Comment by jameshart
11 days ago
Most good looking games built with Unity don’t ’look like Unity games’ so people don’t think of them as constituting an example of ‘what Unity games look like’. So the archetype for ‘what a Unity game looks like’ remains at ‘pretty rough’.
The ‘art’ of making stuff look good has not been lost at all. It’s just very unevenly distributed.
When a team has good model makers and good texture artists and good animators and good visual programming, it looks great, whether it’s built in Unreal or Unity or a bespoke engine or whatever.
I don’t think that is what people are getting at, since they uniformly want more texture detail.
There are a lot of technically polished Unity titles that get knocked because they look like very well rendered plasticine, for want of a better description.
For example, there was an argument on here not too long ago where various people pushing the “old graphics were better” (simplification) did not understand or care that the older titles had such limited lighting models.
In the games industry I recall a lot of private argument on the subject of if the art teams will ever understand physically based models, and this was one of the major motivations for a lot of rigs to photograph things and make materials automatically. (In AAA since like 2012). The now widespread adoption of the Disney model, because it is understandable, has contributed to a bizarre uniformity in how things look that I do think some find repulsive.
Edit to add: I am not sure this is a new phenomenon. Go back to the first showing of Wind Waker for possibly the most notorious reaction.