I think that lighting and shadows make the most important point for creating visual worlds. Without light and shadow it looks flat and can only create cartoon worlds.

Softshadows can be rendered on the graphics card and therefore don't have to be slow with the right technique. Besides that they probably don't have the problems with clipping errors when within the camera volume.

With the fact in mind that current stencil shadows are quite useless with those problems I would say: softshadows (or any other new shadow technique) is our only hope to get realistic worlds.

We need shadows reacting to dynamic lights (maybe even optional more than one light) in indoors or to sunlight (outdoors). They should be casted correct. The current perspective is wrong (probably because it comes from the very distant sun).

So I really think this is a very very important point when you want to create 3d-worlds. Otherwise you can paint a 2d-background and make an adventure game.