Good summary Terra and Tranz. For all the good it is showing age and the models... uhm, yeah. BUT they are adding some new nice features AND FC was a huge hit with some because of the AI difficulty, open worlds, and long draw distance. The graphics are definately on the "good" side and "next gen". Maybe not killer APP quality, but definately a solid filler title.

Crysis and the Crytek 2 engine on the other hand... drool.

Yes, but on the other hand those two changes are smaller. View distance is a matter of adjusting your engine setup (often by the alteration of a config file that controls LOD, fog, etc). So that is not significant. The water would take some work, but still not a significant amount. Games as old as the N64 had rolling water (WaveRace) so the issue was only dedicating the CPU cycles to do it. The 360 has some extra cores for that so it is a minor addition from a programming perspective, just demanding from a performance one.

New models on the other hand require (1) new high detail meshes (2) high detail source images for quality normal maps (3) new bone system / animation setup (4) new texture work (5) eye shaders and (6) completely new skin shaders to get an organic look. Do this for 10-20 distinct characters (maybe even add a randomizer to artificially increase the variety) that is a TON of work. Then the next hurdle is when you get these killer models the rough edges stick out--like the poor lip syncing/expressions (manurisms) or REALLY bad voice acting/script.

Character design is huge in games and take a lot of time.

The changes in place are fairly minor and cosmetic. YES, they make a huge improvement in the game, but for time:return investment if they are going to redo the characters then they need to totally redo the color palette because the current FC games would seem out of place with more realistic models due to the slightly cartoonish color palette. Then we are talking a new game, when the point really is to recycle and make some money on the already completed game.

So I would be surprised if they did much more than we have seen.