Bringing absolutes into a relative discussion is kind of short-sighted, and barely above "reducto ad absurdium". My point is simply this: almost without fail, the games of a generation with the absolute most impressive visuals have terrible gameplay. This being largely because so much of the budget is expended on graphical polish, and so little on tweaking and perfecting the gameplay engine.
I know a lot of gamers don't understand the full implications of it, but video games have budgets. You go into developing a game with an understanding that the expenses for making the game are a debt that the game has to be able to repay in sales. Meaning that the budget cannot exceed how much the game can practically be expected to rake in. And so you assign priority of focus to fit within the budget of your game, giving highest priority to the features that will sell your product. For a very long time now, developers have been giving graphics top priority, spending most of the budget on them, and all other aspects have suffered as a result.
The drive to improve graphics at the expense of all else is a plague upon the industry, and encourages companies to think that, as long as they just upgrade the visuals a bit with each new game, they can keep selling forever. EA has pushed this to extremes with their sports games, which lately have just been nothing BUT visual upgrades of last year's version with slightly updated rosters. There is zero creativity involved in this. There is no talent necessary. You just have to be able to make more and bigger to succeed when graphics are the primary focus.
When graphics cannot be improved any further, however, those developers who relied on graphics to hide their lack of talent suddenly have to contend with the fact that they can't just slap on another visual filter or add another 200 polygons to the player models. And that's when the developers worth their salt shine, and the ones who can't actually build a gameplay engine falter. And good riddance to them, I say, because the primary job of a video game is to entertain. If you cannot produce a solid and compelling gameplay engine (especially in an environment where that's your key means of differentiation), then you shouldn't be making games at all.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
