Thanks for the kind words everyone.

Quoting mondi

The problem lies not in actually showing the results of damage or tire treads etc, but in the amount of memory dedicated to preserving that detail, and what it takes to reliably synchronize that data between players.

Yes, computing power has increased over time, but limitations are still very real. Different systems have differing amounts of memory available for persistence ( PS3 vs 360 vs PC vs etc ). You could write data to disk, but there is no guarantee that there is disk space available. What percentage of available resources do you dedicate to bullet X, fired by player Y, Z minutes ago? How much of that data do you transmit to each player in a networked game, to ensure that their playing field is equivalent to yours?

Good point, but for the sake of tech discussion, lets throw out the option of multiplayer (as most games dumb down graphics on MP as is). Decals are very much limited by memory, both in random access or hard disk. And knowing how much memory a system will have is a crap shoot when regarding PC gaming. But why shouldn't developers take risks and push the technology? Crysis did it with shader and raster graphics in general. By making a game that literally couldn't be played to it's fullest potential by current hardware the bar was raised. Sure it was risky, but gamers stretched their systems, hardware continued to break boundaries, it refined what the enthusiast gaming PC looked like.

Technology is progressed when the current limitations are challenged. The limitations on decals are, in my opinion, not being challenged, thus remaining stagnant.

We have to assume that the standard amount of memory is larger than it was 5 years ago. Almost every system out there has at least 1 gigabyte of ram. Yet many current games still do not have better decal lifespans than games did 10 years ago, when the memory standard was closer to 128MB. There's more memory out there, yet simple 2D textures don't persist much more than they did a decade ago.

And Koreish has a good point, why do so many devs that promise full destructibility fail to make the mark? I had such high hopes for blowing away EVERYTHING in Crysis, yet thick trees still remained steadfast. Why were there only certain types of vegetation that would break procedurally? Shouldn't that algorithm be applicable to all types of foliage in the game?