I'm trying to stay hyped for Avowed but so far it really, really has that Default Unreal Engine 5 look to it and that's not a great sign [edit] I re-shared this and tacked on a big ol rant because I've got feelings to process ok
Allegedly it plays very well, which is good.
I'm trying to pinpoint exactly why the "UE5 look" bothers me so much, because it bothers me a lot. So far all I can come up with are the identifying features of The Look, but I'm not sure about what bugs me apart from it looking, basically, cheap somehow. Like someone threw a bunch of plastic action figures onto a brightly-lit sitcom set. Let me be clear, this is not a problem unique to Avowed, not in the slightest. One of the best examples of the look I'm talking about is Immortals of Aveum.
It might be that one of the things that makes it look cheap to me is a mismatch between the visual fidelity and the animation fidelity. When you've got all these beautifully-detailed characters with outrageously detailed costumes, if you don't animate all the parts of the costumes like their real-world material counterparts, they look like solid blocks of plastic. If the realistic-looking skin moves as one solid unit with no noticeable muscular deformation, it looks, again, like chunks of plastic. It's weird.
The lighting is definitely part of it too. Some scenes are less bothersome than others, and it's the scenes with dimmer, more directional light that look better. The fully-lit scenes are just so awash with diffuse fill light that they feel like they're lit for a low-budget television show. It's too even, and too soft. The improvements in ambient occlusion really sell these scenes and make them look more "real!" But, that amazing tech is being applied here to make flat lighting look more real, and less "videogamey." And the end result of that, again, reads as cheap.
I don't see anyone else complaining about these things though, so is this just a me problem? "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills," and all that.
[edit] I might have nailed the problem in the comments. The graphics for these games look like very high-quality footage of cheap toys. It's both gorgeous and bad at the same time. And that mismatch is what's aggravating me.
It's a similar mismatch you'd get with a fantasy medieval game having perfectly crisp typography with a flat visual design. It's neat. It's tidy. It's high-quality. And it's wrong. And both Aveum and Avowed are doing this, too! Though this particular pet peeve is also in older games, like Skyrim.
