Can I just say as a hobbyist 3D artist, I really appreciate this thread's existence? It's a much-needed constant reminder to us that good art direction will always be better than trying to impress people with poly counts or texture sizes or whatever--ESPECIALLY if you don't have a large team and the absolute latest and greatest technology to even attempt trying to impress people with detail and realism.
Having gone to art college, I was taught to look towards hugely-successful, mega-expensive movies (mostly from Disney and Pixar, stuff like The Lion King and its remake, Inside Out, Coco, etc.) for inspiration. Now these blockbusters are fine if you're working in the industry on an expensive tentpole project with at least 1,000 other people, and you have an extremely specialized job like making the fur groom for one background creature for the next 3 years of your life, but for indies, hobbyists or even those recently laid off from the animation/VFX/AAA gaming industry and still struggling to get back in, these sources of inspiration are counterproductive. It's like, "my laptop can't even render 1995's Toy Story in a reasonable amount of time, and I'm only one person, how on Earth do I make something as polished as THAT without directly working at one of these companies?"
Looking to the past and being inspired by the ways ingenious artists and game devs worked around hardware that is weaker than the smartphone we had 10 years ago and incorporating it into our own indie projects is a much smarter way to go about it, I've eventually found. This thread, intentional or not, is providing a fantastic fountain of inspiration for me on ways to make cooler-looking stuff of my own, whether it's animations or getting back into small-time game dev--I've gotta check out videos of the original GameCube versions of Resident Evil 1 Remake and Resident Evil 0, it seems.
Even games that objectively look hideous by today's standards, usually from the 5th generation of consoles (N64, Saturn, PS1), used some pretty cool techniques to make the graphics look at least a tiny bit more bearable for the time. Until or unless Activision makes a version of Spyro Reignited Trilogy that isn't so aggressively dependent on nauseating motion blur (and even more nauseating at only 30 FPS with motion blur turned off entirely), I'll still be a huge fan of the thoughtful color/fake lighting choices and adorably-janky, Muppets-like animation of the original Spyro games, for instance:
