So I'm looking at the trailer on this page: http://news.yahoo.com/video-batman-arkham-knight-trailer-brings-gotham-life-194822740.html -- which by the way, pretty good. And I'm wondering to myself, why does everything still look so plastic? In the era of PS4, XB1, and improved GPUs, can't the texture look more "organic"? Are we always going to have the plastic look for decades to come?

What I really hate is the shiny effect, maybe that's the plastic that you can see. The worse game for it in my eyes was the latest GTA

to a large degree, this may have to do with things like the specifics of the material settings, ...

it seems like often the developers/artists/... don't really set the values for various settings to values particularly appropriate for a given material (instead often leaving everything at default values and similar).

so, for example, you might end up with skin where the specular exponent is too high, and bump/normal/... maps are either absent or don't incorporate much of any real "noise", ... with the ultimate result of a lot of plastic-looking characters.

this may also be extra true if by default the engine assumes the use of specular-maps, and so uses an initially high baseline value for the specular exponent (assuming it to be multiplied with the value from the specular map to yield a more sane value). in these cases, often leaving out a specular map will result, say, in the material being rendered with 1.0 (full specular) for every texel. in such a case, you may also get something that comes out overly glossy.

a lot is likely to depend on the specific engine though.

or such...

Haven't the recent Batman movies had a rather plastic style? I thought it was a stylistic choice to incorporate their comic book origins.

The things that actually stood out to me as being particularly fake or plastic were skin and two-face's jacket. True enough that the other materials were very pristine, but I think the materials, at least, were fine and reasonable.

Its still hard to do materials that are affected by sub-surface scattering (like skin), or to convey at a distance materials that have sub-millimeter detail (like cloth or skin). On top of that is our Brain's wiring to recognize faces above all, which I think is going to make achieving more than a couple convincing faces in real-time be such that we're just going to have to wait for hardware to give us that much excess power.

I think the biggest incongruity of today's graphics is what Carmack recently spoke about -- For a very long time, the materials in games haven't been created to satisfy a unified, physically-based lighting model. Instead, the norm has been for an artist to come in and tweak local lights or the material properties affected by them to achieve the look they are after -- sometimes consistency, or sometimes an artistic touch. We're really only very recently seeing the idea of the unified, realistic lighting model with complimentary shaders take hold in games, the likes of which has been used in film for years (given the luxury of offline rendering). We still live in a world of hacks to get things that look as good as they do. Take the Epic Citizen demo -- probably the first tech demo to actually simulate more than two-three bounces of light in a complex scene, and it required three flagship GPUs to render at playable frame-rates. I don't know what their lighting model is, or whether its physically-based and consistently so, but it shows both how far we've come, and at the same time, how far we really have to go.

I can't say for sure, but I believe it's down to the use of Unreal Engine. Every game that uses that engine (i.e. most AAA games these days) has the look. I wouldn't describe it as plastic, more as wet modelling clay.

Disappointingly, this seems to have been carried over into UE4.

Of course, this is just a lay opinion. I'd be interested to hear from one of the more engine knowledgable members here (assuming they're not all under NDAs :p )

Despite it's age, I still think Source has some of the better skin tone modelling in games.

Nothing is allowed to have a flat finish, it seems. Gloss just makes it easier to show off your graphics tightening I guess.