Good riddance... Who need graphical advancement? All it does is make games cost more to make, and require more hands.
Lol spoken like a true Amish Representitive :-P
Honestly though, it's the industry falling in on itself when people say that graphics have no place in games....
Look at the market, we have 50 big name companies developing 4-5 titles a year (thats just the big boys). few-to-none have a good story, or even satisfactory gameplay, they are just pushing out graphics because the casual gamer screams about how nice something looks. Or you folks go to E3 and oogle over the neat tech demos (IE "There is no way that's real time rendered, oh wait, it is?!!!").
The industry is hearing the cry for how real it looks, and how everyone wants more. It's not the fact that few are buying Doom3 that made an impact, it's because it sold a few copies which made developers and publishers say "see, they know where the money is at".
Now I am not one to sit here and say "you're all wrong" (like Red would), hell, I like the pretty tech demos just as the next fella. I enjoyed Doom3, I loved Halflife2, I still play oblivion, and I have a bad addiction to Forza Motorsports for Xbox right now. I will not say that Graphics have no place in games, cause they do, just not as dominant a percentage as the industry as a whole thinks.
My latest project has some heavy requirements. I need to push around 20-25k of polys. Thats not good art people, thats only 100 polys a model (I need the ability to have alot of stuff on the screen). I can't do any good lighting, I cant do any good physics, or AI, I want to, but I cant do to much because of the limitations just in showing what I need to show. Hell, if I could, I would love to bump each model up to 150-200 polys, and have them all parallex mapped, with shaders and the whole nine yards.. It wouldn't take much to do (as far as developing the art), but the machines wouldn't handle that. I would love to show that kind of detail, not as a selling point, but because I would love to take that sort of direction with art.
whoa, started babbling, time to be done with it :-)