@bonifartius Everyone's shooting for realism but they're all landing in the same not-quite-realism region, and they all recycle their models. It's a dark age.

A lot of the older aesthetics came from the limitations but people that could make something interesting within those limitations could make something interesting now. As an industry, games are hit-based, so the studios get very risk-averse with the big budget games, so there's pressure to look like the other games. The interesting visuals usually come from indie games. Hotline Miami, games like that. Stray looked really great. People lost their shit when they saw The Last Night (and then Twitter killed that game). But then you look at something like Cyberpunk 2077, right, it's like the entire budget went into the art department.