I see what you mean there. Another thing that's been happening lately is some development tools making the process easier. Euphoria is a nice example of how animation has been made a whole lot easier. If you haven't youtubed it, Euphoria is definitely worth taking a look at.

I imagine a lot of those kinds of tools will be coming out in the future, but the biggest change over these next few years is probably going to be the scale of games. Simulation and strategy games especially stand to gain a lot.

The tech jumps lately have been huge, but it hasn't all been just in games. There's a lot of things that are (in a purely direct sense) of peripheral significance, but will impact gaming in some interesting ways. AI is a nice example of this.

A lot of things have been done the slow and roundable way in games. For example, if you wanted to detroy a building you had to it all piece by piece in very specific way, or a tree would have to be done leaf by leaf, and that's not the case anymore. Computers can grow plants to where each individual leaf for each tree grows in a unique way procedurally, and something like destroying a building is done procedurally.

Edit-Videos

Procedural Terrain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTyBFvg0e4I

Procedural Tornado: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRiJcF4r3vU&feature=related

Euphoria: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae3fgj2x1aI

I don't think that we hit a technology wall.... more like capacity to make games at a moderate price and in a moderate time

 I had this long boring post ready, but you said what I wanted to in a sentence. And better.  Kudos.

I don't post here much, because rarely can I bring anything relevant to the table that hasn't already been said.

but...

technology walls don't actually exist. You see, once we get to a point that man power in designing levels, textures, etc is holding back the design of said game, which quite frankly, as you guys point out, is happening right now, the next step will be undertaken. That step is what we call "proceedural design"

the idea is that eventually we won't have to "draw" or photograph each texture or object in the enviroment, but rather, we'd program the game with paremeters to generate the enviroment from scratch, on the fly. We're talking fractals and mathematical formulas that would simulate nature and therefore, have infinite variations. Computing these proceedures would take much more power than our most powerful game systems today. The current game systems may be able to pull it off, maybe not. I'd suspect the Ps3 would be the best machine for this, as it does have that whole corecell thing going on where it can do multiple computations at one time. but regardless, i believe that this process will eventually change "the games" more than anything that has ever come before.

at that point, you can say goodbye to looping backgrounds, overused texture surfaces and enemies that look exactly alike. But even though proceedural graphics exist today, and even as powerful as a machine as the PS3 is, we're still not QUITE to that point yet.

technology will continue to improve until we run into the only REAL technology wall, which is sillicon conductivity. that wall won't exactly apply to video games, however, i don't forsee, because by the time we develop sillicon conductors that are only 1 micron across, proceedural computations will have taken hold.

hope that gives you guys something to think about. great thread. And with that, i'm out. : )

Look, maybe my definition of "A LOT BETTER" is different than some other people.  To me it means more than just improved textures and loading times or some added effects.  To me it's when someone who's used to gaming on a 360 looks at a PC game and their jaw drops because it's that much better.  It's the games like Crysis that show beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's beyond anything before it.  It's like going from Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PS2 to Grand Theft Auto 4 on the PS3/360.  Screenshots show that kind of difference because there's simply no mistaking one game's graphics when they're far beyong the other's.  That's why I asked for screenshots because even though I know Bioshock and Gears of War look better on the PC it's nowhere near the kind of thing that was talked about in this thread where the 360 and PS3 would look archaic in comparison. 

Oh and for some people's info I do keep up with PC games, the last two games I've played were on PC. 

Thats a brilliant post, you should post more. Its pretty much what I was interested to hear when starting this thread.

 I watched a very interesting science doco on fractals years ago, it really grabbed my imagination.

I just hope next gen has the massive leap that the PS3/360 took this gen and not what the wii did, the Nintendo wii is about two GC's, while the 360/PS3 smashed what we thought this gen would be. The biggest improvement this gen has got to be GT, 4k poly cars to 200k ones this is just insane. I can't wait until PS4 to see cars at over 2mil polys, truly life like.

You stated clearly what I fumbled around like a retard trying to say, thank you :)

@ Mr cAPSLOCK

I watch them vids from your post and that Euphoria engine seems pretty cool.

It is really amazing what technology can do. I remember playing Donkey kong Country and the first water level, I was absolutely blown away. I thought this is where its at, it never gonna much better than this. Modern day games like crysis, kinda proved my thinking back then to be little wrong.

I own a PC, I play PC games, and I know what's coming on PC.  And as far as looking like a troll how about you take a good hard look at your profile pic.  Oh and about Gears, I know it looks better on PC, I'm talking about games that look A LOT better, and that's more than improved textures and loading times and a few more effects, it's games that raise the bar a lot higher like Crysis and Far Cry 2.   Games like that will be few and far between.  Don't believe me?  Look at the list of PC games coming next year that are listed in a thread in the PC forum and tell me how many rival Crysis.  Yeah I thought so, 'nuff said.