For those who are unaware, Deus Ex turned 10 recently (yay!).  Instead of waiting for my Christmas holidays for my annual play through, this year I decided I'd jump in early to celebrate one of my favourite games hitting double digits.  The graphics may have aged, and the A.I. bugs are as hilarious as always, however Deus Ex still remains one of the most engaging titles I've ever played.  As part of this anniversary, Rock Paper Shotgun have been doing a few Deus Ex articles.  In one, it was commented that to do a game like Deus Ex (without the pre-established name) today would be impossible due to costs.  AAA titles are bloody expensive to make and taking a risk on something as random as emergent gameplay is financially irresponsible.  This made me remember back to when Final Fantasy XIII was released and the Director remarked that towns and the like were removed because creating them use industry leading visuals expected from AAA titles has simply become too expensive.

It seems to me that game development might have crossed a line here.  FFXIII is regarded fairly poorly, and some of the main criticisms leveled against it is the pathetically linear and non-interactive nature of the game - the removal of illusion of freedom offered by previous titles in the series.  Essentially, the removal of towns, optional quests, NPCs and the over-world hurt the game, and they were removed because to create them at the level of visual fedality desired was too expensive.  My personal solution would to have been to decrease the level of visual fedality desired for the project, saving the company money on the whole project while allowing the game to have everything it needed to really shine.

Obviously, my personal choice doesn't reflect the thoughts of everyone, and so the question: would you trade HD Graphics for gameplay?  Imagine, say, Call of Duty 4 with visuals slightly better than the original Call of Duty, however will hundreds more NPCs and significantly larger battlefields.  Is the trade off worth it?  If a developer released the game that would become the next 'Deus Ex' today, if it had PS2 quality graphics would it hurt the game?  Would the game be worse because of a lack of Normal Maps and Full Screen AA?

Usually a game has a focus on visuals to ensure it can be marketed to the mainstream audience to make up the development costs in sales, however it would see that the development costs are now so large due to a focus on visuals that the games are having to suffer as a result, which should mean less sales over-all? 
So, to make more sales to cover the cost of producing industry leading visuals they have to produce games with... industry leading visuals which means cutting features which results in less sales because no one wants to actually play it now?
Maybe I'm way off here, however it would seem to me its simply smarter, from a business perspective, to make a game with decent, not industry leading, visuals and let your gameplay capture your audience rather than the resolution of your textures?