So what do the shots say:
- Moody, artist placed, but inaccurate lighting
vs
- More natural, less moody, physically accurate lighting
So the lighting is more
correct, but it does not uphold fully to the original artists intent, and the fact that they are applied to last-gen assets.
Fortunately, you still have a choice -
Keep playing the original. It does not mean that one version is inherently better
overall than the other. The original has more ambiance, the enhanced version has better lighting which simply does not fully match with the assets used.
Okay, as someone who understands quality and art:
- The games you mentioned do strike up a good balance of quality and art in both assets and lighting.
- That isn't to say that the quality of lighting on display here in Metro Exodus Enhanced is something else. Some static shots from Uncharted look rendered, whereas some (realtime!) shots from Enhanced look photoreal. The latter is more in the uncanny valley than the other.
- Are Uncharted and Metro comparable on this front? I don't believe so. One is made for now-last-gen hardware, the other is a next-gen lighting upgrade to a last-gen title, appearing on now-current-gen platforms.
That is indeed the case. The lighting engine is impressive as all heck, but its iteration speed is too slow, which leads to the annoying byeffect that players can
percieve the lighting change over multiple frames when it is mean't to be
unnoticeable. This may or may not be a tricky thing to tackle for rendering engineers, as you'll need to simulate how eye adaptation works. Some games already do this, but i am not sure if they use a physically based model of it.
Exodus Enhanced comes close enough, but unless stated otherwise, the game's player perspective is not physically modelled. Its a virtual camera, not something that actively simulates how the eye percieves light and shadow.
The dev was thinking to release a version of the game which requires raytracing support, using a new lighting engine on previously not-developed-for hardware.
If it looks too bright, then perhaps it will see a patch if its a geniune error. If its the result of raytracing actively providing the lighting
as it were, then it can be dismissed to last-gen assets that do not fully take into account how their materials should behave.
After all, they overhauled the game on lighting and made sure assets played
nice, not that they were tailor-made for it.