As a fairly avid gamer, but there is a reason why my top 10 games are all fairly mediocre in the graphics department. High end Triple-AAA games with "Great" graphics usually lack depth in their mechanics, and while this isn't always true, it happens enough to keep me from enjoying them.
There is a reason why Skyrim, Mount&Blade, GTAV, etc are still dominating playtime charts years after release. Good enough graphics + deep, flexible mechanics is a much better combination in my opinion.
I'll give you Mount and Blade... but Skyrim and especially GTAV were at the highend of graphics (and budget) for open world AAA games when they were released in 2011 and 2013. They also both had very long development cycles, the release of GTAIV was 2008 and Oblivion was 2006. Assuming similar development cycles, the next games in each series will be due in 2018 or 2019.
The bar for "great" graphics is going to change as new hardware comes out, but its a stretch to say those games were not pushing rendering on their target minspec systems (Xbox 360 and PS3) at the time of release, there aren't any examples of open world games that looked better than either of those games and ran on that hardware.
I know it's fun (although tired) to jump on any thread about game graphics and say "Graphics don't matter, games with great graphics don't have good gameplay!", but sharing knowledge about how to tune and implement postprocess to get better image quality isn't hurting gameplay quality and can lead to games both looking and playing better.
> There is a reason why Skyrim, Mount&Blade, GTAV, etc are still dominating playtime charts years after release. Good enough graphics + deep, flexible mechanics is a much better combination in my opinion.
Those are all sandbox games that you effectively never stop playing. People tell me that there's a story and an endgame in Skyrim, but I've played a few hundred hours without doing any main-line quests past the first city. Mount&Blade I've sunk even more into - there isn't even the pretense of a story there, so you're pretty much on your own if you want to role-play, or just take in the enjoyment of riding around, hacking at people, and looting their corpses.
Those were just 3 of the more mainstream games with semi-limited graphics I could think of, but you're right they do share a sandbox style. Overwatch would be another example of a game where they put "good enough" graphics combined with much more refined mechanics (depending on who you ask, this last patch...eh) to achieve success
Anyway, the point I was going for the last thing we need is having them spend even more effort trying to make pretty looking but mediocre playing games.
Mount and Blade, and to a lesser extent, Skyrim maybe, but I don't think GTAV fits here. It pushed its target hardware (originally PS3/Xbox 360) pretty far, to the point I wondered if it was going too far and was thus lacking in other areas (e.g. pedestrian/vehicle density).
There is a reason why Skyrim, Mount&Blade, GTAV, etc are still dominating playtime charts years after release. Good enough graphics + deep, flexible mechanics is a much better combination in my opinion.