His point:

Having a fancy-pants game engine isn't worth much if your art direction sucks.

I'm not sure which I'm more sick of, the beige post-apocalyptic war zones or the shaved gorillas that game developers have populated them with. IMO, this industry needs an injection of new creativity more than an injection of new technology

/thread

It's true that art direction is very important but technology is as important imo especially in videogaming. Bad artists make bad games, it has nothing to do with the engine. New engines on the other hand give more and better tools for artists to play with and you can't measure creativity based on the amount of colors on screen. We're at a point where the industry needs new life and a new look. New devices, new engines and new consoles will give this industry the boost it needs.

No if that was hit point he would have said something about developers using the engine. Instead he stated that Epic were going to make the engine ABLE of doing more than 2 colours (obvious hyperbole but we get the point). The Unreal Engine is more than capable of handling vivid beautiful colours. It's simply that some developers prefer not too use them. 

Don't blame the engine for what developers do. Oh and also since when did having colour = better art direction. You could have a beige post-apocalyptic war zone that had utterly beautiful art direction and style. 

Even further you can't simply create an engine that makes more creativity. So not sure why you are bringing creativity into a discussion about tech. Technology advances so you build new engines to keep up. Not only this but better engines can make it easier to have better art direction, do creative things etc. For example doing physics puzzles, portals etc would have been very hard on old tech. The industry has a lot of creativity as it is, creating a new engine isn't going to reduce it. 

Given how often they've tried, if that were possible, I think somebody would have pulled it off by now. It's fugly in Gears of War, it's fugly in Killzone, it's fugly in Fallout, and it's fugly in Borderlands. That last one is cel-shaded, so it should have all kinds of style, but there's only so much style you can give a garbage dump. Even worse, the aesthetic seems to ooze into into other games which aren't set in war zones, but somehow everything has to be rotting and run-down anyway.

You're right though. None of this is the tech's fault. Good technology and good art direction shouldn't be mutually exclusive. The cynic in me just can't help but feel that rather than enabling greater or cheaper creativity, UE4 will enable sharper textures on rotting cardboard boxes, a more realistic sheen on corrugated aluminum siding, and better animated bulbous ape-men. It wouldn't bother me so much if it didn't feel like every, damn, developer was drifting in the same direction.

I would love to be wrong. Maybe UE4 will bring some much-needed freshness to videogame art design. Or maybe I'm the outlier, and what the mass market wants is pro wrestlers in gritty wastelands and I should stop being a whiney bitch and suck it up.

Sweet, Epic Games always has the best engine demos, can't wait to see what they've trumped up this time!

It will do both and it will be 100% up to the developers how they use it. 

there are actually a wide veriaty of art styles used with UE3 not just the bald space marine warzone, there is no reason to hate on the unreal engine or it's tech advances because you don't like the current popular art styles the are used in most games.