With all the talk going around, and the Kojima thread, I figured I would take time to state my view on what "realistic graphics" is.

My take is that they theme of a game doesnt have to be realistic or that a game even needs to have a real-world color pallet. I believe that games will have more definition to the characters. Each character will have its own weight, abilities, motion, and feel. The game could be as simple as an anime or as drawn as Okami but textures will be well placed and high-quality.

Kojima talked about how how the backgrounds of the next generation will be alive. I believe this is a good way to think. If you shoot a grenade into the distance,it shouldnt just blow up on an invisible wall, it should continue flying and maybe hit a tree and blow it up and start a fire. With that fire something comes along, mattering the game, and puts it out in real-time. Resistance 2 with the battleships is a great start since they are far in the distance but they slowly fly across the screen.

Realism doesnt have to mean real. Take a Final Fantasy game, there is no way a summon would be real but could anyone imagine Crysis level graphics attached to FFXIII. It would be basically be equal to a CG movie. As long as a game feels real then its a realistic game.

Creativity is really the only limiting factor if developers have the right hardware and an adquate budget. Although we are going to see the console makers do something about helping out the third-parties with getting budgets under control next generation.

I would expect a smaller comparative jump from this generation to the next (compared to last gen to this gen, which was a very big jump) simply because it would not be cost effective to do otherwise.

Interface and style are the two most important things in a game to me.

Psychonauts and No More Heroes aren't the most graphically complex games ever released, but the interface is excellent for them. Psychonauts has a very smooth, customizable control(gamepad + Mouse = win), and No More Heroes wins on pure visceral feedback.

The style of these games also makes it so I don't worry about realizstic graphics. They establish themselves around a style, and the second you get wrapped up in a game, that style BECOMES that reality. It's only when that style is deviated from that the game loses reality. Provided a cohesive style is retained, it will always come across as being superior.
Crysis and other high level graphic games may be really nice to look at screenshots of, but every time I watch the physics engines run, it just makes me more aware of those small details that are still missing, like in teh physics demo for crysis in which thousands of barrels were dropped/exploded. All i could do was ask "why don't the barrels get damaged?"

we see all console makers helping 3rd parties now. Sony has created an ever evolving chain of software tools, same with M$ and Nini They are all assisting in some form or another.

the barrels werent coded to have collision damage. The barrels were made to show bump physics versus collision. Crytek's engine is by far strong enough to have both on, it is jsut current hardware cant handle it.

I think it will be ninth generation when we see this come to reality. With MS and Sony next generation, I see more of a polish of this generation. Maybe, 1080p and 60 fps for all games. Ninth generation is when I think we really see more of this happen.

Also, I would like to see AI be taken to another level. For example, seeing NPCs get annoyed or change moods in RPGs.

Well there's too kinds of realism. There's the realistic art style, and the realistic level of detail. All too often developers go for either both or none it seems, which ends up giving us games with a lot of nice detail but not much style, or at least not much variety in style.

this is true, i can see things balancing out more as development costs drop. Next gen will be the next level of that balance as  hardware wont be much different so development wont cost as much as the last jump.

This thread really isn't about graphics.. it appears to be about physics, various kinds of simulations, and the level detail put into a game. Title is kinda misleading.. but yeah I don't know about all that.. adding all those little details would probably take a lot of time to put in.

Doesn't make any difference what the reason is. The point is that it didn't. It's much like the uncanney valley, in that once you reach a certain level, all you notice are the things that aren't acting correctly, and there are millions of nuances that will contribute to that. Even if each individual nuance can be accounted for, you still have to have a development team that can pinpoint them all and teh funds necessary to actually work each and every one of them in.

This is why style is so important, because you can bypass this issue entirely. Rather than attempting to pass something off as mimicking reality, you literally redefine what reality is. Provided you maintain a consistent style, the players belief can be suspended to the point that no level of reality is needed.