Rivals has a varied and interesting map, combining every imaginable topography and climate and season with dynamic weather effects and day and night cycle. Sounds great, doesn't it? It's sure is pretty to look at, but to me...

...due to its Extreme Contrast Art Direction, it's all being whitewashed into a uniform impression of light and shadow, black and white. In it, the uniqueness of the various environments, and much of its detail and vibrancy is lost.

I sincerely hope that developers wake the fuck up from this craze for such, and start focusing on results again - rather than butchering their visuals on the altar of technically superior lighting and shadows.

I like it a lot.

Are you playing on the Xbone? I've heard the scaler it uses makes the contrast really intense. But no I don't like it when shadows are pitch black and light is super bright if that's what you're asking.

This seems to be a Frostbite specific style. The lighting in pretty much all frostbite games seems very harsh. Especially when a scene has direct sunlight.

Plants VS Zombies Garden Warfare is built with Frostbite 3. It's definitely not inherent to the engine, it's plain old art direction.

@seppli: It's mostly scenes with bright sunlight. There are scenes in BF4 that look great but any map where you are outside in direct sunlight it gets really harsh looking. This applies to all of NFS Rivals since the entire thing is outside.

With PVZ they don't have a super bright light source anywhere. It's very overcast looking. If you look at the first gamplay trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYjUrHOY7A4) it has the same harsh look to it.

I've only ever noticed it with Frostbite games. If anyone has any examples of games that use a similar style and don't use Frostbite I'd like to see them.

Could be. It's kinda there in that E3 demo of Garden Warfare. I definitely found the lighting in BF4 on PS4 more harsh than on PS3 - like the higher quality lighting model comes with it inherently. I really dislike that aspect of it.