There’s some screenshots linked in a tweet at the start. Based on that tweet, I’d argue the engine used in Far Cry 3/4, as well as the one used for the dead island/dying light games, are some obvious examples of offenders I can think of, but I’d agree with the author that its missuse/overuse is pretty rife.
AO was one of the primary shiny new things in game engine technology this generation, Nvidia also heavily pushed the tech as one of the new rendering features its recent GPUs are good at. Given this, I’m not surprised we saw some pretty questionable artistic direction with this stuff at times. It’s arguably now part of the PS4/Xbox One generation “aesthetic” in much the same way the over use of pixel shading effects can be argued to define the 360/PS3 era.
Thanks for sharing! Maybe I'm missing where you're talking about, but in the OP I only see a link discussing the Halo effect and one discussing artifacts.
I'll definitely keep an eye out for this in games now. It's easy to notice when something isn't photo realistic, but generally very hard for me (as a non-expert here) to pick out precisely why, so I appreciate this type of content.
AO was one of the primary shiny new things in game engine technology this generation, Nvidia also heavily pushed the tech as one of the new rendering features its recent GPUs are good at. Given this, I’m not surprised we saw some pretty questionable artistic direction with this stuff at times. It’s arguably now part of the PS4/Xbox One generation “aesthetic” in much the same way the over use of pixel shading effects can be argued to define the 360/PS3 era.