I frankly never liked the aesthetic of 3D video games. Even new games have a plastic sheen to them, the characters often look like talking corpses, heavy things look too light, the colours are often muted and muddy, objects are never soft or fuzzy and fabrics often flap like thin but heavy rubber sheets. There's an ever so slight robotic and soulless feel to it, even in the top titles. An extremely small number of games *almost* manage to look lifelike.
2) Much of it is of course down to hardware limitations, but you could also say that the problem is that too many games try for a level of realism that isn't possible with our current technology. I suspect that if more game studios went for a Pixar type of look and hired film animators, the results would be more lifelike. Focus on the strengths of GPU rendering instead of trying to be as gritty and realistic as possible.
@thor #tf2