This is an extreme example but take Star Citizen for example. This game has been in development for over 10 years. How do they take what they’ve already accomplished and keep it up to date? Especially things like graphics.
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Professional dev here.
Generally, visual targets are planned early in development because changing that mid-cycle is very expensive (high quality art is very labor intensive). So basically, if you are planning on releasing a game in 5 years, you try to hit the visual quality you think will be the norm (or cutting edge) 5 years from now.
So really, it’s educated and experienced people just guessing for the most part. And sometimes they get it wrong.
There are some things that can help, though. Graphical features are not as labor intensive to implement as it is to redo the art at a higher quality, so later on in development, studios may implement things like better lighting, reflections, foliage shaders, stuff like that. But for the most part, a lot of it is planned years in advance.
As for Star Citizen, they’ve probably been improving things as they go (probably one of the reasons that project’s dev cycle has run for so long). But they also had the benefit of being a game that was trying to push the limit of what was possible on PC all those years ago. If they were targeting base PS4 or something at the start, it likely wouldn’t look as good as it does now.
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