@rob_zhe I'm so glad someone else made this point, I've expressed it before that I was hugely let down with the Third Remaster because the new lighting and skin textures look incredibly bad and uncanny, especially on The Boss, who looks super unnatural and not nearly as appealing.
It's very hard for to describe as a consumer, but I had the same experience with Saints Row 4, although it technically had the same graphics as 3, the changes they made to lighting and the smoother anti aliasing made the boss look a lot better. I was able to make a character I liked a lot easier in that game than other other Saints Row title. I wish I could verbalize or figure out what exactly about the lighting made characters look better in that game.
I have the same issue with the majority of recent triple A titles where it feels like the environments often look great, but character models look utterly terrible. Like the attempts to make characters look more "realistic" has made them look like they are made out of oily sandpaper or plastic, and the washed out lighting makes them look super unappealing. Netherealm, Ubisoft, EA, Sony, so many companies have this issue for me.
The trend towards attempts at hyper-realism are one of the worst things that have happened to games artistically in recent generations in my opinion, which is why I'm happy that the new Saints Row is capturing the slightly stylized (but still authentic) artstyle. I strongly disagree with anyone who makes trite comments about it "looking like Fortnite" (Barring the Neon Helmet and Marvel esque nothing matters I must make a quip attitude, which I agree is terrible).
I would honestly prefer games look closer to Fortnite than the awful artstyles they have for characters most of the time, but there is a huge difference between slight stylization, which has been a staple of hundreds of video games, especially in older generations, like Metal Gear, Saints Row 1/2, Dragon Age Origins, Deus Ex, basically a tonne of good games you can think of, artistically beautiful games like Okami and Wind Waker, gross looking hyper-realism, and Fortnite, which honestly has a super bland aesthetic that reminds me of CalArts, where everything must be uniform and lacking in contrast or style.
I also noticed people on social media bringing up that they are already censoring the fictional brands in the game world already, which sets a super bad precedent in my eyes. I'm pretty ambivalent about the edgy jokes, but removing a franchises identity and sterilizing it of anything that makes the world unique in a game for adults is asking for backlash.
