Control and Resident Evil 2 Remake still look incredible and run well on fairly inexpensive hardware today. We don’t need globally illuminated Unreal Engine 5 games with individually modeled nostril hairs on each character that require graphics cards with prices in the three digit range
Graphics should just be kept at late PS4 level for the foreseeable future to keep games as accessible as possible
I’ve always felt that photorealism takes second place to good art direction. You look at Half Life 2 and it’s dated, but Team Fortress 2 hasn’t aged a day despite being old enough to vote.
Even though HL2 does look a bit dated, comparing with it’s contemporary Doom 3 is also a good example.
Half Life 2 certainly extended, if it didn’t start, the trend of “high fidelity urban and rural ruins.” So much graphical potential wasted on mostly ugly boring environments.
It really nailed the intended atmosphere though. HL2 also had facial animation that was way ahead of most games and especially PC FPS games at the time
I suppose it did, and that intention wasn’t to my liking so I suppose that’s why I never really got into it much.