Graphic whores make me want to puke my brains out. They'll kill the gaming industry if they keep up this Graphics>Gameplay BS. That's why I like stardock. Elemental looks nice and has a ton of potential.

Games with less then stellar graphics usually are still good looking enough to convey the story, which is whats most important.

Games that look really great, are usually rentals for me, because they lack any REAL depth.

It's like the difference between the girl that's relatively pretty has a good attitude and a deep personality.

Or the girl that is drop dead gorgeous but is a total bitch, dumb as a brick and deep as a mud puddle.

One you might pick up for a night or two... The other sticks with you for a lifetime.

Because graphics look better on a box then gameplay does. It's hard to convey gameplay in ads, and it's easy to convey "ooh, shiny!"

But the idea that PC requirements are still going up is silly. My wife's system until it died was a fraction of what you're running (older dual core, 512MB video, only 2GB RAM), and there was still nothing we wanted to play that it couldn't handle easily. That's the one upside to so many cross platform games. Since they have to run on the 360, they'll also run on even a modest PC so long as the video card isn't onboard.

Aesthetics beat graphics as well. Some games have superb graphics but they just fill lifeless scenes. Here is a list that I made a while back:

Functionality, must be playable

Engaging, you must want to play it

Usable, you must be able to use it (here goes basic graphics that elevate it beyond Ascii, interface too)

Atmosphere, basic sound+aesthetic style+some lighting

Random or Replayable, a bit of all, but some games you play for ages while others are fire and forget, very hard to say what is and what isn't replayable, I don't find Dragon Age replayable yet I've played diablo 2 for over 400 hours

Simple or easy to learn, you can understand it quickly, you can pick it up and grasp what to do, several games people say are great I won't play because they start a jumbled mess

Deep and Complex, there is a lot more to learn

Dramatic/Cinematic, the bang from the explosions and the sound of all that happens, atmospheric but pointless

Visual eye candy, graphics go below sound and atmosphere

Although Kirby's Epic Yarn was voted most beautiful game on E3 by Gametrailers.com

This is a no-brainer. I see the current focus on graphics as the biggest reason for the decline in PC gaming. During the 80's and 90's around 50% of the games made for the PC were really good. Games were made with passion by people who themselves played games. Just about anyone could get into the industry, there were a ton of great games to choose from that even today around 20 years later still shine when looking at their story, gameplay and complexity. There were 3D cards during the 90's but the games that made use of them were few and even though the technology was new and intriguing it certainly did not make games that didn't use it obsolete or any less interesting. For some reason however the industry leaders felt the need to make this new technology standard and with the dawn of the 2000s it became the norm that every serious game developer had to conform to to stay at the edge. Probably because creatively it's really hard to quickly make a game that tops your previous one and that your customers really will want, while graphics is purely bound to technology and much easier to improve on and measure. Companies eventually started making the same game over and over just with updated graphics and people were buying them showing the devs that this is a strategy that really works, but only as a short term profit-cow it seems.

A 3D engine back in the day worked great for first person games but sucked for pretty much everything else. You can probably remember a lot of games during the early 2000s that used a 3D engine because it had become the thing to do and it was a huge marketing point for games, "featuring state of the art 3D graphics". And when you fired up those games you noticed that they looked like crap and wondered why on earth they decided to go 3D when they could have made the game in standard 2D-graphics and it would have looked better, been cheaper to make and the interface would have been far more intuitive and immersive.

And then we get to today when they've worked out all the kinks and made 3D engines really work for just about all game types, the games look stunning but most of them are just shallow when compared to similar games from the past. And most of all making a game requires a team and budget of Hollywood movie proportions. If you go small, indie, perhaps even opt not to use a 3D engine the market completely ignores you effectively getting rid of most of the kids who want to get into game making as a hobby rather than spending 5 years in a school bench and joining a large corporation at the bottom where you do as you're told and don't get to give any creative input on what kind of game you want to make. Today only 1% of the games are actually so good that you'd call them a life changing experience similar to reading a really good book or watching a really special movie. Very few games leave such an impact that you just know you will be replaying it 10 or 20 years from now and enjoy it just as much. Today it's all play until you get bored, forget about it and move on to the next great thing that keeps you thrilled for a few days, just as long as the game still feels new to you.

The creative control of the games have switched from passionate gamers to rich businessmen like the leaders of EA and Activision who aren't interested the art of game-making or how good games they make but how much profit they make. PC gamers are getting tired of shelling out big bucks to play the same game over and over with improved graphics and now want something more and something fresh. The big game companies have money-milked the PC market to near-death and are slowly starting to move on to "more profitable" markets. To me this is what's wrong with the PC industry, not piracy or the threat from consoles or whatever the devs like to blame today. I just hope with the decline in PC gaming that the creative control of the games will slowly again be taken by the average Joes who have a passion for games and are not just interested in making a fortune. I hope the games made by such people will once again be looked on as viable contenders for our hard-earned cash and get their moment in the spotlight, giving the devs a chance to evolve into a small business that becomes competitive in the game market but doesn't lose the focus from making the games they always wanted to play.

As a long time gamer I definitely feel that games are going backwards more than they are going forward and graphics are one of the main culprits.  I'm not against pretty graphics but for me gameplay is what matters and anything that holds that back is a bad thing.  I am someone who can have fun with pure text games like Nethack or Dwarf Fortress though.  Not saying games with no graphics are my preference but for strategy games I really don't think it adds much.  As long as it is easy to understand what is going on and the interface is nice I'm good.  For a 1st person shooter or any game trying to make you think you are in a real place graphics are more important but having something that looks pretty good is fine with me.  Having hair that looks like the real thing and blows in the wind isn't important to me.  It doesn't make the game more fun in anyway.  I'm not familiar with the example of Final Fantasy 13 but hearing that an RPG took cities out of a game basically because the graphics would be too costly is very scary.  I'll just play Ultima or Baldur's Gate again instead.

Unfortunately I know I am in the minority (the minority of the minority even).  I see what my co-workers say about upcoming games, see what the reviews say and see what sells and it's usually the games with the pretty graphics that are the ones that people want.  I think it has a lot to do with the type of gamer you are.  Are you someone who plays games here and there and for short periods and just wants to have some mindless fun, or are you someone who wants a game that challenges your mind and your imagination.  I can definitely have fun with a mindless shooter for small stints but I get bored with it quickly.  Having an expansive world filled with mystery and challenge is what I really want and graphics aren't necessary for those.

Yes I would trade HD for gameplay. I was talking about this very subject with my brother recently and how we both agree that lately it seems as if the games main focus is just in the graphics. We were wondering how it was possible that newer versions of games kept coming out with less and less options instead of more, the only thing they kept getting more is graphics...

Examples of games we were talking about, Final Fantasy. All the FF's were imho works of art until they came up with FFX which is another topic for another day . Anyways, in FF's you could explore the map at any time and go on side quests and just spend a whole bunch of time looking around for secret stuff. New FF they set you in a straight line and you cant even explore much yayyy, but instead we get a super flashy cutscene that we cant even control and is only good for the first time you play it. Open world exploration just gave you inmense replay value. You didnt unlock Aeris final limit break the first time around, you did that after the 2nd or 3rd play through in FF7 (least I did ). I enjoyed Final Fantasy 1 for the NES a lot more than FFX for the PS2, which was the last console FFX Ill ever play.

Another game I've always loved is Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, first one I ever played was RTK2 for the SNES and that game was different every single time, and had a plethora of things you could do. Many diplomatic options, different plots you could perform on your foes (or friends). Fast forward to the latest RTKXI and the only options you can find is Ally, Joint, Gift and a few others I can't remember, same for the plots and city management. It seems most games only get dumbed down for every iteration that comes out and the only thing that gets better are the graphics.

So many SNES games that were just filled with soooo many different options and you wonder how did they do that with just 16MB cartridges, and nowadays with virtually unlimited resources most games you can find are a buncha crap that are just a pretty looking game with no depth and no need to replay the game after beating it once (if you even felt like beating it).

I guess someone noticed "Hey we can make money out of video games" and thats were the quality and passion put into games started to go down since its a race to make a lot of money and to crank out as much as possible in a given time frame.

I know it's ridiculously popular(Deus Ex) but I'm one of the few that thought it was a sub par game. I think it may even have started the slide towards the plethora of crap that passes as pc entertainment today. But that's a personal opinion of course(and before someone freaks out and says of course it's an opinion,I must point out there are facts and then there are opinions and this was the latter).

Now to the titular question at hand. Game play trumps graphics.

And that friends is a fact not an opinion.

I would gladly trade the best graphically enhanced game out there, for a game with well thought at gameplay anyday. I still have my moments where I go back and play Starcraft lol, which still has a huge multiplayer community, and for today's standards, the graphics definitely don't bring that much to the table. But the game itself was great.

While AlienShock might be a good game, its not X-Com. I too want an X-Com with better graphics - what I don't want is a switch to super detailed completly static enviroments that can't be destroyed. Every wall, every door, every shelf, every console must be destroyable! Random layout of tactical missions is also required for good gameplay and is difficult with 3D.

That's an easy one for me. 

While I always appreciate games that boast both good graphics and good gameplay, when push comes to shove, I won't hesitate to sacrifice graphics.  Unless I find a game's visuals to be truly atrocious (and there's fortunately very few examples that would qualify in my book), gameplay will pretty much always trump everything else. 

This is selective recall.  There were a lot of bad games in the 80's and 90's.  It's just that they were so forgettable no one remembers them - or else you were too young to see how bad they were.

On a sidenote the only x-com clone I've found playable after "X-com: goes swimming" was UFO: Afterlight. That one I've enjoyed enough to playthrough multiple times.