Technology

I'm also going to add my stone to the pile here and point out that this hyperfixation on more and more "graphics" usually results in it ultimately being impossible to actually see what the fuck is happening on the screen.

You are a realistic barbarian dude who is brown, and wearing brown. standing in a realistic landscape which is brown, against a realistic highly textured and bump mapped bunch of trees which are brown, with leaves that are waving around in all directions realistically and are brown, trying to dodge arrows (which are brown) raining on you from the half dozen hairy orcs in the distance, who are also brown. And about nine pixels tall, and hidden in the bushes. Which are brown. And if this isn't happening verbatim (or even if it is), 2/3 of the screen is also covered by a zillion glowy particle effects, motion blur, and bloom, which are the only colorful parts of the image but still add up to you not being able to actually see jack shit out of what's important.

Bonus points if this also requires near frame-perfect inputs to handle, and you have half a second of input lag in between all the shit your console is trying to render plus the two or three frames eaten by postprocessing to make it "look pretty."

Yeah, fuck all that.

A major part of game deign that everyone seems to forget a lot these days in the name of making everything realistic and/or extra graphicy is clearly communicating to the player just what the hell is going on. Older games, I find, often did a significantly better job of this.