It looks good but,don't get me wrong, am i wrong to expect way higher graphical fidelity in 2024?
Where are all those UE5 type of graphics that make you jaw drop?
Because to get Hellblade 2 graphics at bigger scale than corridors, the engine will kill performances and or cost too much for artists to make. The costs of development are skyrocketing especially in the western world. Almost nobody has the budget or talent that Sony had to pull these graphics during PS4 era. Not even sure Sony HAS the budget for the kind of PS4 output they had to be on PS5, we're certainly not seeing it so far into the gen.
Why is 8th gen graphics so good looking on 2 TF hardware? Let's pick a few games, Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding, Quantum break, Spider-man, TLoU part 2, MGS 5
Then you have these 9th gen games that have absurd system requirements and don't look a gen ahead on 10 TF hardware, Suicide Squad, Starfield, Forspoken, Gothan Knights, Alan Wake II, Remnants 2, Robocop, Jedi Survivor.
Devs got lazy with optimization exactly because of over reliance of UE. 9th gen basically meant that studios are cutting costs on legitimate optimization processes for faster releases. UE heavily relies on TAA to hide how grainy it looks without it, which is honestly has so much downgrades compared to circa 2015 SMAA in image quality. Yes DLSS is better than "native" which is anyway, TAA garbage, but its not a high bar to surpass. The end result is that these temporal solutions kneecap most graphic effects and smear the image quality. Now devs rely on cool new tech like nanite but its mainly a tool for exorbitant geometry which almost only the cheap labour countries can now afford to make at any big scale, like Wukong. Otherwise, enabling nanite for lower geometry more down to earth games will most often than not hurt performances compared to traditional LOD.
Lumen forces devs to not bake any high quality indirect lights that would save performances and then Lumen's volumetric lightmaps have serious leaking problems which are only mitigated with devs cranking up the volumetric space resolution to stupid levels and blow up the VRAM and performances.
So yea, UE allows games made faster than ever (if you have the budget for the increase in graphics), but is the most inefficient way to present graphics in a long long time. Basically kneecapping all of the best hardware for barely a bump in visuals compared to 2015 era graphics. Is Hellblade 2 system requirements showcasing the kind of visual bump that Quantic dreams' Beyond Two souls managed to pull off on a 256 MB VRAM 0.192 TF hardware from 18 years ago? The fuck happened?
Sadly, I think we'll come to a realization in the future that this massive move to UE5 will be bad in the long run. Konami scrapping Fox Engine, Crystal dynamics going UE5, CD projekt red going UE5, Halo going to UE5, etc etc. Very very worrying imo. I don't think we're heading in the right direction.