If Ubisoft goes in the ground the suits will have to take a look, dissect it and figure out exactly what you said. It'll take a massive disaster or serious financial woes for themselves to get them to pay attention to what we are experiencing right now with their games. I think the turning point will come soon enough cause it feels like the industry is at breaking point and casuals are only putting their money it the most highly aggregated games while skipping and attacking anything that releases with a mild touch of "DEI" cause they subconsciously want to save the money in their wallets cause of the cost of living around the world. Reality hopefully will just bite them into repositioning and not tare down everything completely.

Unfortunately, this means that they may scale back on things that actually matter too like destructible environments and little details but I suppose the latter comes from TLC when a dev team are enjoying their work. 

Well, diminishing returns is getting stronger and stronger generally speaking. Some devs are struggling with the latest Unreal Engine.
And I believe the Series S is holding back multiplats, it has to. They have to make sure the game runs on the S and then just adjust some sliders up for the bigger dogs.

Point is in great art - first painting is hyperrealism, so technically "best" when it comes to pure technique, yet utterly bland and uninteresting. Some devs have figured this out (like Guerilla with Horizon), so they are combining tech and art to a great success, but most are still chasing "photorealistic" dragon and waste most of the tech progress on trivial things.

Because most games that are running on UE5 are upscaled from 720p and look like they are smeared with vaseline. UE5 requries significant time and resources to properly optimise and 80% of games running it are a mess on launch and continue having issues

Horizon Forbidden West wows in many sections IMO and So does Avatar but its true there's a lack of clear generational leap overall, instead more a refinement of what we saw last gen with more consistency across assets and optional 60fps modes where they would of before been impossible. Its more a half step.

Main reason is diminishing returns in terms of increasing asset detail and density. Alot of increased detail is just lost at the distance they're viewed, meanwhile most devs don't have the capabilities to turn a high quality asset into CGI level visuals. I think at most AAA games current scale it's just too much investement for many... but I think we're about to get a bunch of games which make quite the leap from what we saw last gen. These both show in-engine, so they may look much worse on console (for sure lower res) but lets see.

I agree completely. This is why I think Ghost of Yotei and GTA6 will be great looking games, both take a philosophy of art first. GTA5 had the make everything look like a post card design philosophy and that worked to great success, not technically masterful but a masterpiece in where they put resources and vontinued thisbwith RDR2 and evolving adding in dynamic weather effects and siutataional effects like a sun rise through a low lying fog while keeping that, make every scene from as many angles as possible look as interesting as a postcard.

Ghost Of Tsushima is just on another level using the tech for partical effects and details like flowing grass and lots of grass and stuff on screen. Yotei I assume will look like one of these painting you posted, perhaps better with more vibrant colour and stuff like longer vegetation. The scene in the demo where the horses are running in the long grass gives me hope we will see something magical. 

There's this too. Not that bad but something like 856p and then upscaled to make a right mess of an image. I'd rather the aimed for 1080p 60fps which should be possible than upscale and ruin the image completely, making it look far worse than it would, would they just go 1080p native. 

Anything targeting 60 already locks out that next gen leap people are wanting to see.

I know the thread is about the next gen feel but it's also about how they need to get good image quality as a baseline first. They can't even get the graphics much better than PS4 PRO in quality modes and use upscaling there to, that all needs to end and a baseline needs to be reached. Image quality and stability before resolution as standard, I think the majority of gamers would agree with this since 70+% use performance mode and take the hit. I think most would agree performance modes should be lower resolution with better image quality or keeping 60fps modes at 1080p or upscaled just slightly like 900p to 1200p if they could spare the juice like the PS4 PRO was doing all last gen or there abouts and it had very little image quality issues without the most basic of consessions and allowing for ailising, pop in and sacrificing texture quality and what not at high quality's to make it to those resolutions in performance modes.  

I think the reason some people see the base PS5 as an improvement and not a step back is I was on the PS4 PRO last gen enjoying really well done performance modes with reasonable upscaling targets while preserving image quality. I now game further back from my screen at ten feet to allievate the image quality loss and fuzz/oily looks in some games and loose some immersion because of it. Ten feet from my 50 inch as apposed to 6 or 7 feet before. Many of the base ps5 games are just a step back from what the pro was doing and even the quality modes have choppier 30fps, they only started getting really choppy on PS4 PRO with cross gen and stuff like Ragnorok and Forbidden West became unplayable cause the smooth 30 games became a thing of the past. Imagine my surprise to find that smooth 30 on base PS5 went away to apart from a few devs who managed to keep the choppieness out without PP, like remedy with Alan Wake 2. That game should be the goal for all devs with 30 FPS and replicated to how they achieved it or balanced modes at 45 like Stellar Blade. I just don't understand why they all look like 24 FPS now and have uneven pacing on frames to make them feel chopper than 30fps from last gen, perhaps it's that unevenness and the inability to set a clear goal where the fps is taken into account before the viduals, gotta have the prettiest game at any cost even if only 30% of people will use it and post on social media with photo modes of how beautiful it is. Maybe unlock your photo mode to the highest quality possible and get the best of both worlds. 

Rant over. I'm very irritated by this topic. 😤 PS5 PRO is the true next gen machine and we plebs who won't pay over 500 for our consoles will get these stripped back versions of games from now on.