It's a funny thing with graphics that I don't know if anybody really predicted 5 or 6 years ago. Most of the history of consoles every major release has essentially doubled performance and it has been such a dramatic shift to go from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to blocky 3D games and now to smooth 3D games. But there is a problem there. You get to a threshold where suddenly you're still functioning in the same basic parameters as the last generation only everything is smoother/more detailed/more eye candy but the actual game aspect is largely unchanged from a mechanical and gameplay standpoint. It's not that the even higher-res graphics aren't welcome, it's always sweet to see "enthusiast" level graphics and to see games that are actively trying to push the envelope with millions of rendered trees and clouds and things like that, but I think we're in this awkward point where we kind of need something breakthrough and revolutionary to occur for consoles to really make sense again.
I have no clue what that is, and maybe I'm being hypercritical, it really is incredible that the level of in-game graphics has basically exceeded what pre-rendered cutscenes looked like 6 years ago, and even approaches an eery sort of photorealism at times, but it's almost like we've reached the ceiling of what polygons are going to do for us with regards to playing games, and maybe it will take some completely left-field, innovative, revolutionary, unheard of approach to really drive life into them again. Basically just have to leap over the uncanny valley somehow and find a way to make games actually feel lifelike, which might not be for another 10+ years, maybe that's impossible, but otherwise I think we're bound to see people getting a little fatigued by "It's 25% smoother than before!" type improvements.
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