We all have our preferences, but one that I could never get over in VG graphics is thanks to Doom 3. When idtech4 was shown off at Macworld 2001 running on Geforce 3 I was struck by Carmack saying "..the final unification of lighting and shadowing across all surfaces... in a game.."show more

With game objects, moving and static, being treated equally for lighting and shadowing there was no longer obvious visual discontinuities in the game world. This was huge for me then and thereafter as I always knew something was wrong, but I could not put my finger on it before.

I could always visually see the seams in a game due to how objects looked. "oh! That objects is about to move, it looks different." Video games had the problems old cartoons have, E.G. the boulder wile e coyote is next to looks completely different than the surrounding rocks.

Same in video games, like here in the gears of war. Does this door stick out a bit? It looks weirdly brighter than the surroundings. Well, it can move so, it looks different. idtech4 would treat moving or static objects the same way for lighting/shadowing so this would not happen

Here are some doors from Doom 3 (BFG in this case): both doors can technically move yet they are lit the same way as the environment surrounding them, not sticking out in any visually obvious way beyond their signage or other clues (red LED readouts to tell you it is locked).

Every object being lit like this it meant that game design was different: objects were physical and moved! F.E.A.R. which uses similar lighting and shadowing to Doom 3 showed that off well. You could interact with or destroy nearly everything and it enhanced gameplay tremendously

This carried onto games that used unified lighting and shadowing but instead relied on shadow maps instead of stencil shadow volumes. Games such as Crysis for example had unified lighting and shadowing, and like F.E.A.R. made physical interaction a huge part of its DNA.

Ever since this first era of unified lighting/shadowing and physics as seen in Doom 3, F.E.A.R, Crysis, etc., I find it hard to be impressed or even be visually immersed in games that do not have it... I always see the seams in the lighting or how static the world is.

When people got excited by the graphical presentation in a number of games, I tended to feel the opposite for a long time (thx doom 3). That was not exactly a popular opinion from 2004-2019 when the games most celebrated for their graphics heavily utilised lightmaps. (UC4 below)

Fast forward to 2019 and onward, thanks to ray tracing in hardware and in software like from Lumen in UE5, real-time lighting is now becoming more popular again. In my brain, game rendering is finally picking up where doom 3 and co. left off. Ray Tracing is awesome! (CP 2077)

But what about player interactivity? Physics being a core part of a game loop? I have yet to see that in a large way in the AAA space so far. Something as daring as Red Faction Guerilla? Hmmm... time will tell. I hope that large scale interactivity comes back.