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don't let the phoned-in visuals of the Halo remake off the hook by scapegoating Unreal imo. if something looks boring it's because someone boring made it

the fatiguing "photorealistic" (imo it isn't... real life doesn't look like that) look of halo campaign evolved or the many other games that look like that is not a function of any engine, it's not a default, it's boring people falling slightly short of boring goals

what you're looking at is what happens when someone is so blind to art that they look at halo 1 and literally don't even notice it's a cartoony game with huge manga influences, the game the Oni people made after Oni. it has nothing to do with technology

it is endemic, this. you might suffer from it yourself. people think half-life 1 was trying for realism and do realistic remakes of that. they were hand painting textures and doing pixel art

i think there's a whole lot of room to do something modern and interesting with halo visually but you gotta be interested in it. realism is attractive because you can do it "right". you can be correct. nobody can say you didn't do what you meant to do. just ideally you wouldn't have meant to do that