I love BioShock and I desperately want modern games to be as immersive as Riven, but this example image illustrates why it's often obvious that I'm in a flimsy

I love BioShock and I desperately want modern games to be as immersive as Riven, but this example image illustrates why it's often obvious that I'm in a flimsy world made of huge polygons (the tracks in the sky) and repeated flat low-resolution plant textures with some transparency (lower left). Being willing to spend hours rendering a single frame and having an artist make sure that every viewpoint looks perfect is what made these things possible back then. We clearly have more freedom to physically choose our viewpoint in games today but I can't pretend that freedom did not come at a huge graphical cost (still catching up 16 years later).