I know whenever I come here, I tend to talk about exactly this kind of subject, but I'm really itching for this kind of lighting to make a resurgence—only in a souped-up, "we've come a long way since 2004" form. We see some of it in the indie space these days, especially in the indie horror space. Signalis is one good example of low-fi ambitions that take advantage of modern performance overhead to do complex things with lighting that never could have been done in the era it's otherwise imitating. But I want even more ambitious projects. I want an indie, AA, or AAA studio to go all in on this.
Some of you might be of the perspective that ray tracing/path tracing is effectively the successor to this era, and you'd be right on one hand. Personally, though, I feel like the demands of modern polycounts and texture resolution place hard limits on what path tracing can currently accomplish, even on modern hardware. So while it's great to see the truly dark corners of path-traced GI and how, with the right exposure settings, you can get filmic contrast between extreme brights and deep shadows—something you might have otherwise needed baked shadow maps or no ambient light to achieve—I still see the limitations of the approach everywhere.
I'm stuck with a 2080 Super and current consoles, so while it's true I can't always benefit from the best path-tracing options out there, there's a subtlety in the overlapping of different gradients of light and shadow in complex lighting scenes that current ray-tracing solutions can't yet reproduce with tolerable frame rates. Arguably, those older Doom 3-esque lighting engines were better equipped to handle this.
I know Chaos Theory relies on some baked GI in places for certain levels, given their scope and the tech of the time. And I'm not against baked GI or semi-dynamic pre-baked GI in games that otherwise incorporate complex real-time lighting. The Darkness, Prey (2006), and Condemned make extensive use of baked lighting in certain places, yet they still look fantastic and wonderfully dynamic. And with modern hardware and the ability to throw far more shadowed lights into those scenes than devs could have at the time, it'd be pretty simple to mask the baked occlusion almost completely.
But Doom 3 largely doesn't use any baked lighting/GI—maybe none at all. I was always under the impression it had none. And yeah, you see the limitations of no GI at times in the game. Given the hardware limitations at the time and the scope of larger areas where id couldn't throw around as many dynamic lights to cover the space, you can see it hurting for some GI—or at least more lighting in places. But then you encounter a room full of dozens of dynamic lights interacting, overlapping, and influencing each other, and it just works. It’s wonderful—the sheer number of lights makes it so that the utter lack of ambient light only contributes to the scene. The darkest corners are truly dark, but there's still this complex interplay of various intensities of light sources, so you still effectively get some amount of ambient lighting and falloff just by way of artists placing real lights cleverly.
And you just don’t see this kind of lighting much anymore, even in modern games that use a combination of baked GI and real-time lighting. Often, it’s just monotone shadow casting with little variation or dynamic influencing of light sources because that's more efficient at scale and provides a convincing enough illusion at a distance—or even relatively up close—but it just isn't particularly dynamic.
I want to leverage the power of modern PCs to really go all in on old-school dynamic lighting that will run efficiently on modern cards. And don’t worry—I’m not anti-ray tracing. It will eventually be this good. I just want something else in the meantime.
For all the compliments I can give Doom 3—and I think it holds up remarkably well to my 2025 eyes—it’s clear it was hamstrung by many limitations. Character texture/normal map resolution especially. And again, the number of lights or the ability to cast penumbra. Remove those hard limits, and you could do amazing, striking things with dynamic lighting on modern hardware. And I wish someone would take up the cause.
I suppose the Hitman reboots do to some extent, but the complexity of their crowd simulation means they can't go hard on the subtle interactions you see in Doom 3 or Escape from Butcher Bay. Speaking of Butcher Bay, it was a major disappointment to me personally when MachineGames moved from id Tech 5 to id Tech 6. Its lighting, while much of it dynamic, felt far less dynamic than either Butcher Bay or Dark Athena (which relies heavily on baked GI to support it). Especially when The Evil Within existed, running on modified id Tech 5 and far more dynamic.
