Very interesting. Putting what you're saying with what scoobes is saying, and in light of OP, what would stop a developer from using a game and modding it to make a next gen game a little later (say 3 to 5 years later)? What if Crysis 2 was a modded version of Crysis, like one of the vids we saw?

If Crysis can look like what we saw in those videos after what 4 or 5 years, what's stopping a company from modding their own games, and basing their next games off of a top quality foundation game? (and therefore saving money)

A different question, how did Crysis 2 break what was better before, and how is making Crysis 2 different than modding? This is a fascinating thought to me.

That's really, really incredible-looking.

Some people expect we'll see games that good-looking on the PS4 and 720

They will almost certainly be disappointed

Checked that YouTube video... it looked incredibly boring and unrealistic to me. Just a giant mess of green and black with red glowing enemies and weapons that just look red & black. All animations were substandard. Nothing in the environment reacted to being shot.

I don't know by what criteria this is to be judged "best graphics"... but on purely subjective basis, I would consider Pacman to have better visuals because it is more visually appealing and also has stood the test of time.

The only thing really stopping this from looking like the best game ever is that it is just ultra high res textures on relatively low poly models, I personally love crysis and will be getting 3 on release, but as it stands today there are games that looks better than this.

Very nice footage. I can run the game on high (all settings), and can only imagine what it looks like on max with mods.

This also looks really good:

Yup! Perhaps next year I'll have a PC that can do that :P

I actually dont rate BF3 graphics that much, and while yeh it looks great on ultra its only marginally better than crysis, I didnt actually say that crysis looks bad, infact i'm shocked that they have managed to make both 2 and 3 look worse lol, however against crysis, Dirt 3 on ultra in my opinion looks better :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Da391ABXY

I do agree with your apple and oranges :P crysis is without a doubt the best looking shooter ever made, I wont try and argue against that.

The orignal crysis was a risk game, something that never happened before and will never happen again, a studio took a stab at the industry and said look what you can do if you actually try and use what you've got. The problem is that from a consumer point of view only 2% on the game buying public owned a computer that could actually play it at those settings, the rest of us just got to drool at videos (funny that were still doing that nearly 6 years later).

Crytec learned from this and now play it safe with their games, which is why we get crysis 2 and 3 at a lower graphical level, it will be at least 2 years before we see a game truely beat crysis on every level.  :)

maybe on pc,but not on consoles.