I noticed the most recent crop of engines (thinking of Frostbite 3 here mostly) do a lot of cheating to run well. This is most apparent on the awful draw distan

I noticed the most recent crop of engines (thinking of Frostbite 3 here mostly) do a lot of cheating to run well. This is most apparent on the awful draw distance of terrain decoration. Draw-in is very apparent at even the highest graphics setting. Worse, despite games like Battlefield having beautiful art assets, it takes very little for the illusion of photorealism to be destroyed; it could be as simple as getting too close to a piece of tall grass and realizing it's actually just a sprite. Or noticing that a flag is always flapping one way, and smoke is drifting the opposite way. It's unfortunate, but the brain is really good at picking these inconsistencies out. More stylized games seem to age much better; TF2 still looks great.