Very true. Many forget for the majority of gaming history, developers were always working with underpowered hardware or had storage limitations on the physical media so they had to come up with creative and clever ways to get their games to run the way they wanted to.

I don't have faith ND will deliver that kind of moment with Intergalactic, I hope I'm wrong but I get the feeling they are cutting that kinda stuff back and since this is a fast paced genre they are entering they won't get the benifet of slow linear game play to be able to tighten up the graphics. More details I suppose but that can look disgusting like MH Wilds maxed on PC. We are in a period where they are dammed if they do and dated if they don't because of these bloody graphical presets. Perhaps the PS5 and XSX (one hell of an underutilised console) aren't powerful enough and devs are chasing things that they can't get like Ray tracing. By the time ps6 comes they won't make the right choice and aim for stable 4k at 60 but instead probably continue to chase some stupid tech and use AI to patch up the essay after the fact. 

ND getting TLOU2 running on PS4s base console and looking that good was magic. There should be no hardware excuses when they can do that much like there should be no excuses when devs can't reach the complexity of Baldurs Gate 3 and instead whine about it. 

There is one open world game that looks great I keep over looking and that's Forbidden shores for Horizon Forbidden West. That looks almost or the closest to a gen leap we have gotten and it doesn't get the benifet of being linear and slow and also has a lot of moving dynqmic parts under the hood. The fact that world can't reach that which is very similar in terms of what it is doing, perhaps even less so with enemies seems to me like a talent problem.

^ we have reached the point where its choices by devs, and their tallent/time spent, that mostly decide it.

Definitely, but the PS4 gen is also where gaming graphics have started to plateau. Developers could literally stop trying to make their games look "better" and start optimizing their games to a chrome finish if they wanted to.

They should, at least until the hardware power is capable of 4k 60 with as little draw backs as possible. I guess we'll know when Yotei release on what direction they choose to go this generation, God I hope it's not one of these performance mode disasters. 

Indeed and there still is talent who tend to make the correct choices at Sony with games in the pipeline so there is time left this gen yet. Santa Monica with whatever they have, Suckered punch with Yotei, Insomniac with Wolverine, ND with Intergalactic (doubtful cause of the speed of play in the genre). Fingers crossed. Perhaps 10th gen, things will turn around for the third party and they get their shit together. 

I can't understand how anyone can say Wukong looks better than many games like TLOU2 on base PS4 let alone games on ps4 pro. I'm looking at it right now on my ps5 on performance and it doesn't come close to TLOU2. I'm 10 feet away from my 50 inch and I can still see the fuzzy jank. You can go right up to the screen in Seliro and I have to keep brain input lag down (hopefully) and you could see how clean it was, thisbis a fuzzy mess and so janly even before the pop in and horrible textures and camera clipping to see ps1 textures. It's not a bad looking game at a distance but it's not very good. Sekiro pops off the screen because of how clean the image is but this makes you feel ill when it's in motion the image quality is so terrible.

Stellar Blade says hi