Some sort of acceptable IQ standards perhaps? A game @ 720p w/ 8xaf/4xmsaa and some sort of transparency AA shouldn't be the sacred cow, it should be the bare minimum standard. At a push you can drop down to 2 multisamples and ditch the transparency AA but please, don't ever release any more games with less than 8x anisotropic filtering next generation, it creates the most seriously ugly effect and totally undoes all the work spent crafting half decent looking textures. Shitty texture filtering is absolutely the single worst sin of today's console titles, moreso than low rendering resolutions and poor AA support imo.
No more v-sync problems thankyou very much. Always at least give me the option to enforce vertical sync (á la Bioshock) and make use of triple buffering more often so i don't have to experience a drop in framerate to go with it.
Much more sophisticated LOD schemes. I've got great hope for this actually, dynamic tesselation can pretty much solve this issue for geometary at least and I'm sure there's some smart methods that can be used for shadows and the like. LOD pops are ugly and can totally ruin the visuals in a game, make it seamless or cut back on how much your engine is pushing, I don't want to see any ugly pops next generation.
Better shadow resolutions and filtering. Dynamic shadows in most console titles can look seriously ugly at times, with lots of aliasing and low resolution artefacts, but in many of the decent PC ports of these games a few config tweaks/settings can get them looking lovely and detailed yet soft, without much of a performance hit. So with better hardware and more memory this shouldn't be too difficult.
Experimental AA modes. Standard MSAA just doesn't cut it in a modern game engine as a lot more than just polygon edges can cause aliasing, dealing with this aliasing in a more efficient manner than brute force supersampling needs to be a priority for next generation as aliasing artefacts are going to become more striking as overall fidelity reaches new standards. Oh, and no, a blanket blur filter
is not the solution, get that shit out my games, thanks.
