A lot of it is the overuse of filtering effects, especially when they use them to disguise laziness.
For example, the Hydroponics deck in Dead Space is supposed to have contaminated air, and it's full of these floating, dusty little Necromorph particles. Disable post processing, and these vanish, because it's just a filter, not actual particles.
You cunts are retarded
Here's a good example of good current graphics, MGSV, where the detail isn't painted into the texture, now fucking kill yourselves.
Who knows, maybe it's just plain artistic incompetence, maybe it's a lack of passion. Fifteen years ago Team Silent (among other people) were working with some pretty cutting-edge techniques, for console games anyway. If I were working on games I'd be a hell of a lot more excited to be using a new technology to implement some traditionally-choreographed action scenes instead of using a new technology to render a realistically ugly nigger.
It's like poetry, it rhymes.
In the old days, people who made video games often had a strong background in computer science, engineering, literature, traditional art or music. They were truly a disparate bunch of genuinely inspired weirdos. This meant that while quality was uneven as hell, there was still a measure of true artistic vision and technical effort that shone through the roughness, and the few titles with bigger budgets and larger teams could invest in extra "polish" that would almost always make a real, noticeable difference in game quality and aesthetics. Games were diamonds in the rough.
Now game creation is dominated by marketers, shekel-grubbing hucksters, gender-studies majors, rejects who couldn't succeed in movies or writing, and fake geek posers. Plus, formal arts education has gone to complete shit with little to no emphasis on classical technique. Design is done by committee and focus groups to target lowest common denominator audiences, selling soley on the sheer force of advertising. Games are now mostly just a bunch of shiny polished turds, and the few gems that still follow the old ways are comparatively rare and obscure.
I think that the real problem is lightning and not graphics, just look at FEAR and Condemned, they have average graphics but the games looks fantastic thanks for the lighting and level design
Wat?
FEAR level design is its weak link btw
I think most of why old games were better is because the devs saw them as subsitutes to tabletop games, while now it's treated like a trend, and an expensive one at it.
Luckily, trends die.
I thought i was the only one having played that.
If the original God of War wasn't so damn good it would be the best spartan beat em up there is.
Team Silent knew how to work within the limitations of a console.
The SH games had a very short draw distance that was hidden behind fog (said fog was missing in the HD collection which made the draw distance painfully obvious); not having to render a huge environment allowed them to put a lot more detail into the character models.