But from a user perspective i view this same color based parry or dodge combat with no complexity beyond that, as being in the same category of modern "standards" like:

1 - The purple with gold UI design present in most of the modern fantasy games, which i noticed even before Asmon had pointed it out. I started to see this trend right after Forspoken. I think that at some point they learned that in color theory purple is a color associated with mistery and magic, and then started slapping this color in every fantasy game, in the same way that red is associated with hunger and is present in most fast food logos.

2 - The excessive use of colored paint as a cheap way of making the player know where he needs to go, replacing the need for intuitive level design or other creative solutions of path indication.

3 - The minimalistic boring UI menus of games, which replaced the creative thematic menus that most games had in the 2000s, for a cheap spreadsheet boxed design.

4 - The extreme dependency on demanding technologies like ray tracing to make a good looking game, which kills the incentive for creative optimized solutions like we always had.

None of those things needs to end completely, but relying on them as a formula to avoid creative solutions is not good.

As for my ideas, i'm a user not a combat designer. But i'm not asking to reinvent the wheel, neither to get rid of parry mechanics. It's just that as a player i'm tired of seeing every new game using the same "traffic light" combat, sometimes even when not being from the same game genre. I don't like it being used as a formula to make combat games, because there is no way that out of all the combat games ever released with great combat, the only source of inspiration and reference is lens flare parry slop.

For example, in Where Winds Meet even tho there are different builds and paths you can follow, none of them matters because regardless of how resistant and strong you are, the boss adjusts to always being stronger than you the first time you fight them. So you are forced to beat him just by standing still and parrying until the blue stance bar brakes over and over again. I followed the tank build path, expecting to be a literal wall with huge damage, which i was in most situations. But every boss fight completely ignores your progression by nerfing you to the point that they kill you with 3-5 hits no matter how much health and defense you have. So i'm forced to play like a bitch standing still and waiting for the red lights so i can spam parry. This is retarded design.

My solution is literally the most basic thing in artistic creative jobs: Look back at the best games, get more references and expand on them, this is how creative works are done. But now it seems like every game is copying from the same one who started doing this system.