The counter question to this kind of questions should imo be: Do YOU have the power to create large AAA games?
The engine is just a scaffold. It is like asking “Does this guitar enable me to play like Jimmy Hendrix?” - “Well, can YOU play like Jimmy Hendrix?” An engine is just a guitar, not the one playing. No guitar, no matter how much “features” will enable you to play like Jimmy Hendrix, unless you learn to play like Jimmy Hendrix, on any guitar.
People confuse engines with art. It is not the engine that makes the art. It is the artist(s). And that also applies, in large portions, to photorealism.
An engine is nothing but a three-dimensional blank canvas that enables you to render. Sure, there are basic modern features to be expected to use PBR and make things look a certain way. But, there are timeless graphical masterpieces created long before any PBR or even any Normalmaps on the PS2, of which some eat alive some of the soulless modern “500 people work for 5-6 years on a graphical demanding title” games by a large margin when it comes to artistic value and the touching of the soul.
The proof of that is that PS1-PS2 or retro style games in general are still huuugely appealing to audiences and often hugely successful still in a year in which we surpassed the date at which the movie Blade Runner takes place. Non of that is “outdated”. Quite the contrary, people love it like never before due to being overflooded with “photorealistic” slop. And there is a reason for that:
Photorealistic graphics do not leave any room for interpretation. People love art though which invites them to interpret. If every single cobblestone, every tiny facial hair, and every detail is laid out for you, it is becoming dead and sterile. There is nothing to do anymore for the audience, nothing to feel, other than that plump sensation of “wow, this looks like a real photo/video”, which wears off real fast, and which is why it requires an everlasting “next push” to “wow! this time it looks even “realer” than before! I am so amazed!”.
The entire “Arms Race” for photorealism is such a toxic poison to game art in my view that it has started to get a somewhat fascistoid timbre to it in a sense that it tries to bulldoze down and devalue anything that is not remotely photorealistic in a physically based sense. How photorealistic something is has become a form or metric in the same way that measuring “intelligence” was and now is used again to separate something “worthy” of existing from something “unworthy”. I think we should start asking ourselves the “final” question that arises from all this:
What, IF, we finally had graphics indistinguishable from reality? What then? What would be the ultimate benefit of that?
Is it only then, that we can finally start to “really” enjoy games… ?
When learning to paint, there is often the advice you come across that if you paint a picture 100% congruent with a photo ref, without any interpretation, stylization and applied artistic lens, then why in the world would an audience need your painting? When they have the photograph already?
Similarly with games, why would we need to run around a town that finally looks indistinguishable from reality? We already live in reality. Games are escapism, so lets escape.
I am totally on board with an engine offering modern features. I love using Volumetric Fog and modern Lighting features like real time area lights and such in an artistic way. This is also because it brings the creation and audience experience closer to real world equipment equivalents of movies and such. But I also just love the fact I can choose to not use any physical light units and can just freely and painterly work on my game’s graphics with Godot. While I was hesitant at first, it feels incredibly liberating and nice to be able to just focus on the art instead of physical numbers. I love Godot for bravely making such design choices and offering them to developers and artists.
I do love realistic art styles. But “realism”, meaning a believable art style, is not equivalent with photorealism. A realistic art style is what a lot of games had for decades already, but never have we so dogmatically give in into the rush for everything needing to look like a photo in real time. Why?
Godot has you covered for everything. Even if Godot would be “proven” to mimic (the imo horrible looking) metahumans, the endless overuse of unalteredly thrown in 8k megascans, etc… the reason why YOU can not create photorealistic games with Godot is not Godot, it is because the entire endeavor is something that needs gazillions of people over gazillions of years to create games with gazillions of nonsensically and artificially stretched out square kilometers to “impress” the masses about “how far” we, as devs and gamers “have come”.
Where to, we came, we seemingly do not know. Meanwhile innovation, originality and simply appreciation for the arts outside of the craft of “making things real looking” in games is devalued further and further by a certain part of the audience, which suspiciously are also often the same people who say “we do not want women or black people in our games”, … see a pattern here I mentioned before in terms of fascistic timbre?
Imo, Godot, especially Godot 4.0, is a beast. I am a Unity veteran, and someone who used Unreal during UDK times, and I have briefly ported my game to Unreal 5 after extensively learning it, which was before I decided to take the leap and learn and port my game to Godot. I am not looking back. Ever. Godot for me is like a dream come true engine in almost about every aspect. Its streamlined’ness, paradigms and focus on being a raw game dev tool deserves an oscar for me (Not that I think highly of prices, just to make the point).
Godot does imo not have a severe feature issue. 4.x is just swell and offers anything any humble solo dev or small team could ever hope for (for free, including plugins). Anything else is just aggressively ingrained marketing propaganda by the other engine vendors, who created, over the decades, an army of loyalist fans (I was victim of this as well and shilled for Unreal for quite some time).
I would argue, due to its FOSS nature, the immense talent, passion and hard work of the community, Godot’s structure, focus and paradigms are unmatched, and a most needed breeze of fresh air that finally found the focus again that other large engine vendors lost a long time ago. Especially for smaller teams or solo devs. I find the engine to smartly and deliberately be the best of both, Unity and Unreal, while leaving out all the worst.
And despite all that looking at a game engine’s graphics microscopically and saying “oh, this is still not 100% realistic” defeats the purpose of game graphics in its entirety for me. This is rather something to ask for offline rendering, product placement or architecture, I feel.
I would rather have the Godot devs and community be appreciated more for their hard work and their passion and for what they achieved with this insane engine, and I would find it really sad to see any pressure starting to steer development resources into this silly Photorealism Arms Race than being continued to be poured into the focus of it being a game engine first. It would be a tragedy if people somehow manage to turn Godot into the horrible capitalistic machinery that Unity and Unreal has become, exactly due to this kind of push they gave into, stakeholders, etc.
I rather would love to see Godot staying “real”, than becoming “photoreal”.