13. Basking In Gorgeous Dynamic Lighting Effects
You had to love when Fallout 4 got announced at E3 2015, developer Todd Howard made a point to literally go "Look at our new lighting effects!", as such a small thing means so much when you're in-game. At least, it does if you know your Emotion Engines from your Liquid Ocelots. One of the earliest examples on the console side of things that demonstrated such a massive step up in graphical horsepower was Ubisoft's spectacular Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, a game that was already relying on super-sleuthing your way from shadow A to shadow B, but overlaid everything with a graphics engine that looked like it was from the future. From watching light split and filter through some trees in the background to using it to whirl the camera around your character and frame a random 'hero shot', it doesn't get much better than watching digital dawn break at the start of a good day's session.