Been looking at this.There are lots of flaws I see but I see flaws in even the best looking games.
Some parts are better than I thought.
Lightning feels like a big issue.
Grass towards the bottom left looks like a pile. A bad pile. The trees in the back left part of the screen look bizarrely bad. Even for being in the distance.
The wall in the background left doesn't look good either.
IMO improved lighting would fix like 90% of the issues most players have with it. So many elements look like sprites that have just been pasted on top of the screenshot, like the brute's helmet. Could do with some ambient occlusion.
Rewatching it frame by frame, I think it can be summed up in a few ways.
#1 Textures are incredibly high resolution, believe it or not. Craig's arm is clipping through the camera at one point and yet you can't see any texels.
#2 Normal maps are only used for specular highlights. This seems crazy odd. An object will look completely flat and then at specific angles you can clearly see that it has a full normal map. Lighting is seemingly pre baked into textures. In the screenshot above you can see a heart like outline made from veins on the brute's hands. This is in full direct sunlight and realistically the left side of a vein would be darker, but instead that's only true for the right half of the heart. The cliffs in the background look so freaking low res because lighting is based off the mesh instead of off the normal map.
If my #2 point is correct, we could see a HUGE jump in game quality. It's seemingly a stylistic choice to make the game look more like Combat Evolved.
