Maybe from 2005 to about 2013?

I'll take well-done, slightly monotone visuals over the psychedelic rainbow barf a lot of today's games are covered in.

Rainbow barf all day everyday
I won't buy their shit anymore, but props to Nintendo's designers for tasteful rainbow barf like Super Mario Galaxy.

Here's my attempt with no Googling

Edit - that's GTA 4 not SA, I thought that didn't sound right

Mgs4 is the upper and the lower is 3
- Nice. The only ones I played were on PS1 so I'm unfamiliar with the newer ones haha

I had multiple RPG where i literally removed a grayisch-brownish layer with a few reshade shaders. And made it more crisp.

This was an absolute scourge on gaming in the 2000s. I remember when gears of war came out on PC and the most popular mod simply removed post processing effects from the game. It instantly went from poop brown to James Cameron Terminator 2 judgement day Blu-ray edition levels of teal.

I think the teal was better TBH.

Remember when uncharted came out on the PS3 and there was a feature in the menu called "Next-Gen mode" that just put a brown filter over everything?

shout-out to Just Cause 3 for being colorful. On an HDR display it's BEAUTIFUL. Also exploding bad guys is fun af

I must point out though ITS SO FUN

It's SO CHAOTIC AND I LOVE IT
yeah, but that's a whole generation after this. most games were colorful by then. especially once hdr started to come around.

games like crysis 3 and far cry 4 really helped break the trend.

I'd say crysis is almost the exact inflection point. look at it, it still has a lot of that brown aesthetic, but it's colorful and has bright skies and giant lens flairs. the lens flairs especially became part of the norm moving forward.

This was way worse than when every character was getting a bow and arrow because hunger games

Ah the dark days before PBR... If only gameplay had also evolved with graphics.

Before the Professional Bull Riders drank Pabst Blue Ribbon while shooting at Point Blank Range?
- Physics based rendering. Basically good texture shaders that work like materials work in the real world. Since that has been developed artists working with computer graphics in movies and games more or less don't have to worry about making something look realistic.
  
  Every texture has values for color, reflectivity, subsurface scattering, fresnel, roughness and probably a ton more values I forgot. That gives you everything real light does when hitting a surface.
  
  I think Wreck it Ralph was one of the first movies to use the techniques. I remember reading something to that effect alongside tutorials on how to get PBR into Blender. I think it took very little time for PBR to get into basically every graphics software. And nowadays when you buy textures they all come with different textures to set the correct values for PBR.
I don’t think PBR would have saved these games from the awful post-processing. These are just examples of really bad color grading.