Castlevania would be an Indie game by todays standards in budget, team size and concept.

You are making an argument about 21st century cars based on your favorite 19th century horse carriage.

Is that a parody? Castlevania: Symphony of the Night famously have a god awful menu screen that was literally a placeholder and they forgot or didn't have time to change it. Not that it is a bad game, I point it out to say that even back them AAA not always is the Pinnacle or effort and polish, and how can they be, they are subject of so many constraints, like release date to fall into marketing strategies and such, specifically with physical media production. So if a game was to be released for the Christmas shopping season it would not be postponed because a lack of a menu design.

I too was there 3000 years ago and there was a lot of shit AAA games even back them. For one there was a lot of bad habits from the arcade time that made a lot of gameplay suboptimal. I think that it is just survivorship bias because the 90% not great is forgotten with time and we only remember the great games.

But all of that is beside the point, how can you put Fez and Slenderman in the same group? Fez is a great game, there is no lower quality in any aspect of it. In fact in modern games I see more experimentation and innovation in Indie titles and almost none in AAA because they are so expensive they have to always play it safe (same shit happening with the film industry by the way).

Hey man, you might have been around a while- a lot of us have- that clearly doesn't make you an expert.

They were all considerably lower quality, cheaper, and easier to make than AAA games.

You are confusing 'production value' with 'quality'. Being 'easier to make' (if that were true) and costing less to produce are both objectively good things, the only way that someone could remotely think they were bad is if they confuse 'production value' with 'quality'.

In 1992 a crime film was released called "White Sands" having a budget of $22 Million. That same year an indie film was released called "Reservoir Dogs" with a budget of $1.2 – 3 million. White Sands had great production values and 11 times more budget than Reservoir Dogs had.

Both films had very good actors, but ironically the Tarantino film was the one that didn't star Samuel L. Jackson. The 'production value' of Dogs is quite low. There are only a handful of locations and the majority of the film is shot in 1 room of 1 warehouse.

Reservoir Dogs is to this day hailed as one of the best films of the genre and a 'masterpiece' and White Sands is... I've honestly never even heard anyone mention it even once in the last 33 years and had no idea it even existed before googling 'Crime films from 1992'.

See also "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", "Halloween", "Trainspotting", "The Evil Dead", "Night of the Living Dead", "Memento"...etc

Having a huge budget and high production values clearly don't make a film good or lack thereof a film bad- same goes for video games.

There are plenty of "AAA" games that were turds you've just forgotten about them. And there are still plenty of AAA games being released so saying that we've " been conditioned to accept (indie games) now." is just wrong. People don't play indie games because they've been 'conditioned to accept' them, they play them because they are fun.

Are we putting Fez and Journey in the same bucket as that old ass shitty freeware Slenderman game?