Whatever reason modern games have for looking like shit, it's not good enough. The end effect is that they look like shit.

Maybe a little snark is good. These big studios have been pumping out bigger and louder games for a decade, and each one is more soulless than the last. There's a reason Minecraft took off the way it did. It's because it was a return to the visually appealing age when pixel colors were in some sense manually selected, resulting in a pleasant palette. I can say without a hint of irony that I prefer the look and feel of the original Doom to any modern blockbuster game.

Are you here to tell me that Minecraft and Doom are paragons of bad gameplay?