it does look VERY pretty though. You can’t deny that applied to a less fantastical setting, scenes would look far more believable with lighting detail like that. Regardless of whether it looks real or not, the increase in visual fidelity is something to get excited about. Yes graphics aren’t everything, but it does open up artistic and cinematic potential with the play of lights.
Another reason i’m looking forward to how this turns out is since 3d graphics became the norm, most lighting technologies give a pretty narrow range of how things are lit up, this may easily allow the creation of settings where the light in the scene has a much stronger individual identity, making the impact and impression all the stronger in scenes depicting the real to those depicting the surreal.
Remember back in the days where 2d was commonplace if you saw screens of different games side-by-side it was extremely apparent, that they were very different games. The personality of the scene was different, the world was coloured and painted in a way that (if it was good) seemed very individual, very unique and very special.
Not to say that the case isn’t true of all games these days, Crysis and Killzone 2 are worlds apart, but this technology, if it pulls through, will give so much more control of the way light falls and shapes around objects, to the artists and designers.
For example. Take a look at some of the concept art for Half Life 2 for instance, compare it to the finished product, the lines and shape and overall appearance of things may have translated quite well, but the scene, the picture of the world the scene takes place in, the colour of the sky and the way it strikes objects on the ground… from the painting to the game, due to technological constraints a lot of the feeling of the scene has been lost in translation.
The reason i compared this to 2d games is that in that era, the concept artists could produce the art that went into the game itself in the same way they produced the original concept… through drawing, painting, taking into account the restraints of screen resolution that applied at the time, whatever they put when they touched paint brush to paper… went into the game. And you could study the background of a scene the same way you study a painting.
