Video games are reaching the end of graphics.

Environmental realism has been perfected.

Human motion capture has been pretty much perfected too:

Human hair also looks great in Death Stranding.

With Ray tracing and the advancements made in that field we reached a point where we get real life like lighting in game.

Destruction physics is doing great too:

The primary limitations right now appear to be:

Human hair physics

Human skin

Destruction physics improvements.

It's not necessarily an issue of lack of know how but the issue of a machine not being powerful enough to pull all of them off at the same time.

In 10 years however, it is pretty much guaranteed that we will have systems powerful enough to be able to do all these things. At which point the only things that would need further improvements would be in game AI and good stories.

We can see the limitations of the cutting edge right here:

It's not a not knowing how to make it happen issue at this point, it's a no computer is powerful enough to run with all the features on issue now.

In another 10 years we should have systems powerful enough to simulate perfectly real looking environments in open world settings without issue.

By the way does anybody know why Yasuke and the woman assassin look like their character models are running at different graphics settings?

The moment they figure out all the graphics capabilities for games in general, we are going to see an explosion in VR games, due to the fact that it is the only place left to move the experience further up.

Over the course of 15 years as information density increases by a 100X for technology, we can expect VR headsets to become as light as mobile phones today.

Remember that the ps4 released 7 years after the ps3 and was 10x more powerful.

We are also halfway through the ps5 generation and should see a noticeable difference between games at the start of this generation and the games at the end of this generation.

One of the primary reasons we don't see a great leap in the specs of consoles is also because console prices have to be kept within a manageable price point, which means consoles will always sell at a price near the price of the previous consoles which limits how many upgrades they can put into a single console to play games.

In any case, seeing how far Hideo Kojima has been able to push the graphics on the PS5, and his tendency to be one of the few people who churns out games that look better than the initial trailers, we are going to get really good looking games at the peak of the ps5 era that will surpass all of our expectations, but in turn we are also going to see a whole lot of middling studios because now the issue with making great games isn't the tech anymore, but the quality of the staff and their creativity which is surprisingly a very limited human asset.

Reaching the end of the video game graphics era is also why we see most studios moving from a focus on exclusives to a focus on buying up as big a share of the gaming market as possible, because they realize that they cannot provide as big a difference in gaming performances as they could in the past. It is in current year very hard to sell a person on the idea of buying a console to play a specific game like they once used to. Being able to sell a game across multiple platforms is far more profitable.

Another impact of reaching the end of video game graphics is that we are going to see massive improvements in video game AI and its capabilities making every video game out there a whole lot more lifelike.

The best games in the world today are not the most realistic looking, but the ones that are most interesting in terms of art direction and fun. Graphics has become a second tier need in a video game industry where it has become so easy to create things with good graphics.

Graphics still matter however, the Horizon games, death stranding games, Gears of war games, all depend on improving their graphics to keep selling.

There is a lesser effort in terms of improving graphics when it comes to Call of Duty games though. With most call of duty games being unsure of their precise direction and quality in the present era. For example - MW 3 sucked in comparison to the original.

The best thing that games can do right now with all the graphical advances is to create games that show world's unlike our own. To create the greatest works of fiction to entertain us rather than to make things that feel more grounded. More graphics, not more realism.

To summarize:

We are reaching the end of graphical improvements in the video game industry. With the end being only 10-15 years away.

The primary places video game graphics can still be improved are destruction physics, hair physics, and human character models.

After the end of video game graphics is reached we are going to see a leap in VR graphics.

The primary limitation of graphics today is not due to graphics know how but rather due to technological limitations. We already know the code, we don't have powerful enough hardware to run it at the middle income consumer level.

The end of video game graphics should lead to more focus on AI capabilities in game.

Video game graphics should focus on new worlds, rather than more grounded realism as their selling point.

Final note:

Somebody please fix the plastic skin issue permanently. It shouldn't be this hard and taking this long.