Unreal Engine 5 is just insane: this video isn’t real

Agree. I'm just in the process of copying my batocera save files to my retroid pocket and to scamper off on this fun Saturday night to replay my childhood... Again.

This kind of realism is neat, and I'm sure has its use in VR and movies. But meh for gaming we reached good enough a few years back.

I'll take both. I like fun games and I also like seeing how far developers and artists can push graphics given cutting edge hardware, budget and time. It doesn't have to be an "either or" situation (nor are they mutually exclusive necessarily).

Why not both?

Graphics often (must?) come at the expense of gameplay depth.

The deepest (to me, most interesting) games -- roguelikes, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress -- all have shit (not photorealistic 3D) graphics, as if out of necessity. Maybe because they're all tile-based?

The sole exception to this I can think of are 4X games. Europa Universalis 4 looks pretty good, and I could picture it being photorealistic and fully ray traced while still being one of the deepest 4Xes of all time.

Kerbal space program has pretty good graphics when maxed out.