Why Did So Many Unreal Engine 3 Games Look So 'Wet'?

Tip for the editor: please add a bit of footage of the games the team is talking about. They have true knowledge of gaming graphics and how things work and seeing examples of the things they are discussing while they are discussing it would make the video come alive. Excellent analysis and explanations by the team as always. Congrats!

[@ReggieVdz]

Agreed. I get the jest of it but don't know exactly what they're talking about, so I can't really understand the point

[@TheLongWind]

100% agreed. Please add clips in videos like these.

[@applebottomjames]

Yes please!

[@mistermcking8445]

That wet look was one of the reasons i was able to identify 95% of UE 3 games.

[@PlayerOblivion]

For me it was the delayed texture streaming on basically everything in a scene.

[@worsel555]

Every game being a shade of brown and delayed textures loading it did it for me.

[@Mattened]

you identify with wet? what

[@DandelionVolta]

And the specific look of the bloom effect

[@DaBigBoo_]

and unreal engine 4 those grainy reflections

[@LilBoyHexley]

That wet look or "sheen" as I've always called it was like the defining aesthetic of the early seventh generation to me. "Next-gen graphics"

[@savagedregime8176]

I distinctly remember there being a "graphics improvement mod" for Quake 4 shortly after release, and I think all it did was increase the specularity of the normals by like 200-300% making everything look drenched in vaseline. I couldn't believe it when I saw people claiming this actually looked better. Really hammers the point that this was a shorthand novelty for "next gen" visuals that people bought hook line and sinker.

[@SianaGearz]

At the time we didn't have physically based shading, no microfacet model. It was impossible to describe surface roughness. Instead the surface was represented in Blinn-Phong shading, which is an empirical model made to describe originally billiard balls, which were made of a layered material. The inner surface of a billiard ball is oil painted wood, which is matte and coloured, and the outer is a clear hard varnish with a specular mirror like reflection of the light colour. This is it, this is the foundation of the laminated look, because the shading model describes exactly that! The model is also flawed in how you shouldn't add these up, you can't add two different light contributions from a single light source twice, or the effective energy that comes out of the object is higher than what came in! This is physically a fundamental impossibility. The more reflective and less transmissive the specular layer is, the less light the diffuse should get to work with. It wasnt noticed because the billiard balls which had a distinctive enough specular were dark coloured. At first, we had vertex lighting in real-time and interactive graphics, and specular component plain looks bad with Gouraud shading, and cannot be precalculated unlike diffuse, so it was under-emphasised. By UE3 era we had per pixel lighting, bump mapped as well, and suddenly one could go wild with specular, and obviously most surfaces aren't truly diffuse, so wild go they did. It just seemed more modern and more future for the time, less of that flat look associated with games from before.

[@dphrygian]

This is the correct answer!

[@ShinAli]

yup, great reply!

[@TheLizardKing752]

I remember being a computer science major in college at the time these games were releasing. We were all pretty keyed up about UE3, I think that was really the time they started marketing graphics cards as a thing you'd want to upgrade every few years, unfortunately.

[@SianaGearz]

@@TheLizardKing752 I don't know graphics cards never lasted me a long time till recently. I went back and forth between Permedia2, Voodoo2, then TNT2 and Voodoo3, Geforce2 etc etc and that's barely even starting the 2000s :D And it always had to be the newest thing. Also went through almost as many whole PC builds, i mean you build a Pentium MMX 166 in 1997 well how come you don't have a Pentium II 600 by 1999, what is it good for, losing out on a whole oder of magnitude in performance. And these were $500 CPUs, getting plopped on $300 ASUSTek mainboards, and then RAM wasn't cheap either. Those $150-$200 for a graphics card barely even registered. And then i've had a gtx970 from basically uhhh all the way back then till last summer. 9 years ish?

[@MaxLebled]

To me what made UE3/UDK games distinctive was the look of their bloom and SSAO. Much like how you can usually distinguish an UE4 game by the look of the tonemapper

[@henryviiis_craft]

Honestly, I can't remember any "wet" example of UE3 that looked like Chronicles of Riddick or Clive Baker's Jericho, most of them had bloomy and unclear image suitable for stylized games. That's why Mirrors Edge was so shocking back then it doesn't look like any UE3 game.

[@wingedhussar1453]

And now 5 with its lumen lightning. I cam easily tell now

[@High.on.Life_DnB]

​@@wingedhussar1453Some PS games look just as good or better than some UE5 games, in those cases it's kinda hard to see if you don't know what engine is used

[@sean7332]

I don't remember that, but what I do remember is how amazing the factory level looked in gears of war 1 it had incredible atmosphere and the rain actually effected all the floors, walls, trees and effects, that game was truely amazing

[@worsel555]

Gears of War was the first game that really showed off what the 360 could do and was by far and away the best looking game at the time. It really did make you stop and admire the scenery and effects that we had not seen up to that point in time. Going back to look at it now it wont seem that impressive, but what we have now built from it; more modern "takes" on how retro games look terrible should remember that.

[@sean7332]

@@worsel555 I think the atmosphere is still the best for the series and the graphics art style etc grittyness made that happen

[@AJ-xv7oh]

I remember the hype around it's release 🔥

[@tallgeese88]

You don't remember the glossy wet look of Gears and Unreal 3 games? You didn't play those games, then. Don't know why you would try to say otherwise.

[@FenderUsa]

@@tallgeese88 i remember it, but just because he doesn't doesn't mean he's lying dude. he either doesn't remember it or didn't pick up on it

[@MrHobo87]

It really didnt have too much to do with lighting... In early UE3 games developers were still coming to grips with how to texture a models material definition using a specular map. In UE3 with just a spec map it could be a challenge to properly define something as metal, cloth, skin etc. You had to work in VERY broad strokes. This got better when UE3 games began using spec AND gloss textures which allowed you to define how bright and tight the specular contribution was which is why part of the reason why the wet looks started to go away as time went on. Now modern material definition in UE4 and UE5 is determined by Metalness and Roughness textures replacing the old spec gloss workflow from the PS3/360 era. This makes material definition MUCH more straightforward which is part of (in conjunction with many things) the reason why so many realistic looking games can feel a bit similar graphically. UE3 was capable of it as well, but the shift away from a specular texture based workflow happened at the tail end of the UE3 days, if I remember right Dontnods RememberMe was the first game released on UE3 using modern workflows.

[@ZeitGeist_TV]

Nice contribution and worth the read, early UE3 titles were still fun ASF though especially Gears of War and Mirrors Edge.

[@piotrmazek540]

That's the right answer. One correction, though. Epic's UE3 didn't have PBR at all, Dontnod built their own custom PBR implementation, plus some other cool stuff. The work done on Remember Me was then described and published on the graphic programmer's blog (Sebastien Lagarde) and has been an inspiration for many engines' PBR implementation.

[@niks660097]

You are talking about PBR and non-pbr, but arkham knight was not PBR so why it didn't have that problem?

[@MrHobo87]

@@niks660097 Its important to remember that just because a game is using a non PBR material approach it doesnt mean that it cant have amazing art and strong materials. Its just much more difficult to maintain consistency across the art pipeline. BUT it can be done. Also being at tthe very very end of UE3's life cycle meant the art teams were very well practiced in the best way to handle material definition and minimize issues. In addition, Arkham Knights art direction has a strong basis in rainy wet environments. So as good as Rocksteadys material work was on AK, it didnt need to be completely "accurate". Lastly, Rocksteady basically ripped UE3's guts out and pushed a lot of their own tech into it to make AK look as good as it does.

[@MrHobo87]

@@piotrmazek540 THANK YOU for reminding me of Lagardes blog post, thanks to the openness of him as well as Dontnod, the whole industry gained a massive boost on getting up to speed on PBR workflows and rendering. We all owe a massive debt of gratitude to that work.

[@vibujicilemi]

Static lighting is underrated. It's usually much better, since it can spend hours calculating the light during build time vs a few milliseconds that can be spent on realtime lighting during runtime.

[@bltzcstrnx]

Good for linear games.

[@YogiTheBearMan]

Good for CS2

[@ErikLosLobos]

This is why I find alot of maps in Halo 3 look much nicer than their equivalents rendered 15 years later in Halo Infinite

[@wb6930]

@@bltzcstrnx Metroid vania/Open ended games work well too. Heck, even some of the best looking open world games in the last generation used static lighting (Spider-Man, Batman Arkham, Mad Max, etc)

[@unfa00]

(junior tech artist here) I think the "wet, drab and gloomy" look was just the era in realtime graphics development, when specular lighting and post-processing became possible, so all the tech artists were finding ways to use that to make their new game look "next gen". The new tools are always overused at first because they separate the "next gen" from the "current gen", and that sells games to mainstream audiences! So about specifics - the "wet" look. The shading model at the time was "Diffuse+Specular". Remember that PBR rendering didn't exist in realtime rendering (if at all) at that time. Each material could use 4 textures: diffuse (like base color * ambient_occlusion), specular (grayscale specular values gave non-metalic materials, but if diffuse and speculat were both colored the same eay it would look like metal), emission was a relatively new thing, and nor al maps which were known for a bit, but not exactly figured out yet. The extra pieces to the puzzle were cubemaps. Roughness for a material couldnt be set with a texture, and it only affected the specular shading (the hilights), and did not affect cibemap reflections. So all cubemap reflections were still 100% sharp, giving that wet look. Specular maps could only affect the amount and xolor of reflections, not their roughness. The "drab gloomy look" - post processing became viable, and with more than just bloom. So art directors were experimenting with tinting as a way to make the game's screenshots be distinct from the rest. UT3 was notorious for the rampant post-processing, which made it harder to read the world, but sure did make the screenshots in magazines pop!

[@BACK2PORT]

Never forget though how mindblowing Gears 1 at the time was. HD tvs had just started appearing, i got one and was just blown away at 1080i 😂

[@StreetPreacherr]

AGREED! The excessive specular highlighted 'wet' look might seem 'bad' now, but that first 'Mad World' trailer for Gears 1 was MINDBLOWING! I remember Gears 1 looking better than ANY PC game available at the time!

[@BACK2PORT]

@@StreetPreacherr This guy knows. That trailer i was gonna originally mention. " All around me are familiar faces " was amazing

[@BACK2PORT]

That wet look also looked amazing with the mission at night and lightning strikes. Its been a while but it was mind-blowing back then. Same as the first rodie run, blew me away lol

[@vince207]

Gears 1 was the game that made by buy an xbox 😍

[@TheHAMMER91]

With game itself running at 720p lol it’s crazy how recently we got games to run at 1080p on consoles. Makes me want to try an old 1080i flatscreen and see how games look on there now

[@cosbusta]

It's easy to say" nein nein, it's terrible" now, but Gears 1 looked absolutely insane back then and a generation above anything else.

[@JAGtheTrekkieGEMINI1701]

DAS!

[@David-ln8qh]

It looked great...overall. Aspects of it always looked gross to me. Same with Oblivion.

[@pixelmentia]

Yeah GoW was mind-blowing at the time. Hell, I didn't even like the gameplay all that much but the graphics kept me going.

[@SuckItDown]

GoW 1-3 still looks great by today standards, just proves that game design and art direction is more important than graphics.

[@nicholas.alan85]

​@@pixelmentiaI still hate the gameplay. But even i, who was/is a HALO DIE HARD, can admit the original GoW was INCREDIBLE looking when it came out.

[@tadpole3159]

cube map reflections were additive and no one stored roughness values in the mip maps so you have perfect sharp reflections added on top of a mesh. result was wet looking stuff.

[@rizzo-films]

I love that they took time to talk about this piece of gaming history. For me the early UE3 look isn't just the wetness, it's the brown / gray / drab textures and color pallettes, flat lighting, low res normal maps and heavy use of the glow effect. Bio Shock somehow looks nicer than Gears I think because the art direction is high-contrast with a lot of darkness and rich colors. Arkham Knight still has all of these signatures but, again, the art direction and design got really ambitious and created a world teaming with detail, contrast and awesome dynamic shadows dancing all over Gotham. Because it still has that wet look. It's raining in Gotham after all.

[@ThePreciseClimber]

Bioshock 1&2 used Unreal Engine 2. Or, to be more precise, a modified version called Unreal Engine 2.5. The X360 era Splinter Cell games also used it.

[@crestofhonor2349]

That brownish yellow look was so common in that era. It was all over media at that time and both video games and many TV and movies had that horrible color palette as well. One of the first things to change when we hit the 8th gen was the abandonment of that awful color palette

[@mechadeka]

Got so bad even Nintendo was doing it.

[@yusofplayed]

Well said!

[@Komatik_]

Yeah, look at Killzone and at Mario Galaxy and see what's aged better.

[@ClayWheeler]

Batman Arkham series is the only titles that pushed Unreal Engine 3 beyond its limit

[@Lynellf]

I think the word, "moist" is a better adjective.

[@LyRaLex]

Like many already pointed out the several reasons why games looked like they did during the 360/PS3 era... one of the major reasons is also the group think graphic trends developers followed and still follow i.e. 6th Gen had Lens Flare, Film grain, 7th had Bump/Specular Maps and colour filters (mostly brown, yellow, grey), 8th Gen had chromatic aberration and so on...

[@jonathanwagner9279]

I just have to say how consistently impressed I am with Alex Battaglia's knowledge of 3D tech.

[@mkb144p6]

That's why it was the perfect engine for Arkham Knight.

[@Hirnlego999]

Although it was quite heavily rewritten to be more optimal for the game

[@crestofhonor2349]

Arkham Knight likely started development before UE4 was released to the public and it would have been way too difficult to switch from UE3 to UE4

[@PixelsLaboratory]

It's easy: PBR rendering was becoming available to people by means of this new shader pipeline, therefore most users abused the Specular and Metallic nodes, making things look way too shiny, just because it was a novelty comparing to the previously flat-looking generation. Like when you discover heavy metal coming from pop music, that's what you'll be blasting day and night until that phase kinda cools down.

[@clairearan505]

Alex, what in the hell are you talking about? There's direct lighting in Gears 1, and for it's time, it looked incredible. The characters don't always glow, though in darker areas they didn't fully seat in the environment, but that's likely partially gameplay and partially just the tech of the time being limited and new. The initial showing of UE3 was a tech demo, with none of the considerations necessary for a full game, running more than just pretty visuals across large and pretty intricately detailed play spaces. I remember shadow movement happening when entering a volume with a different light setup, which would cause the directional light in use to shift its position to whatever a given lighter had set for that area. I'm not surprised that the directional light didn't always line up with the sun's position in the skybox, but art direction is art direction, and motivated lighting is sometimes sacrificed for one reason or another. The wet look of games of the time was a result of "we can so we will". All sorts of new rendering tech gets used that way, and with time, game makers and artists making content find their way to nuance in the tech, rather than bashing you over the head with it. UE3 and Gears 1 are huge milestones in the history of game graphics. Criticism is good, but that seemed unnecessarily mean. What they pulled off with Gears 1 was amazing, despite its shortcomings, and a little grace goes a long way.

[@JAGtheTrekkieGEMINI1701]

THIS! DF is just exaggerating like they often do in their otherwise good Analyses

[@Turok1134]

The DF crew has gotten a bit too comfortable in their armchair developer seats over the years, unfortunately.

[@memorycard1000]

I had just went from a 28 inch crt tv to a 720p 42 inch Panasonic plasma tv and Gears Of War just blew me away! One of the best gaming and hardware upgrade experience I have ever had. The Plasma actually still runs. 😍

[@LiamNajor]

I have a fully functional 1080p plasma at about that size. It is my baby, and I will be quite sad when it kicks the bucket.

[@ViperGTS737]

Whoa, I went through EXACTLY the same upgrade from a Philips 29 CRT to a 720p Panasonic Plasma, and yes I was blown away when I played Bioshock

[@pegcity4eva]

Same. Still kicking.

[@zerolullabiez]

Same here, my dad's 2007 52 inch Samsung Plasma TV still kicking ass, the very same I played Gears 1 when I was a teen, time flies...

[@ismiismael]

All of your plasma tv have burn screen?

[@rnbpl]

2:48 wow i had always assumed that Mirror's Edge used some variant of the Frostbite engine

[@unspecialist]

One of you at DF should invest some good hours in learning a program like Maya or even 3D studio max so you could go beyond with how shaders work, normal maps are used for, go beyond calling it light system and have all the little shading terms right under the tongue when explaining this. Specular and reflective controls are very attached to the shading engine or rendering engine, having normal maps has very little to do with this articular wet look, normal maps are just rgb colors used to represent position or direction, the wet look could come from the ergonomics of the software, the defaults of the render engine and the creative direction seeking more detail and more dynamics. It could also have been the additive mathematics of the shader that are “plusing”(+) without any rolloff of the highlights as opposed to “screening” the specular shader on top of the diffuse color pass for example. With your insight into the industry and contact with dev teams, having someone familiar with how at least shading and rendering work would definitely bring great production value to the channel/team. Not that you guys need more of that, you guys are great and I hope I didn’t come out wrong.

[@Cheynanigans__]

I feel like UE5 games tend to all have a similar aesthetic, too. Not as obvious as UE3, but it's definitely still a thing. Still to this day, delayed texture streaming in on basically everything is a dead giveaway, too.

[@ethanwasme4307]

gah the texture streaming LOL

[@robertcarr4172]

I remember when i played gears of war 1 at launch, it was the most insane looking game id ever seen. It was gorgeous

[@StreetPreacherr]

Yep! I remember watching that original 'MAD WORLD' trailer on a nearly ENDLESS loop when it first came out. Gears was the first game that looked truly 'Next Gen', and I don't think there was even anything better available on PC! At that time, no PC Game Studios could afford the development costs to produce a game of that quality, but Microsoft was desperate to secure their share of the console market and gave Epic the resources required to show what their new engine was capable of!

[@StreetPreacherr]

And wasn't Gears basically the FIRST 'MAJOR' game that used the brand new UE3 engine? Other than maybe an actual 'Unreal' title that Epic produced themselves, almost more as just a 'proof of concept' to advertise the new development tech? Despite its limitations, at the time UE3 was a GAME CHANGER for the quality of game graphics! PC didn't even have anything better. It was a perfect storm of 'Next Gen' Xbox 360 hardware, Epic's New Next Gen UE3 engine, & Microsoft opening their wallet in hopes of 'beating' Sony!

[@dmer-zy3rb]

in terms of raw technology it was good, but the art style was horrid. in that regard the "big 3" of the previous year Half Life 1, Doom 3 and Far Cry 1 were all better. and especially Far Cry 1 with its both vast levels and great looking indoor areas is superior. (and lets not even get started on the gameplay)

[@robertcarr4172]

@@dmer-zy3rb whatever. It looked and played great.

[@VTorner]

​@@dmer-zy3rbWrong opinion. Check your eyes and memory.

[@Hanley9000]

It is hard to understand these kind of videos without show game footages on screen.

[@nickman8423]

The darkness used directional lighting and showed a good mix of newer and older technics. Also I think the main problem stemmed by the use of specular maps at the time, to better show the depth of normal mapping they usually upped the specularity in the material itself, sometimes it was implemented in the normal map itself through the specular map placed in the alpha channel, it was less about lighting and more about shading.

[@carlwheezer1544]

i would say the same for a lot of raytracing games now, thay always look like they have the roughness set to 0 so it appears wet

[@doltBmB]

when color film was first invented everything was oversaturated, whenever there is a new toy it it always overused at first

[@SimonBuchanNz]

That's more a console RT issue, as rough materials are much more expensive. You are getting your nicly worn wooden floors on PC nowadays.

[@ethanwasme4307]

​@@SimonBuchanNzrough materials are the cheapest bro... you can invalidate all sorts of reflection calculations and gain performance

[@SimonBuchanNz]

@@ethanwasme4307 a perfectly rough surface can be even cheaper then a perfectly reflective surface, yes, but it's also completely unrealistic in most environments (paper and the surface of the moon are close, not much else). It also requires analytic lighting to be actually cheap, any RTGI is going to completely overwhelm the direct lighting cost. Perfect reflections are both fairly realistic in many environments, "good looking" in the (literally) shiny new tech sense, and hilariously cheaper than *naive* rough surfaces, which need hundreds (or more!) of samples per pixel to even start converging in many environments. Denoisers and surface caching are doing a lot of heavy lifting now, of course, so it is actually realistic to do, but it's still worse for memory locality reasons to throw a bunch of reflections all over the scene rather than in mostly the same direction. There's a reason there's a roughness cutoff setting, in other words.

[@martymcintosh5026]

somewhat off tangent, considering its not an Unreal 3 game, but i was reminded of Bloodborne, everything had a plastic laminated look to it when you get up close to things

[@masterquake7]

When I was younger and didn't understand nearly as much about real-time CG, I figured that the wet look was attributed to developers having access to specular highlights and just couldn't help themselves using it.

[@marcos1669]

I always thought it was to mask bad textures, same thing with the "yellow" tone of the lighting

[@thepsychedelicmicroscope4688]

This engine fit Bioshock so well though. The remaster of Bioshock took away from the look and atmosphere.

[@Lead_Foot]

Bioshock used unreal 2.5

[@vitordelima]

@@Lead_FootDeus Ex Invisible War used something similar (modified UE2) and had the comparable visuals, similar to Doom 3.

[@thepsychedelicmicroscope4688]

@@Lead_Foot it was still close to unreal 3

[@SianaGearz]

@@thepsychedelicmicroscope4688 the complete rendering and shading in Bioshock is independently developed and not the same as in UE3. Unreal engine 2 carries the gameplay and serves as the overall framework. Though different as it is, it's also of the era...

[@chengong388]

I always thought it was because they didn’t use specular maps, so you had to have the same specularity for the entire material.

[@Aeduo]

I just figured it was the style at the time. Like there was some parameter that developers thought would make everything look impressive that they just cranked up to max.

[@MrLeoG79]

It's precisely because of the missing specular maps, and low res normal maps with rim lighting shader ... also hardware limitations of the era with how many texture samples per clock are possible - often specular maps were not used for optimization (xbox360+ps3), and that gave everything uniform wet look - especially when UV mapping many textures in atlas under one shader (because optimizations)

[@SimonBuchanNz]

That was definitely an issue with Doom 3's engine: there was only a flag to say if a model was shiny or not IIRC.

[@florianschmoldt8659]

Specular maps were used only to define if a material is shiny or not. Not in the physical based material sense of energy conservation that scales the and at the same time, weakens the specular the more roughness you add. The size of the specularity was its own paramater. This way you could have very physically implausible large and strong highlight.

[@savagedregime8176]

I think the low res nature of the normals really compounded the "wet" look at the time since it didn't allow for enough granularity in the reflections, and the filtering from the low res stretching accentuated this look. When the industry moved on to multiple texture materials that gen the console hardware didn't really have enough memory to do it all justice and most developers did a kind of "jack of all trades, master of none" with how they allocated fidelity for materials. Texture fidelity across the board really felt like it stagnated or in some cases even regressed that gen and it was extra apparent if you played PC versions of multiplatform games. There was a really interesting interview I read at the time with one of the artists for Mirror's Edge which stood out with its clean and sharp texture work. He complained a lot about how other studios handled texture materials just indiscriminately using low res diffuse and normals across the board regardless of how much sense it made, and in particular stuff like grass he thought looked awful with that method and would be better if normals were flat out unused. Mirror's Edge instead relied on very simplistic low res diffuse textures and emphasized all the details in high res normals. Another funny quirk about that era is how if lighting conditions were not optimal, which they often weren't, then objects and character models would end up looking way flatter than earlier more primitive 3D games where there was at least lighting/shading baked into the textures.

[@vandammage1747]

UE3 was an amazing engine for it's time. Can't say the same about the 800p ue5 games

[@bern9642]

The piss filter era?

[@MLWJ1993]

I'd take UE3 over UE5 at the moment. That's just because I DON'T have a RTX 4090 for 1080P gaming...

[@crestofhonor2349]

UE5 is in it's early days. You forget how badly many UE3 games ran on the 7th gen consoles. You think performance is bad today, the 7th generation makes everything today look like butter. I'd easily take UE5 over UE3

[@vandammage1747]

@@crestofhonor2349 not true, UE3 games looked better than the ue3 tech demoes. They also wasn't low resolution for their time. Ue5 games look nothing like the tech demoes and the resolution is 2 generations behind.

[@The666Ozz]

The game I most remember the wet looking is Dragon Age Inquisition, and it is a Frosbite 3 game, not UE

[@awesomereviews1561]

Me too

[@Noah-Lach]

Mirror's Edge did great job avoiding the Unreal 3 ugliness.

[@360Fov]

The wet look was a trophy of top-end gaming during that era. It reminds me of getting excited about new gpus, and them actually being affordable....and increasingly cinematic fps games.

[@ninjafrozr8809]

Arkham Knight is UE 3 ???! That is insane, it looks better than most UE 4 games.

[@gordonheywood2125]

Did my dissertation on the advantages and disadvantages of using middleware engines and it was born from me being able to spot a UE3 game from 10 paces, artistically they all looked the same in the early days

[@tdome3000]

I just finished Bulletstorm, which has UE3, and it looks fantastic for how fast it runs on the Deck (FHD @ 60 fps all the way). I wouldn't mind more, current games to use UE3.

[@crestofhonor2349]

Pretty much all 7th gen games run like butter on all PC handhelds

[@Variarte_]

1st most notable thing, we didn't have physically based rendering, so no separation on what was metallic and non-metallic glossy. So both of those attributes were lumped into specular. Specular still exists, it's just that most object in the world fall in a very, very narrow band of specularity. So a specular map, at a glance looks very one colour, only if you absolutely crank the contrast do you see that specular maps can have detail (if we use them at all). We also didn't properly understand how to use specularity. Then hardware. Early consoles simply didn't have anywhere near enough RAM to have another texture map for every texture and specular is an easy sacrifice for diffuse and normal maps.

[@fastenedcarrot9570]

Some examples shown on screen would really help visualise this for people who aren't familiar with the games mentioned.

[@BmikroB]

I remember seeing first UE3 demonstrations watching some game magazines' DVDs and stuff because I just haven't had the access to the Internet back then, and the thing just blew my mind. Especially those UT2007 screenshots, my god those looked amazing to me. And that Sony 2005 demo, man this one still is my favorite Unreal Engine demo. And that early Gears footage before they dumbed down the lighting & shadows, ah... Then the downgrade happened, and with that all those sweet-sweet beautiful colorful dynamic shadows, muzzle flash shadows (which they still kept in the game intro, say whaaaat) and stuff - all gone in the shipped game. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Gears on both X360 & PC (GFWL port), but the shadows downgrade hit me the most. In Gears1 & UT3 they had that 'Composite Dynamic Shadow' jumping around like crazy, which basically was a sorta dynamic shadow that was calculated using the information from multiple light sources, and then interpolating between them on the fly to create an illusion that characters (as well as other dynamic entities, or Pawns) do react to level lighting and its changes. But for me this didn't do the trick, and on the contrary it made things worse. I also remember (AFAIR) during early UE3 days they used that alongside with bLightEnvironmentComponent or smth, so the composite shadow would be 'glued' to the ground right below the character, like if there was always some light source shining above it, and nowhere else. However, don't quote me on that I barely remember UE3 documentation nowadays, there's too much time had passed since I properly read it, haha. In later games like Mass Effect 3 I believe they got rid of this, leaving just composite shadows, now 'unbound', and the thing looked much better. Yes, Pawns still could cast only one dynamic shadow, and that shadow still would jump all over the place switching & interpolating between different light sources (which in some places looked ridiculous if ask me, especially when the char was running around a bunch of lightbulbs cramped together in a tight space), but the composite shadows actually did stretch in other directions now, and it looked far more acceptable than ever.

[@Final_Fantasy_7]

Man Gears of War 1 X360 looked amazing at the time and still does today.....

[@simongravel7407]

It looked wrong until the UDK update (v3.5?). Gears of War 3 looks great for instance.

[@sonicsean34]

Assuming I get what the question was here are my thoughts: I had just finished Uni at the time and had played about in Maya as part of my course so my thoughts at the time were that developers just got the new toy of specular maps and went overboard with almost every surface. It’s a bit similar to how many are using ray tracing now making surfaces far more reflective than they are in real life to show it off. I don't see my face in my glossy coffee table in real life but games will make you see the whole environment on that surface I know DF have explained rough reflections are more computation-intense but there has to be a way to avoid making all metal have vague mirror-like reflectivity in so many games

[@fireaza]

Ray-tracing is more than just "shininess", it also handles shadows and light. You can have ray-tracing in a game and not have everything with a mirror finish. This is a developer choice, not an intrinsic side-effect of the technology. The more realistic lighting effects alone should be reason enough for it to be standard feature in all games, not simply because it's a "new toy".

[@sonicsean34]

@@fireaza yeah, I agree, what I meant was that currently, they keep focusing on mirror reflections for everything cos they want to show off new tech even when the real world isn’t that reflective. Ray tracing is gonna be the big game changer, things will look more natural, developers won’t have to spend months faking lighting any more cos it will be properly simulated etc The digital foundry video on Alan Wake 2’s path tracing was sublime and I get excited imagining five years from now when even that feels like a basic implementation.

[@SimonBuchanNz]

​@@sonicsean34I hope we get pro console revisions just so I don't need to keep hearing people complaining about how "RT is a fad and doesn't even look good" when they've only seen the lower than minimum PC settings most console RT uses!

[@sonicsean34]

@@SimonBuchanNz I am not sure how far they can go with pro consoles but the next generation consoles will definitely be great if everything is using path tracing like Alan Wake 2 PC. Also, a “problem” with Ray Tracing is that while half of it is obviously stuff like reflections and fine detail lighting, the other half of it is just a better way of doing lighting we were already doing, but more accurate, so a lot of things will look similar to how they used to but with a lot less work to make it look right. Like the end user will think “That looks basically the same what’s the big deal” when the devs just placed one physical light in the scene and called it a day and worked on the next task instead of spending months trying to fake the same lighting by meticulously placing hidden light probs in one area. It’s similar to how some ppl react to HDR, a good HDR image will still sit in a yeh SDR range a lot cos what that tech does is just expand the dynamic range higher so when a scene needs extra brightness or darkness there. But ppl just heard about increased brightness and expected to burn your eyes out levels of neon-searing brightness all over (not accounting for all the ppl who bought £30 TVs in a supermarket that can’t do good pictures or hdr thinking it’s a trick cos it looks dull on their tv )

[@mvnvxt]

man that worm level in gears 2 was definitely something

[@Shaun-w4c]

The worm was great 🪱

[@LRon-ef7ni]

I also felt like character models were designed to be overly buffed too. From Gears to Transformers

[@DoomsdayMayBeOkay]

I remember catching a lot of flak online for criticizing U3 graphics at the time, although the games themselves were pretty good in a lot of cases, visually they left a lot to be desired comparatively with other engines at the time.

[@David-ln8qh]

I still think it's the ugliest generation of games, which is not to say it didn't have it's own beauty.

[@cube2fox]

I remember a few years prior to UE3, Doom 3 also looking far too glossy for some reason.

[@johnosterman494]

I always noticed those shadows jumping around like crazy. I just thought the engine could only handle one light source at a time so it reset every time you went by a new light. Interesting to hear how they made the lighting work!

[@NRobbi42]

I ask if my video game is wet or creepy...

[@jmssun]

It was simply not knowing you could do per texel specularity, and instead just use per material specularity settings. Combine with texture and normal asset production were often wrong

[@JAGtheTrekkieGEMINI1701]

Never thought the first Gears looked "Wet" ... It was more of a *Metallic* Look

[@evdomos]

It's interesting that they call it wet when I always discerned that phenomenon as dry. It looked like it was missing ever so much to bring it back to life.

[@kidneystone1345]

enemies with elemental effects in borderlands 2: elemental wet

[@BunnyslippersEUC]

Gears of War was downgraded compared to the Unreal Engine 3 techdemo (2004) for the pc. The techdemo didn't had that shiny/wet look for everything. The creatures in the demo looked fantastic, the difference between the scales/flesh and the metal looked very convincing. Even today the creatures in the techdemo look awesome.

[@piroman665]

Specular and diffuse texturing workflow, lack of PBR lighting and materials, single point sampling from volumetric light cache for movable objects, composite shadows, overuse of bloom and heavy color grading, no baked GI before GW3 and lightmass are major factors IMO

[@CanOfFanta7]

Alex knows so much about lighting. He got muted for cutting over John 😂😂

[@DeepWeeb]

Gears of War? More like "Grease of War" amirite

[@sulphurous2656]

It's about time some people talk about one of the biggest questions I had playing games in my childhood.

[@andrei007ps]

What is insane imo is that games like Arkham Knight or Mortal Kombat 11 still used Unreal Engine 3. They honestly look UE4 level easy.

[@PandaJerk007]

I wish they showed gameplay clips during this conversation, because I have zero clue what they're talking about. I played a lot of early ue3 games, though it has been many years.

[@rokkudayo]

I kinda dig the look, it definitely feels GoW.

[@1InVader1]

UE3 games looked like the definition of Xbox360 era filtering stack, but you know what, it was THE most stable and well performing engine I've ever used. If only UE4 and 5 were that good and reliable.

[@MrCarpediem6]

Especially Arkham asylum.. and the wet look of all the bad guys

[@Nick-4K]

I always loved the look.

[@alanlee67]

Pioneered by John Carmack and Doom3. Lots of janky normal and specular maps. Worked in Doom3 sort of because of low poly cartoony models and the abundance of metalic environments.

[@Howitchewstofeel5gum]

The brown, vaseline era of gaming

[@ansettaustralia]

Can you guys include more videos examples of the stuff you are talking about for these clips?

[@senseihEnRY16]

Yeah say what you want about Gears 1 but at the time, it was mind blowing. My only problem with it is the remastered version is broken on Xbox Series X, it's constantly crashing and unplayable, Microsoft and Coalition really need to fix that masterpiece.

[@MoonOvIce]

I could identify UE games all the way back to the original. They had this "look", textures, lighting, character models, etc. It was always known as an engine that look incredible and uses the latest tech but was super well optimized on anything, it ran on things it had no business of running in...until UE4 which had a lot of shader stutter, etc.

[@homersimpson8955]

It's not just about lighting, pre backed things looks great, but they are super static, if you want to move your objects around the scene and have some nice debris and destructions you need to go with dynamic lighting anyway. And yep, quality of dynamic lighting was pretty much limited by a hardware back ten and still is now. I like Gears of War 2 much more than 3, due to level destructions, yes Gears 3 looks better, but 95% of the level is made from a solid concrete, due to lack of dynamic lighting and more use of pre backed thing.

[@ethanwasme4307]

you could and can use a hybrid of the two

[@drummer7557]

I think DARK SECTOR (2007) was a very good looking game, they definitely used their own style in that game. IMO

[@soyfemboy]

bloom+specular lighting

[@AngryApple]

But tbh, the Arkham Series except Knight really used this specific look to its advantage, its had a really nice semi realistic comic look and to this day I love the aesthetic of these games. Also saying Arkham Knight uses UE3 is like saying Star Citizen still uses CryEngine, yeah sure the base is that Engine but so many systems were replaced that its really more like Unreal 3.8 :D

[@raresmacovei8382]

" the Arkham Series except Knight really used this specific look to its advantage" No no no. City, Origins and Knight all use LightMass. This was a LATE gen additional to UE3, brought over since Gears of War 3. This was not the common UE3 look. Only Asylum more so looks closer to the typical UE3 look, but still vastly above most other games of the era.

[@GAG091186]

In my opinion I think the Batman Arkham series looked fantastic despite using Unreal Engine 3. Maybe Unreal Engine 3 had matured good enough before Batman Arkham Asylum was released (2009)? Unreal Tournament 3 that was released in 2007 had a very wet Unreal Engine 3 look in my opinion; frankly I enjoyed way more the graphics in UT2004 than UT3.

[@xikaryo6735]

I never liked Unreal Engine back in the day for two reasons: high input lag, and of course the environment and character models looking like they were rubbed down with Vaseline. Hideous engine, honestly. Input delay is still a big problem with Unreal Engine, I actually haven’t even been impressed with any new Unreal Engine game so far. The last one that genuinely looked great to me was Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

[@ethanwasme4307]

i still use the unreal 3 editor from time to time to make sure i don't forget how to use it... maybe some day people will appreciate the aesthetic 😊

[@KrustyBunion]

I'm glad you guys mentioned Arkham Knight. It still looks so good

[@thepunisherxxx6804]

GOW1 never looked wet. It looked dark and stenciled due to heavy use of exaggerated normal maps and POM. Perfect Dark Zero on the 360 was a good example of a "wet" looking game. Everything had normals/POM/reflections. Gears 1 was very impressive for the time. UE3 was one of the first engines to be model focused instead of simple 3d brushes of the past. It could render a lot of geometry and had a great material system with that. Lighting was static but it could still look good. It had good god rays and ambient occlusion too. It was very stylized along with the post processing with color grading. A game doesn't have to accurately simulate light to look impressive.

[@twocityfoodies8476]

Whenever I see someone with a puffy coat on in the rain, all I can think of is Unreal Engine 3 😂😂

[@vesselinkrastev]

Well, I may be in the minority, but to me shaders looked like the new cool thing thing back in the day. I still have a bit of a soft spot for that era of gaming. Inaccurate doesn't necessarily mean unpleasant to the eyes 🤷

[@Monody512]

What I want to know is why so many UE3/UDK games around a certain time used the same horrible desaturation filter as UT3. (Borderlands 1 and Transformers: War for Cybertron are examples.) Did they just never bother changing the default UT3 filtering, or did they actually think it looked good? XD

[@shibaos]

SC chaos theory is a perfect example where everything is so glossy

[@ChaosAngelZero]

Guilty Gear Xrd ran on UE3.

[@NecroMoz]

I always spotted UE3 games by the gigantic meat block character models

[@InvokeSoul]

I loved and still love that look.

[@friggindoc]

Its the Blinn-Phong specular. You can see it in Final Fantasy spirits within as well and early pre rendered CG. Everything looks plastic. Mix that with the unreal engine 3 "detail maps" and everything looks wet

[@kayeplaguedoc9054]

I never looked at it as wet, I guess I can kinda see it now that someone mentions it though. I always identified UE3 more by its lighting. No other engine really has lighting like it.

[@Ad-im1ne]

For me the iconic look of unreal engine 3 was texture pop-in😮‍💨

[@hitbm4755]

Well at that time it was the combination of almost opposing techniques that made games look good, I mean when we were playing it, it looked next gen. Furthermore, there are even some scenes in Gears of War 1 that looks better than the Ultimate Edition; for example, the night time level with all the bat creatures and then the rainy/stormy factory level. It doesn't really matter if graphics are being "cheated" in these scenarios as long as it makes the games convincing. I mean, in those years the developers had to find feasible solutions that fitted in the graphics rendering pipelines and even today I still believe rasterization makes more sense in a graphics pipeline, because look how expensive Ray Tracing has made technology and not that it makes a dramatic difference as Nvidia is still pushing methods to A.I. Upscale to 4K when the XBOX One X was already at 4K with Rasterization. In my opinion, I find traditional upscaling more authentic to the original image than A.I. upscaling (which tries to fill in the missing gaps). Rather do dynamic resolution with contrast adaptive sharpening and rasterization, I have found to prefer this more than FSR in Far Cry 6 for example.

[@SmurffNationn]

Would’ve been nice to have seen video of the UE3 games while they were talking

[@urseldowntownempire1930]

Didn't Mirrors Edge use Frostbite Engine?

[@Moosemanity]

Awesome video 😎 love these guys.

[@rogerwilco2]

Discussions like this are really hard to follow without pictures.

[@internethistorytrash7464]

Gears of War looks better than most games today, insane.

[@thewhyzer]

Ok, so they hacked together some lighting thing, but why did they make it look wet?

[@wile123456]

UE3 looks wet, meanwhile (bad) UE4 games looks like plastic. Suicide squad lighting is so flat and boring looking compared to the UE3 Arkham Knight.

[@gtx1650max-q]

Many UE4 games has this clayey look