1) Yes, we need better tools to make better textures, guess what Sherlock, those tools have gone DOWN in price per decade. It used to be you needed a whole mainframe for 3D work in the early 90s, now a 500$ laptop has far more power.
Sure but tools are not what make the development of these "AAA" games expensive, it is the workforce that uses these tools. The tools are a very minor expense - practically no consequence - compared to the wages of all the people involved in creating these games.
2) Textures can be more complex today, true, but again, the difference in workload is not that extreme as you make it out to be. I never said you can make Assassin Creed Odyssey with the same number of people you can make a tiny PS1-era game, by the way. But you don't need 100x the people either.
The difference in workload for making a state of the art game during the PS1 and today is *huge*. During the PS1 days you had less people working on the entire game than the most specialized art department (e.g. technical artists) in a modern "AAA" game. Check the credits of any of these games for the actual artists, designers, etc to see.
And given that most PS1-era games sold 100k-500k copies each, at best, and were considered a success, vs AC selling millions and tens of millions, and DLCs, i think it evens out....
What is considered a success or not to the people behind those games (be it their developers or publishers) is irrelevant to how much the games cost to be made and your argument in the post i replied to was about that cost, not how the people who paid that cost could interpret the games' success.
3) You whole argument is that modern engines are more advanced, they need more people to work on them, and they don't re-use assets. This is patently false.
Indeed it is patently false because that isn't my argument at all. My argument has nothing to do with modern engines or tools, it has purely to do with the number of people needed to create the level of visual quality you see in state of the art "AAA" games and how that number of people affects the development costs compared to the PS1 era since that is what you originally brought up in the comment i replied to.
Models are getting reused all the time, for example. Have you ever wondered why for example in the UT3 engine era, almost all the games per dev had the same bulky/beefy human models? Ever wondered why? What, they couldn't design slimmer human models in UT3? Firaxis did, they designed "thin man" in XCOM, for example... Why most models looked the same type of meatsack? Does the word "reusable" say anything to you?
Yes, a game does reuse a lot of assets in itself, however your original comment was not about reuse of assets in a game but about reuse of assets between projects - here is explicitly what you wrote: "
but we are also re-using more stuff between projects, so it evens out".
They don't build all the assets from scratch per game, this is a myth you are peddling.
This is not a myth, it is a fact that the vast majority of assets used in games - especially when it comes to graphics where "AAA" developers are into a rat race for the best visuals - are recreated from scratch for each game because the time interval between games is large enough for those assets to appear "dated".
However...
In Assassin Creed, they reused the vast majority of assets. The Ezio trilogy reused a lot of models, textures, and animations, between the three games, and Altair's game, with minor alterations/improvements.
...even in the few cases where some assets are reused (but do not be confused, compared with the new assets, those assets are a very tiny minority) they are not reused as-is but instead go through modification and, just like making new assets from scratch, that modification takes time for the artists to do (time which costs money to the developer).
I am sorry, all you did was to say "modern engines more advanced, therefore they need more people".
No, that is your misinterpretation.
Credit screens are a sham. [...] They are meant to give the illusion, like in the film industry, that the product was expensive to make.
EDIT: also
You don't do motion capture and facial motion capture per video game.
Yes you do. Many "AAA" developers even have their own motion capture rooms with fulltime actors working on their games.