Unreal engine and it's consequences have been a disaster to human race. While it allowed indie studios to achieve photorealistic experiences, it also made developers terified of experimenting with any features, that are not already implemented into it.
This caused all physics based gameplay to decay rapidly. No racing game can offer even a part of deformations, that Carmagedon 2 came with. Living environments will never again reach the levels of The force unleashed. And even something as simple as slicing through enemies will not return to the quality of Revengance.
@LukeAlmighty everyone just uses the default rendering pipeline too and it looks bad
@LukeAlmighty I was playing The First Descendant and the environments are so boring I was left wondering how much of the game was just automatically generated by UE. It really is a lot less impressive when you can just make a lush field filled with trees and shrubs at the push of a button, with almost no input from an artist, even though that might not even be the case there.