That's fair. Personally I am often struck by the beauty of nature, or even how good live action film can look with the light composition, colours, lighting, etc.

The world we live in can be a magical place, and photorealism can capture that magic and use it to bring fictional scenarios to life in a believable way.

Yeah, while graphics have come a long way since the days of the PS3 and Xbox 360, I feel like interactivity has not kept pace.

Games like Crysis and Far Cry 2 are more dynamic than the vast majority of modern games even 16-17 years after their release. One of the most impressive games in the last decade for me is BOTW, simply because of how many interactive systems it manages to weave together into an organic whole.

Modern games look beautiful, but the beauty is often only skin deep, as they remain for the most part static sets made for looking rather than touching.

The RDR2 video you posted is perfect and if games went in that direction with realism as a secondary pursuit over the atmospheric effects and painterly like quality of course I'd love to play something that looks like a Our Planet in HDR or whatever HDR evolves into with Naughty Dog character models.

Precisely. Breath of the wild is impressive considering the level of simulation and interactivity considering it ran on the WiiU 3x 1.24ghz PowerPC cores and/or the Switch 3x 1ghz ARM A57 cores... 9th gen consoles aren't even achieving the same results in games today with 7x 3.8Ghz Ryzen CPU cores, by comparison they are extremely static.

Visually it's not class leading besides some artistic choices, but for the hardware it released on it definitely achieved a ton.

It is far from perfect.

Many of the plants are 2D billboard assets, not full 3D geometric flora like in Hellblade 2.
There is significant shadow pop-in.
They are using cheap and nasty screen space reflections.
The lighting is overbright and not accurate, which is the general issue with shader packs as they take a very generic approach and often destroy effects like subsurface scattering, which is why developers dont use it... If they used path tracing like cyberpunk, then it might have been better.

But I guess some people think it looks cool. But it's simply not accurate. Shader packs are good at bringing life to old games that couldn't achieve any semblance of realism, but modern games with newer rendering pipelines? It ruins it in my opinion.

I know lol. I meant it's a perfect direction for games to take. Tbh, I don't care about the tech, if it looks good on my screen that's all I care about, it doesn't bother me whatever trickery goes on under the surface. Elden Ring is one of my favourite looking games, it's not even graphically impressive but it has artistry woven into the landscapes that makes it great. Ghost of Tsushima, my favourite by far is another example, the vibrant assets with all the particle effects and atmospheric effects with the lighting HDR and dynamic weather system is cup of tea. There are games that are far more technically impressive that I think don't look as good to my eye. 

Agreed. It's all about artestic style now. I played dead space and was never impressed by the graphics cause everything looks the same. space is super boring to me but someone into that will find it impressive. Graphics just have not made huge jump for consoles this gen, it's way too close and you just look at pics of crossgen games and they still look better then most of these nextgen games which for most part really have nothing going on alan wake 2, and hell blade 2. is like comparing luigi mansion 3 to BOTW, it looks better graphically sure but we know why cause they focuced on super linear gameplay with limited envoriments.

Everything you said was wrong.

Precisely. Breath of the wild is impressive considering the level of simulation and interactivity considering it ran on the WiiU 3x 1.24ghz PowerPC cores and/or the Switch 3x 1ghz ARM A57 cores... 9th gen consoles aren't even achieving the same results in games today with 7x 3.8Ghz Ryzen CPU cores, by comparison they are extremely static.

Visually it's not class leading besides some artistic choices, but for the hardware it released on it definitely achieved a ton.

Everything you said was wrong.

Lol it's a opinion and a common opinion at that. I mean we can post 4k pics of these console games right now and 99% of people will just choose what art style they like more and provided plenty of evidence to back my point. Including hundreds of people on gaming forums backing my opinion. 

Yeah it really goes to show that power isn't the only limiting factor; its also a matter of ambition and skill, of committing to achieving something difficult and time consuming. But it can be done, as games like BOTW demonstrate, and if that's what's achievable on hardware that was underpowered even in 2012, the thought of what can be done with much stronger hardware is enticing.

I don't care about opinions. I care about facts.
If I was to run into a burning building and used someones elses "opinion" on the current fire behavior, it would get me killed.

And stop with the lies where you believe 99% of people support you. They absolutely don't. It's a lie you keep repeating.

Either way, I am not going to go around in circles with you anymore as it's a waste of mine and everyone's time and the forum doesn't need that kind of rhetoric.