But to be fair: Games like the old Unreal rendered with software on your CPU only. They could not display Hundreds of particles and enemies, they even had to optimize sound, using CPU extensions like MMX and still the game was too slow on most of the hardware.
And if they would have let you look down at your own player model then it would be an ugly mess of 150 polygons of a body.
They did what they could do best at that time. And it was a revolution of gameplay and technology.