The last time a generation gap impressed me was seeing Gears of War 1 in action back in 2006; I could hardly believe what I was seeing was a video game, it was a quantum leap beyond anything I'd ever seen before. First game I ever saw running in HD I believe.

I am curious to see how PS5 and XSX look visually compared to the current gen, but I feel like the days of mind-blowing leaps between gens are probably over.

Who knows though, maybe I'll be surprised.

Not been impressed since the jump to HD and before that PS1 to Dreamcast. Now I play my Dreamcast with HDMI. I play Switch games on the TV. Games focus so much on realism and use the same tricks every gen to show how powerful it is. Look at this very real looking face that will never be in-game. Look at the shiny car. Just so bored of it now. I just wanna see the games I want to play. The Astral Chain knockoff looks fun but unless it comes to PS4 I'm not getting it. It doesn't look like a game that says I need to spend $500 to play it. Shenmue or Gears of War were those HOLY SHIT next-gen games and so far not seen that. Not seen that game that not only looks next-gen but the gameplay is only possible for next-gen.

I was more impressed getting an Arcade1up machine playing a really good version of TMNT Arcade at home after 31 years of waiting than I have been with next gen face tech demos.

I think these kind of threads pop up prior to every new generation.

Just take a look at TLOU on PS3

and compare to the TLOU 2 on PS4. And this is for a 7 year old console.

TLOU 3????

I can't imagine what first party developers can do with orders of magnitude better specs can do with this. At the end of this upcoming gen 8th gen is going to look a little dated again.

Yep, every new gen people say we hit the ceiling and nothing will impress us anymore, but they are always wrong. But well, some don't really care about graphics.

I actually think cutting edge graphics make a game worse and we've been at that point for a while now.  Why?  Because gameplay has been butchered.  There is a lot less variety among the leading games now.  That is because the budgets are too high.  Studios can't take risks easily because there is too much at stake.  I think only first party studios take risks on their games, because the risks of launching hardware are even bigger.  So they take risks, but third party companies don't.  They play it safe and actually cut a lot of corners in other areas. 

A good example is Final Fantasy 7 Remake.  First they have to go back to their most successful Final Fantasy title, because the risks are too high.  But the game only goes through Midgar now, when that is about 15% of the original game.  That is just to illustrate how much you are missing because of the focus on graphics.  

Indies are still innovative, but they have extremely low budgets compared to AAA games.  I actually prefer something in the middle, a game that takes risks but still has a decent budget.  My "sweet spot" is probably Breath of the Wild.  To me the game looks beautiful, but I can tell they saved some money by not going for realistic graphics.  And more importantly the game took a lot of risks.  They could have easily alienated their core fanbase by taking risks that big.  Another good example is Demon's Souls.  Sony almost didn't publish this game originally, because it looked terrible when they first saw it.  The reality was they had spent almost all of their development time on the gameplay and they just fixed up the graphics in the end.  So the game looked good at the end, but graphics wasn't really their focus and their budget was a lot lower than other "big" games at that time.  I would like to see more of this from AAA studios.  Put the focus on gameplay and keep the graphics good but not cutting edge.

So, I'm not really looking forward to graphics upgrades, because that ends up hurting the gameplay a little bit more every generation.  I want to see more gameplay leaps and less graphical leaps.

Yeah that's true.

And there's false misconception that better graphics =/= more realistic graphics. You can have better graphics and it will improve a games look, even with more stylized designs. Take Nintendo, hypothetically, if they decided to go power route for next gen for Switch 2.. you could have Mario running around in 4K with ray-tracing and it would look stunning.

Even now we're at the end of the gen, I feel the gap between PS3/360 and PS4/Xbone was underwhelming. Current games do look better than last gen, but the gap is smaller than between prior generations.

(Referring to the bold) I have to disagree.  Almost every generation sees signficant avenues of gameplay open up, with generation 8 being the exception.  Generation 6 was the first time we could have open world action games like GTA 3 and Shenmue.  PS1 had a lot of limitations in the action/speed deptartment, and N64 had limitations on game size.  But Gen 6 games could handle both just fine, so we get open world action games.  In Gen 7, motion controls were one obvious new type of gameplay.  However the more important thing was that the internet became commonly used in games.  Mario Kart Wii was the first time I could play Mario Kart on the internet for example.  Internet gaming allowed new types of gaming on consoles.

But Generation 8 really had nothing.  It was just like Generation 7 but with better graphics.  Nothing new.  This is not rule.  It's the exception.  But Generation 8 was the most recent generation and it offered nothing new.  We expect nothing new now.  It's like we expect we're going to be bored at this point.  It's kind of sad.

I'm expecting a Color Game TV to Atari 2600 leap.

Nintendo will make 4k games once I get a 4k tv.  So 2025.