About the art, I think another perfect example is Grim Fandango. It was the first Lucasarts 3D adventure, at a time when the 3D (late '90) was a graphically inferior solution to 2D. However, they exploited the low polygon number, to give a special character to the models, like paper dolls. So the heresy of moving from 2D was instead a conscious artistic choice, strictly linked to the then-modern technologies.
To me, Grim Fandango looked fantastic. What made it difficult to play were the cursed keyboard controls. I still did beat it, but never wanted to come back to it because of those controls. A couple of years ago, I replayed the modern remaster, and boy does the good old mouse pointer improve the game immensely.
It's hard to remember how much controls for 3D games were a wild west for so long, especially on PC. (The original Tomb Raider controls are pretty bad, too, for instance.) People act like modern WASD+Mouse Look is an "ancient" standard passed down for centuries but a lot of that was hard work in 1990s and a lot of failed control schemes that never quite worked right, even in their time. (Similarly too how relatively "ancient" the modern two-stick controller flow feels, but isn't all that old actually. Remember how the N64 named the weird yellow D-Pad the "C-buttons" in part because they thought that might be more natural for "C is for" Camera control than the dual stick position?)
> So the heresy of moving from 2D was instead a conscious artistic choice, strictly linked to the then-modern technologies.
This is how it should have been all along. The only reason modern GPUs are in such demand is because we forgot to apply art before shiny tech. I don't know why things like polygon count and texture resolution turned into a metric for fun.
To this day I can have way more fun in older games like Minecraft than super polished AAA titles like RDR2 or Cyberpunk 2077. The graphics used to get me interested back when we thought photorealism was going to make shit way more fun, but the reality of artistic expression turned out to be much more complex than this...
Plenty games went the other way. For every stylish Grim Fandango there's been dozen of Superman 64 and Bubsy 3D, where the developers spent so much time trying to get graphics to work that they had no time left for gameplay or story.
Shiny tech means there's much less fighting with the technology that's needed. You can take advantage of that today you don't need to optimize every clock cycle and spend the time polishing up the gameplay.
Also, some stories require a fair amount of tech. Superman 64 should have happened in a bustling Metropolis, just like Cyberpunk 2077 does. But it was impossible with the technology of the time.
Another great example of choosing an art style that worked with the limitations of early 3D is Interstate '76, from 1997: https://i.imgur.com/ro5k82Z.png
...and then Escape from Monkey Island utilized the same tech as Grim Fandango, but without those stylistic choices that made Grim Fandango's graphics work so well :)
