People had the same outrage for KOF 14 too and its markedly improved. Folks need to realize that specular, diffuse, reflection and various other maps as well as lighting and material settings that effect the amount of shadow and highlight on a model are all things you don't have to have ready to put a character into production animation and coding. You literally just add those on whenever once your model and UV unwrap is done.
When KOF 14 first trailered it had nothing but normal maps of hand painted textures and base material settings. As it progressed the early cast looked notably better. So long as the models aren't jaggy from too low a polygon count shaders, maps, and lighting can always be improved. If the model is good, the textures can come whenever. A lot of times if you generate your diffuse, or specular maps off of a negative of your normals you still need to go back and brush in more light and dark tones to adjust the amount of texture, shadows, and light that roll across your model and if you adjust material settings these can need readjusted into new PNG files again.
That shit is secondary. You leave that to the texture artists to polish alongside the lighting mechanics over the engine as you go into development. Once they got a base functionally textured model it doesn't need the rest of the polish yet.
NRS is doing markedly better than KOF 14 and SFV in textures already. It obviously needs some more material/lighting work to adjust deep shadows and tweaking is likely gonna come just like last time as it develops same as with KOF 14 and honestly SFV which also improved as it developed.
Its got a daaaaaamned solid start already. Its obviously missing several maps and setting tweaks at this stage just like SFV and KOF 14 did. Its fine.
_/¯
