Well, it may not look realistic, but its not supposed to. Game has a very non-photorealistic slightly cartoonish art style like Dragon Age veilguard. I was talking about materials, lighting, shadows and geometry being a cut above other games out there. Specifically KCD2 and AC Shadows.
And while last gen games might fare better in smaller compressed gifs, I think modern games especially UE5 games look far worse. This particular gif was a bitch to capture because my gif maker kept adding jaggies to all the ropes on the boats so I had to settle for capturing just one boat. Last gen games and cross gen-ish games like KCD2 dont have this issue because they dont push near as much geometry in every scene.
I also had to put it through a gif optimizer utility to reduce the size by 50% which means compressing it by 50% so literally half of the detail is lost. What you can still see is the shadowing on the barrels. Different barrels have different materials. Same goes for the wood on the dock vs the wood used on the board. I wish it was targeting a photorealistic art style like KCD2 so we could do a 1v1 comparison but its clear to me that the game is far ahead of KCD2 in terms of lighting and asset quality.
Gif format give to everything that clean cg look, real games don't look like that on my huge tv, you notice all the artifacts, the round edges, the subpar assets etc.
Horizon fw look like a pixar movie in gif format but we know that asset wise is faaar from perfect, and no game has perfect assets everywhere except maybe hb2 (until you zoom)
It is true that gifs hide microdetails, they also hide small and huge flaws and no game on the market is perfect, not even ue5 games.
About avowed, sorry, i prefer a fully realistic style so i'm really not impressed by the cartoony one and i zoomed on the assets, you still have round edges and imperfections and the wood look like the wood in many other games, i really don't see it, they are not good enough to make me say wow more than something like stalker 2 (and i wasn't wowed with that one neither).
It looks nice from afar because the art design of the locations is nice (like veilguard) but i'm not really impressed by anything else.
The lights look pretty realistic when i'm in the dark but you know i can't recognize good lights to save my life so...