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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

oni, my beloved...

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 it's interesting to look at how many games have a more realistic bend in their stylization and get mistaken for full on realism. I often think of Metroid Prime when thinking of that phenomenon myself... and that the remaster seemingly *understood* that with its visual updates to my surprise

I think of this a lot when people describe The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess as "realistic". It's certainly more detailed and less traditionally cartoony than its direct predecessor but it's still an immensely stylized game, with a slightly eerie puppet- or doll-like look to its characters.

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