Graphical realism is only one small part (that I don't care so much about). What I do care about in game development right now is AI: either a) massively parallel simulations of thousands of individual AI units (i.e. a war), or b) extremely intelligent motivation-based AI (which does NOT mean that the AI is extremely "good" at the game, BTW). Currently few games deliver on one or the other, and it is currently computationally infeasible to develop an AI that does both. GPGPU may slowly change that though...
I.e. a scenario:
1. Dark corridor. AI cannot see player.
2. AI sees "something" blocking a ray of light. (happens to be the player). Goes to check out what it is.
3. Player throws grenade. Explodes at nearby wall. AI is shocked (severe penalty to aim for a few seconds), and then goes check out wall, then tries to deduce where grenade came from.
4. Walking to place where grenade should have been, AI finds nothing. Spooked out, he tries to report to his superiors.
5. Player stops that with a knife on his back.
This is only an example with a "brave" AI. An AI with the "coward" personality would go straight to step 4, while an AI with the "psychotic" personality would fire at random at every dark corner in the room.
Currently some games (i.e. Crysis) do implement one or more of these things, but the behavior never seems "natural". All actors have the same reaction to stimuli, same degree of perception, etc.
I totally agree.
I got bored playing games because A : The AI of the adversaries is to simple and thus has some abilities that kill the gameplay. I crawl around a building, I am hiding around the corner and the enemy AI sees me. i am not making any noise, but the AI uses some simple Z depth test between me and itself.
If the AI sees nothing is in between because of rounding errors, it sees me. At least that is how i think it works. I had this with a game i liked very much for the story and the graphics( it was called FEAR) but that i could be seen through solid walls of concrete buildings really made me really sad. That and the fact that the enemy could shoot straight trough buildings of concrete with a pistol. These kind of glitches i find very saddening. I see them more and more often in games. I do like how there is more realistic physics calculations, if only you could actually use the physics and not just see spectacular explosions. I have seen this only in halflife 2 where there where puzzles with weights. But even there it was limited. If it was not specially made for that puzzle, it just did not exist. I feel that with most games you do not really have enough degrees of freedom. You can follow the path and the rest is just fenced off.
But there is 1 thing that would make me give up almost all graphics candy of today. The details of Halo 1 is enough for me, and when i was playing with people the fun part was to use the physics. To be honest, the graphic details of the halo 1 engine and a completely destroyable world would be enough for me. I also loved the way the controls of the vehicles worked flawlessly with the mouse keyboard combination. It was the best experience aside from a hydraulic racing simulator in the arcade hall.
Slap on a great story line like for example : Halflife,Jericho, Return to castle Wolfenstein, FEAR, Stalker, The undead, Legacy of kain, Shadowman, Deus ex. It would make me go play games again.
Today it is all about eyecandy and not about gameplay. It is the combination that makes a game fun.