Is Hardware getting TOO Powerful?

[Shadow1980]

No, because one could then start to argue for any old arbitrary cutoff on what was "good enough." A crusty old Gen X-er like me could argue that consoles should have never advanced beyond the 16-bit era, that the games were good enough, and that the fact that the era produced so many classics is sufficient to demonstrate we didn't need anything more than that. I could then argue that the move to 3D just produced a flood of ugly games with terrible controls (which is an opinion I actually held regarding the vast majority of Gen 5 games back when they were new, and still hold today), and caused budgets to balloon year after year as games became more complicated.

In the same vein, one could apply these arguments to other media that have benefited from advances in technology. One could argue that the effects technology was good enough in the 80s and that the advent of CGI was just too much, providing all sorts of examples of CG that looked terrible even when it was new as well as old movies with practical effects that still look great today, and further arguing that ever more advanced CGI is just causing movies to become too bloated in terms of budget and ambition. One could even revert to the absurd position that the downfall of cinema came with the talkies, and that all we ever needed was a camera, the wacky antics of someone like Charlie Chaplin, and the backing of a classy orchestra.

The problem isn't technology. The tech will always advance. I'd even argue the tech should advance, much the same way as special effects in film shouldn't have stagnated where they were 20 or 30 or 50 or 70 years ago. Graphics in video games do matter, despite what some people might say. Graphics vs. gameplay is a false dichotomy, and sometimes graphics do matter for gameplay.

The problem is what people do with the tech. All this computing power is routinely thrown at things like rendering ever-larger worlds filled with a whole lot of nothing besides repetitive copy-and-paste objectives that exist simply to give players 60 hours worth of things to do in a single playthrough. There are games that show off what newer systems can do, but far too often the industry is content with churning out either uninspired open-world games like those I mentioned, or always-online multiplayer experiences that are designed first and foremost as platforms to sell microtransactions. AAA devs could easily make smaller, more focused single-player titles that have top-shelf graphics and play smoothly, but many of them choose not to. There are some current-gen games that do just that, though few of them are big-budget AAA third-party titles.