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Which is exactly why they look like plastic, and which is exactly why even Doom3 proves my point! Contrary to the popular believe, it's not the shader (normalmapping/lighting/etc,) making the models look like plastic, it's the lack of good and detailed texturing.
No, textureing in doom3 has little to do with why they look plastic (and frankly I dont think they look very plastic).. this is the specular/diffuse shader.. because there is no skin surface effect. This was because when Doom3 was made pixel shader hardware was not advanced enough to support lots of different surface simulations.
For realistic skin you need something like sub-surface scattering and better specular control.
High res textures are not so important, and there is a practical limit to high of a resolution you can get. In the future expect to see more procedural stuff with mulitple layers. For skin for insatnce, you will do most efects with detail normalo maps overlayed on top of the larger normal map, combined with a subsurface effect.
Poeple need to stop thikning in terms of "textures" and begin understand the concpet of materials. A flat color texture is a not particularly sophisticated hack to make up for lack of surface modelling complexity.
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