What I would like to see is not surface changes but things that are more... internal. Procedure generation especially. Imagine being able to create entire planets as a gameplay world, fully explorable from the bottom of the deepest ocean to the tip of the highest mountain, with intelligently placed enemies and everything.
Games like Noctis. Just google it. Sure, the graphics suck but it still shows what it can do.
Don't just imagine random terrain: imagine every tree being unique, every animal different, every rock different, wherever you step, you are always seeing something that's a bit new.
Games where an enemy will have a complex moral and damage system. Where enemies will stop and rather leg it then go against the guy that practically slaughtered their way in. Where enemies will rather surrender and tell you stuff for a first aid.
Games that allow you to fully explore a city, inside and out. A city where every building, every citizen, every car is actually alive and does a full purpose.
Also, I would like something a bit like what Outcast was: a world where everyone had some place and were doing it. Where you could go and make a conversation with anyone you see. Where everything meant something.
As I said some time before, there is still plenty things that need upgrading. Right now, our hardware is too lame to do in real-time things like: real water physics, hair strands animation, as well as operating the whole game "loading-less".
In other words, things we are expensive in both time and man-power, practically worthless to gameplay yet we will still see because we need better graphics because... because we don't want to play a game with end-of-90's graphics on our expensive high-end machine, now do we? I mean, the Wii is weak in sheer processing power and... oh, wait, its dominating the market place because it had a more solid idea what games are. Never mind.
Oh, and we can do away with loading for quite a while ago: current hardware can do the "last generation's" games with almost zero loading times, its just that when you add more highly detailed textures, it takes more time to render and animate them. You can't ask for higher graphics and lower loading times at the same time (well, to a point anyway).
I remember Soul Reaver without loading times, at least within the game.
hopefully the next generation involves making good games again. The development costs of modern games drive a lot of better ideas into the ground.
I second that statement.
