> Unreal engine 1 looks good to me, so I am not a good judge.

But we did hit a point where the games were good enough, and better hardware just meant more polygons, better textures, and more lighting. The issues with Unreal Engine 1 (or maybe just games of that era) was that the worlds were too sparse.

> over saturation of samey games

So that's the thing. Are we at a point where graphics and gameplay in 10-year-old games is good enough?