Boy is Alex Battaglia good at what he does. As I mentioned in my initial post regarding the "Unreal Engine 5" reveal, the demo makes things sound like magic-- but everything has a cost, and each approach has trade-offs.
And sure enough, if you skip to around the 6:30 mark in Alex's video, he shows where Epic's new lighting model breaks down. Just like how screen space reflections work really well in some game projects-- "Assassin's Creed Odyssey"-- but terribly in others-- "Shenmue III"-- I suspect this "lumen" system's limitations will be extremely noticeable in many game projects, as we see it employed in different kinds of scenes.
That doesn't mean it isn't cool-- but it's not a silver bullet: rather, it's just one more tool in the box for developers to combine with other methods such as hardware ray tracing and pre-baked lighting-- all in the same frame, even.
Similarly and regarding the new geometry engine, he seems to come to the same conclusion as I did: other than the absence of "LOD shifting", the big benefit isn't so much in terms of visual fidelity, as it is the monumental time savings it will have for projects. He also raises concerns about the memory cost of these massive-count models, plus a few other risks I hadn't considered.
In spite of all this, "Unreal Engine 5" looks incredible, and I think it's going to be the dominant engine for this "next generation" of third-party games.
In other gaming news, I had a magical moment in "Assassin's Creed Odyssey" last night. The first bounty hunter would simply not vacate the "Temple of Zeus" site, where I needed to conclude some quests-- so, I decided to initiate a premature confrontation with him. I started by sniping him from the bushes for big damage. As he circled around the temple to investigate, I shimmied up to the roof, and sniped him again for more big damage.
This time though, he spotted me: he scaled the wall, and we kick off some roof-top melee combat. He caught my under-leveled self off guard, and a pair of blows put me in some major trouble. However, I was able to re-position him so that his back was very near the edge of the roof overlooking the front of the temple. I waited for an opening, lunged with my spear, and... he was knocked off balance! He wobbled, desperately trying to re-establish his footing-- but ultimately fell backwards off the roof, dying from the thirty or forty foot fall onto the paved surface below!
What was especially neat is that the NPCs below actually gasped as the body tumbled down near them. The whole situation, and the fact that it occurred totally emergently, on an inch-perfect historically accurate re-creation of a famous building to boot, is an experience which only an open world game can deliver.