http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/12/Detail-texturesIf anyone's interested I think that is a nice insight into the kind of thing this thread might be alluding to.
that's kind of an opinion, boaal. plus it's irrelevant.
Fair point, but I'll back it up with personal experience and the experience of many other people too. I browse the Unity showcase forums a lot, I think the engine is pretty sweet, making multiple terrain tiles is aggravating since they don't start off at the same place/levels or mirror, I suppose, would be a better word so it's really hard to align them, but I digress. Some of the time you'll find a demo level, which looks quite amazing considering that it's usually made by one guy. but these levels, pretty as they are, usually hold me for at most two minutes. If there's nothing but pretty scenery it gets pretty boring pretty fast.
This is the same reason that many people are starting to get aggravated with the amount of 'spectacle' games on the market. Games that feature very detailed, in depth, exciting graphics, but only offer 2-5 hours worth of gameplay in the entire game. It's too little of the core aspect: the game. I love exciting, brilliant graphics as much as the next guy, at the same time I enjoy AI:UFO, and that game has, to be fair, crap graphics! Same reason why Dwarf Fortress and Nethack are still very much noted and commented on as 'deep', 'replayable', by loads of people even though they are ascii based games. Diablo II is another example, people love that game and it was made how long ago? Graphics like that nowerdays make people laugh. That's why people are making games like "Dins Curse" and "Torchlight" in an attempt to bring it into the 21st century. Starcraft too, loved to death for it's balance. Same reason why Achaea, a MUD still has several hundred players online at any time, even thought it's text based.
I know this is getting way off the point, but I do feel a need to stress the 'gameplay over graphics' aspect of gaming.