> Current game devs, especially in the AAA space, spend a lot of time and effort looking for hyper realism and embracing new tech to achieve accurate PBR. I wonder whether the limitations of the older hardware force a more artistic stance on everyone, even down to technical artists, to embrace an art style and art direction and work to achieve attractiveness vs realism. Or I could just be seeing my early 20’s through rose-tinted glasses

I'd argue that during Max Paynes time (early to mid 00s) gaming was far more graphics tech driven than these days, especially on PC. It is far more common to see heavily stylized or non-photorealistic games these days than back then imho. When I think early 00's PC games, lot of it is shooter games pushing the tech envelope very heavily, stuff like HL2, Far Cry, Doom 3 etc, and I don't think we really see that sort of games often these days anymore.

Early to mid 00's was peak Moore's Law. Every year left last year's computers on the curb. Graphics hardware acceleration and programmable shaders were expanding their capabilities in ungainly leaps and bounds. Every new piece of popular hardware wasn't just the marketing number going up, it was Christmas for software. You didn't need 100+ devs to compete in the big leagues. And yeah there were a lot of moody FPS games, but I can't describe the delight of first seeing a Katamari Damacy or a Portal. It was a time of untilled earth and unplucked fruit.