A large section of the gaming public sees photo-realistic games as serious, and prefers them for high-budget games. It's a rat race for devs though - its just incredibly expensive to create high quality models, textures, maps.

I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and while the graphics are great, it's clear they could do more in the visual realm. It doesn't use current gen hardware to the maximum, in every way, because they also targeted last-gen consoles. I'm thinking in particular of the PS5s incredibly fast IO engine with specialized decompression hardware. In a game like Rachet and Clank: A Rift Apart, that hardware is used to jump you through multiple worlds incredibly quickly, loading a miraculous amount of assets. In Cyberpunk, you still have to wait around in elevators, which seem like diegetic loading screens.

And also the general clunkiness of the animations, the way there's only like two or three body shapes that everyone conforms to - these things would go farther in creating a living/breathing world, in the visual realm.

In other realms, the way you can't talk to everyone or go into every building is a bit of a bummer.

I think chasing photorealism also hurts the modding community, which hurts the players. No ordinary modding community could push out photorealistic contents in a realistic span of time. I think that's why we are seeing less and less mods nowadays comparing to the late 90s and early 2000s.

For FPS, HL2/Doom3 is probably the last generation that enjoys a huge modding community. Anything above it pushes ordinary modders away. I believe it is still quite possible to make mods for say UE4, but it just took such a long time that the projects never got finished.

In certain way, I so much wish the graphics froze by the year 2005.

Let's see how GTA VI will change this and the industry.

I personally like Cyberpunk's 2077 style, it looks great maxed out with HDR. Yes, the models aren't the best, but the overall look/vibe is spectacular at times.

> In Cyberpunk, you still have to wait around in elevators, which seem like diegetic loading screens.

Cyberpunk has vanishingly few elevators. While it may be a loading hide in some spots, it's certainly not indicative of the game which otherwise has ~zero loading screens as you free roam the city including going in & out of highly detailed buildings and environments.

> I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and while the graphics are great, it's clear they could do more in the visual realm. It doesn't use current gen hardware to the maximum

I'm not sure how you can reach this conclusion to be honest. Cyberpunk 2077 continues to be the poster child of cutting edge effects - there's a reason Nvidia is constantly using it for every new rendering tech they come out with.