This is mostly for AAA games not so much indies.. and not neccessarily just dying light

One thing about older games that tends to be better imo is the world design, even with the worse tech a lot of the time they feel more tightly designed around the mechanics, being more densely populated with content, instead of just being massive open worlds even when that doesn't serve the gameplay loop, or having the far cry 5 "tackle zones in whatever order" thing, which just leads to them all feeling inconsequential and kinda samey, cause you don't get zones designed for specific skills you pick up later etc. and in general newer games feel more homogenized imo, like every game is an open world first person shooter, with light RPG elements (unless it's an online arena hero shooter), and what would've been the central mechanic boils down to a small part of it. so dying light for me feels like a parkour game while more of the modern games that feature those mechanics feel like games that happen to have parkour in them

Also in general older games feel less intrusive, newer games just have pop-ups and collectables and UI for every little thing all the time, it feels like it just wants you to buy a battlepass and DLC and whatever else

But where they are a lot worse is accesability. I mean dying light's controller settings are weird, like you have 4 presets you can change, but you can't bind the buttons individually, and some games I played don't have options to rebind at all even if they detect the controller. I always end up just using steam input anyway tbh, but if not for that replaying those games would be a lot more painful, also I often find a lot of settings like FOV or whatever else lacking (dying light is fine in that regard :3), and there's also things in a lot of older games where they don't neccesarily remind you what quest you're on, or teach you certain mechanics etc. So sometimes when I take a break from one for a while I end up needing to just run around or look up what im actually meant to be doing lol :3 maybe that's just me

Though overall I do enjoy a lot of the older games more than modern ones in the AAA scene lol. I do still play a lot of modern indies as well :3