Everytime i watch Iron Pineapples "steam dumpster diving" series (which is great btw!) I always kinda come away feeling like, for MOST extremely small dev/solo dev projects? And even mid-level indies? Low fidelity with a strong art direction would make so many projects look visibly less "cheap".

Cuz like, there is a LOOK that im coming to associate with small team projects that want to LOOK like the big AAA big boys but lack the budget and manpower to actually pull that off. You know shit thats like:

-extremely high detail character models with the STIFFEST animation
-or if the individual animations are fine, then theres like zero animation transitions so you see these lovely character movements snapping from one to the other jankily
-way too many overly bright special fx with particle fx that would make Killer Instinct 2013 blush
-way too much effort put into physics fx
-put together in an engine that very obviously cannot handle all the fancy shit theyve thrown together so its performance chugs

Like i feel like every other game that ironpineapple tries that isnt obviously some student project would benefit from severely reduced scope of visual fidelity and instead focusing on like, trying to look like a really good, idealized version of a game that could have been released on the ps2. All the effort going into these AAA level models and rather than looking impressive and realistic, it just comes across as MORE artificial and cheap than if they aimed a lil lower.