focusing the graphics power

[starstutter]

I was thinking the other day about developers trying to shove too many aspects of gameplay into a single product and end up with ten mediocre or boring mechanics rather than one or two really really good ones.

Then I had the thought, what if the same concept is applied to graphics? Now that's not to say "lets have some awesome looking shadows and let the rest of the visuals go to crap", but do you think its a good idea to invest a lot of power and time into making a few graphics aspects really really good, while letting the rest be current-gen or average?

[Reedbeta]

One trap you can fall in is having things look visually incongruous. I was watching a friend play the Mercenaries 2 demo the other day, and they have per-pixel lighting and sophisticated postprocessing like depth of field and motion blur, but then we saw some "volumetric" light beams that were clearly just big cones with alpha blending. It was very strange.

[starstutter]

ah yes, stuff like that can be really bad. Specificly something I was speaking about was on the front page, the leadwerks engine. The lighting in the demos is current-gen I'd say, but the shadows are amzing, that's where it really shines. And on the island demo, the lask of realistic plant lighting was made up for by the shadows being so incredibly detailed.

Yes though I do agree that you shouldn't (as I kind of said) neglect any one aspect because one wierd or bad looking element can break immersion.

I guess given the last statement though, can the same be true for having one element that is "too" good looking?

[SmokingRope]

Your post made me think of the thread on Pixeljunk Eden (http://www.devmaster.net/forums/showthread.php?t=12797). This game (although i have never played it) looks to focus heavily on the particle system. Perhaps this could be extended to other aspects of graphics such as dynamic lighting, fog, post-processing, what have you?
I think there is plenty of potential if you expand the topic from simply graphics to each of the different components of the game engine. The physics heavy games have already created a sub-genre for most existing game styles.