@beardalaxy
I literally sent you this yesterday.
https://gameliberty.club/@LukeAlmighty/111849842874789548
So, I absolutely do agree. The modern artstyle doesn't even allow for hard shadow.
Man, I wish I knew 1/100th of needed knowledge to know, what went wrong with modern game engines though.
@LukeAlmighty it's also the way games try to be purposefully addictive, the lack of passion, the lack of actual artistry, the push for trendiness, and the disdain for their actual audience.
to be clear i don't even really think this is an engine issue. i think it is a developer and publisher issue. unreal engine is pretty heavy, but you can still make something that looks great and plays great in it. witcher 3 and cyberpunk use the same engine but obviously cyberpunk had a lot more issues right out of the gate.
i think the creation engine from bethesda is one of the only engines i can safely say actually contributes to bethesda games being bad. even then, though, people can do some amazing stuff there. i'm eagerly awaiting the release of skyblivion to see how it stacks up.
@LukeAlmighty long story short, there were things like MSAA that were really performance heavy and that was limiting what people could create. so they sought to find other ways to deal with these issues and provide more realism without losing too much performance. over time, these new methods have been leaned on as crutches and that will only continue to get worse.
what started as a way for artists to be able to realize their vision more fully ended up being a way for lazy devs and undercooked games to still ship a product that was somewhat put together.