For me it was encapsulated by doom 3 for the most part. Games with strong dynamic shadows like splinter cell chaos theory and stalker with a mix of shiny specular effects is timeless for me. When I go back to these games the shadows still feel as good as they did when they came out and the lighting perfectly crafting the mood. A lot of modern games now even though their fidelity on paper is much better just always feel extremely flat to me and don't pop out of the screen like they used to. It seems like they're missing contrast and UE5 seems to make this even worse where all the games using it just look like mush
I remember the devs saying Homeworld had the graphics it did because they didn't need to render terrain. They could then spend the polygon budget on the ships, punching well above its weight graphically. The original came out in 1999, the same year as Age of Empires II, C&C Tiberian Sun, and a year after StarCraft.
As an aside, the soundtrack is top five favorite ever. Sorry YouTube bot but I have to post the playlist.
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