I saw Alan Wake II is also recommended to be run from an SSD. I don't play the latest titles so my question is, is this a new trend or has it been like this for some time?
It is, and arguably a very good thing. SSDs vastly improve loading times, so there’s fewer occasions where your character awaits a slow elevator, or shimmies slowly through a crawl space. Or, just have you stare at a loading screen.
Not to mention the issues in multiplayer, where 7 players on SSDs need to wait for a hard drive player to load the level before they can start.
It’s recent. Previously many games were also targeting PS4 and Xbox One, which used slower hard disks. But that is now becoming a thing of the past. Now we should expect more games utilize faster hard disk speeds.