Companies don't want to invest in creating their own engine anymore, so now we get unoptimized unreal engine games now.

It's not laziness, it's bottom line and chasing the dollar. Management doesn't give a shit about optimization, just MVP (minimum viable product). Speaking as a developer, the mindset of 'we will fix it after deployment' is fucking everywhere.

It also helps that the game uses locked perspective scenes.

Just to nitpick, the HD remaster is a remaster of the 2002 remake, so it's a bit older than 10 years.

Here’s the reason AAA devs are obsessed with graphics:

It’s the only thing that differentiates them from indie devs.

Once you realize that indie devs can do anything and everything that a AAA game can do, except for creating tons of high detail 3D models, levels, and textures, you begin to see the AAA studio’s dilemma. If they don’t hire all those artists, level designers, and animators then they’re forced to compete with indie devs on gameplay, story, and features — none of which they can do!

Why is that? Because there are millions of indie game devs out there who are willing to spend many years of their lives trying out ideas that have close to zero chance of being successful and all the gamers out there are happy to pick that one in a million game which actually succeeds! For a AAA studio to step into that arena would be absolutely foolish.

It’s the same reason big corporations dominate book publishing but they don’t even bother trying to write books themselves.

I will never understand the obsession around computer-crashingly good graphics. They push your temps to the max and computer components don't start throttling themselves until the temps are a little too high so that your shit will stop working sooner so you have to buy a new gpu sooner. Why can't they let us control the thermal throttling temp, huh? Fuck that 99 degree celsius shit. "99c is acceptable temps for laptops and gpus" my ass.

Pixel art isn't a necessarily a positive selling point to me but if the game is good and the graphics are good enough to be able to tell what's going on without having to get high on drugs first, then its fine by me. Ps2 or xbox 360 era 3d graphics are the sweet spot though. I'm glad they finally added actual graphics to Dwarf Fortress, it's actually playable now. If the msdos installation process has better graphics then a game then that's pushing things little too far imho.

Seriously, way too many games are just generic garbage that advertise only on "look how realistic my game is, you're not a true gamer if the games you play don't make your computer sound like a jet engine!"

Graphics can be part of the fun. What's so difficult to understand?

Only if you like smudges due to upscaling and TAA.

Yeah seriously, anyone can make beautiful prerendered graphics that look good running on any game system released in the past ~20 years (which is what RE1 uses). Doing in realtime is the hard part.

I noticed that too, but I do think that the anon is talking about the remaster since he's also talking about Windows 98 and the remaster was out in 2002 while the original game was out in 1996. I know fuck all about the production of the remake, but maybe windows 98 was all they had available to them and maybe they did draw all the textures themselves for it. It'd have to look into that, though.