I can't help but feel you didn't read past the headline. You've just about entirely missed eevee's point as elaborated in that essay: that earlier generations

I can't help but feel you didn't read past the headline. You've just about entirely missed eevee's point as elaborated in that essay: that earlier generations of games with a lot less graphical and detail oomph achieved your stated goal better: Good entertainment immerses you in the environment [...] Most of the article is spent in trying to explain this observation and get underneath it in a nuanced way. There's a lot of good observations in there. It's worth noting that major figures in the gaming world are making big stakes on this very premise[1]: "The biggest reason why we haven’t done a remake until now is because it’s a massive undertaking to reconstruct Final Fantasy 7 from the ground up with the current technology," Kitase wrote. "Producing a proper HD remake of Final Fantasy 7 that maintains the same feeling of density of the original would result in a volume of content that couldn’t possibly fit into one installment." That's exactly what Square Enix is doing with the forthcoming FF7 remake, installments. A big part of eevee's criticism might be summed as "graphical density is a poor substitute for environmental, interactive density". I've played too many recent-era games whose gameplay felt straightjacketed and linear, their gorgeous eye-candy environments managing to be disappointingly boring. In the worst cases, the gameplay worked hard against ever looking at and appreciating the highly detailed environment. What an enormous waste! [1] http://www.gamesradar.com/final-fantasy-7-remake-too-big-one-game/ http://www.gamesradar.com/final-fantasy-7-remake-too-big-one...