I have played over 1000+ games in my lifetime, so I will state my input here. Compare games from back in the mid-2000s to now. We had Far Cry 2 with burning and destructible foliage. GTA San Andreas with a large open world and dynamic car destruction. SWAT 4 with top of the notch controllable AI. Half-Life 2 with absolutely groundbreaking physics. Soldier of Fortune with dynamic limb dismemberment. Red Faction with completely destructible environments, with absolutely no limits. Not to mention the multitudes of games in the past with miscellaneous interactables that would immerse the player more deeply into the game. Crysis with its batshit insane graphics, that pretty much NO computers in 2007 were able to run on high settings.
How many modern games can you list that have any sort of combination of these?
It has been 20+ years since some of these came out, and we have somehow DOWNGRADED for the most part from how it used to be, LMAO.
For some of the case, a lot of these companies make their profits simply by brand name. For example, when people think of Just Cause, a lot of people think of Just Cause 2, which was fun as fuck, not Just Cause 4, which is somewhat mid. These companies can afford to make new shitty downgrades every year because of this.
The influx of "retro style" shooters isn't helping, because even though a lot of them are cool and creative, in some aspects, they miss the point of what made those old games so good. A lot of indie games these days are shitting out pretty solid titles, though.
With "AAA" gaming companies, it's just a dick measuring contest on who could make their game look the prettiest and who can make their games the most pozzed. We have good looking and decent playing racing games with "birdshit" destruction. We have good looking games that last 5 hours and have little to no playability, with companies now charging $70 for them. It's all about LOOKS for these fuckers, from both the consumer and the company themselves.
There are very few AAA companies that are still even on par with how they were decades ago. Some try to make up for a lack of interactivity and replayability by doing dumb shit like spreading "collectibles" around the map, but people who have played video games for a long time can see right through this bullshit.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is probably the newest AAA game that masterfully adds even just a few of the top notch stuff that was present in the games I listed above 20 years ago, and infuses it into the game to some degree, which makes it such a good fucking game. A RDR2 type scenario nowadays where just some absolutely amazing game comes out that blows them all out of the water is maybe once every eight or so years. Back over a decade ago, there would be a game like this that would come out every year. 1998, 2004, and 2007 in terms of video gaming had several of these types of games competing amongst one another. The golden era.
So yeah, at this point I definitely do prefer a remaster of a 20 year old game over some washed out garbage. Pretty much most video games with a few exceptions stopped being good after 2014. I cannot wait until the gaming industry crashes and burns to the ground again so they are FORCED to come out with good shit.