And here is comes, the next generation of poorly optimized games and artificially inflated requirements.
Studio's are very quick to tack on all sorts of performance hungry catchy features and effects without simply improving the baseline of the game. Its quite frankly lipstick on a pig in some cases.
Best example: Bioshock Infinite
Seriously those roses. All these fancy DX 11 lighting effects and the roses are from 10 years ago (even the texturing is crap), the facial animations are seriously lacking, and the balloons are clearly polygonal. The apples appearing in the game are also crap.
Yet the raindrops look very pretty. The game is unbalanced in this respect.
Don't get me wrong, Infinite is quite pretty and I enjoyed it but the static NPCs and stock character bodies broke a lot of immersion. I would rather have had more dynamic NPCs and an interactable environment than some of the pretty lighting.
It appears that the trend with recent games is to blow the budget on visuals and then not optimize anything. And of course include features and effects that have no noticeable IQ difference but cut framerate in half because the game has to be hard to 'max out'.
Areas of games that tend to be poor and generally need improvement include AI, story, physics and environmental interactions, level design, and character design and animation (metro LL was pretty bad with respect to facial animation). These are areas that tend to dramatically need improvement.