: TLDR: 343 are using global illumination so little light info is baked into
: textures - they are relying on direct lighting, most of the demo is in
: shadow and it's too expensive to properly model light bouncing so they
: cheat with light probes light probes are sparse points in the world where
: they sample 360 lighting in the world and project this as a sphere around
: objects, this lights the objects - this lighting does not respect
: character self shadowing and ignores that the objects are in areas of
: shadow so the objects glow and their edges are light unrealistically the
: problems can be fixed by ray tracing which will arrive in a patch

: They freeze framed to show that the AR actually does have good texturing in
: direct light but looks flat and muddy in areas in shadow.

: Plasma effects are almost solid, you can't see through them.

: Characters in shadowed areas cast no shadows.

: DF thinks that 343 should have gone for lower res so there'd be less LOD
: problems. DF thinks that it might have been better to have concentrated on
: the newest platforms strengths and let older platforms look worse.

: That's my memory and understanding of what was said but watch the video to
: see what was actually said :-)

I don't understand how it's acceptable to add ray tracing to the game potentially months after the game comes out to fix the graphical issues that are there at launch. People's first impression shouldn't be that it looks like mud, but it's going to look really pretty in a few months. I'd almost rather them delay the game to have that system available at launch. It's like them releasing MCC with only some of the levels from some of the games remastered, but promising that the rest will be updated at a later date. The game shouldn't ship incomplete.