While I would like to agree with you, and the "best games" are in fact those who do manage to get the (interesting, wonderful) story across in an imaginative way, technology--in this case hardware--has lent a quite helpful hand at making games easier to immerse into. Take Crysis as an example. The story is laughable at best, the gameplay is simply the gathering of various gimmicks from other games into a single one, and to a certain degree it is truly just another generic first-person shooter. Its graphics, however, are still the best ones seen in a video game released so far, and it has been almost two years and few games have been able to rival it in terms of graphical impressiveness (Killzone 2 in the lightning and animation department, Uncharted in both animation and lushness, MGS4 in amount of particles on-screen at once, etc.) but none have surpassed it. Oh, crap, sorry. I seem to be derailing from my main point. When I first booted up Crysis, I could not believe my eyes. The videos I had seen beforehand did it no justice. I broke ever single tree and house in through the first two level, marveling at the amount of detail every time the tree slowly fell down. It was a wonderful sight indeed. Grabbing the enemies and looking at the amount of detail that went into creating the facial textures was amazing. I was completely immersed in the game, almost to the point of feeling physically hurt every time the character was shot. And this wasn't done thanks to the story, or gameplay mechanics (well, it was, actually), but because of the graphics. Hell, I was running it at a mix of medium-high settings and would sometimes turn it all the way to very high just to marvel at the slideshow. Again, I want to agree with you, but a push for graphics/technology is a complete necessity. id did wonders back in the 90s with the Dooms and Quakes, Valve with their Half-Lives and Crytek with Crysis. You may argue that storytelling is essential, and I have to admit that I am a sucker for the Metal Gear Solid series (note: MGS2 was compelling, despite what all the haters say) and the LucasArts games, but graphics, well executed properly in conjunction with the rest of the game, are as essential if not more important than anything else. In short, I hope that certain developers will still want to push beyond our current hardware's capabilities.