Yeah, it's the problem with old innovating games. They had good ideas, but they were either limited by the possibility of their time, or searching the marks for the UI.
It really was, but it have a counterpart. It's been something like 15 years that I haven't be trilled by a game. There's really good ones, but when your youth and teen age is past witnessing games evolve from pac-man to Half life, it's not more realism in the graphic design and/or the physics, that will really make a difference for you.
But it's understandable, when you need to spend millions on your game and have around a thousand people involved in it, there's a limit in how far you can go on the innovative side. Some small studios still achieve to do good, but... I don't know, it feel like they just revisit the past.
Perhaps that we reached the limits of the current system.
AI are better and better, but they'll never really works for games. Opponents need to be predictable and not too brights, because most players want to be able to progress in the story. And dialogs, as well as quests/scenarios, can't be created in real time because players need to be able to rely on someone else if they are stuck.
Don't take me wrong, an AI based game could be fun, but games that you can't finish offer a really limited amount of fun; I know it, I grown with them
And VR is just immersive First Person 3D, so an extension of what we already have. It can change the UI (basing it on movement), but not really the game mechanisms themselves, and even less the concept behind the game.
And it will be all for today, grandpa grumpy wish you all a good night