Do you want the truth about why all games look light shit anon? Its because 95% of devs ignore the most important rule about about graphics its more important than pixel count, good coloring or even decent art direction its Lighting.
Every game dev suffers from the same brain rot that realistic lighting is the best version of lighting. Its why UE5 is so popular because it offers great realistic lighting that will make every shovelware look good and the same. Theres no other dev that knew this better than john carmack who added lighting to doom 1 so the game looks better than every other game at the time and so that you could actually scare players. He did it again with doom 3 and while all the enemies in doom 3 look bad because they are model from 2002 the environment looks really good they are over 23 years old by this point and they beat out shit being put out today just skim through this video.
https://youtu.be/OQAd-HHdf1c?si=aulwgo1HNjc5kwJs
the fact that such a video even exists is a testament to how good the environment in this game is
Back to the point devs are lazy now and to be fair i can see why lighthing fucking sucks ass to work and get right in any visual medium its why shit like the "golden hour" in film exists but that doesnt mean we should regress into UE5 Nintendo hire this man bullshit
https://youtu.be/XCVubOzbFzI?si=F71SrHkPClap1qW2
anyway have another video on lighting
https://youtu.be/ESXAxtdEkzY?si=paR8WV8TJ_NSWjAD
also I think raytracing wouldve been cool but abused by lazy devs just like how VR was suppose to be cool with half life alyx being the gold standard not every game just realsing a shitter VR version
