What's with fantasy and past settings being so generic and boring?

I just thought it was weird seeing both threads directly next to each other on the front page.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. There are shit-tons of extinct animals that would be fucking awesome in games that are just never touched for some reason. If a game is going for extinct animals, it's usually just dinosaurs at the most.
As fantasy games go, it would be cool to see more cryptids in games. Anything beyond the obvious Kraken, Yeti, Bigfoot, and Chupacabra would be awesome.
Imagine running into a Bunyip or a Dobhar-chu.
The best we've got is the Zelda: Majora's Mask Flatwoods Monsters, or Monster Hunter, but I don't think that really counts.

Oh and ground sloths existed up until right during the golden age of egypt which isn't that long ago.

I ain't see nothing wrong with that.

...

why did we kill all of the cool shit?

Why do you assume it was hunted to extinction? Thing go extinct all the time for a dozen reasons.

Well all the cases in the OP are because of humans.
We hunt and kill all big things because they have the most meat for the work.

thats fine I suppose, but you'd kind of turn it into more of a weird dark aged farcry 3 than like a traditional medieval setting, which is totally fine, I just don't think thats exactly what op was getting at

ah, my bad, but which ones? I doubt we were getting megatherium sized behemoths at that point

oh no its totally fine by me (as long as it isn't butchered like in farcry primal) that just wasn't what op was talking about specifically

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalocnus
This is the last known ground sloth which lived until the 16th century.

Futurama did the sci-fi the best and it was a fucking parody.