I'm betting some combination of procedural generation and scanning tech a la Kinect will start taking a lot of the workload off the artists. This has already begun to some extent, with many if not most AAA titles using procedural generation of terrain and vegetation.
The algorithms to control grass reacting may be difficult to write, but that only has to be done once. You could as well have said ten years ago that it would never be cost-effective to create photo-realistic CG films, but that has been pretty much accomplished at this point, and game developers are already borrowing techniques from films.
The algorithms to control grass reacting may be difficult to write, but that only has to be done once. You could as well have said ten years ago that it would never be cost-effective to create photo-realistic CG films, but that has been pretty much accomplished at this point, and game developers are already borrowing techniques from films.