The_Architect
Member
Going by a pure graphics perspective:
This one is easily the saddest I think. The picture on the right looks like a level editor screenshot with all effects disabled. It hardly even looks like there's any lighting at all. The skybox is also gone or covered up.
Looks like a very primitive screen space reflection. Basically they take the lightest parts of the screen, and reflect it at super low blurred resolutions on objects with set to reflect it in it's materials properties. That or dynamic cubemap (It's been so long since I've worked with those, I'm not sure how good they've gotten).
As for the second picture, looks like generic baked lighting to me. The issue I have here is look at the trash bags in your first picture. Notice that inbetween them, it's almost black in terms of lighting? Then look at the I beam girders, and it's all lit up in there. It looks flat because of that and unnatural.
edit: Hit submit button early darn it.
I agree. It is definitely not true indirect illumination. At most, it may be using a technique to fake it somehow. There are many ways to do this, but the end result always ends up looking washed out with too much ambient light on the screen instead of having primary or secondary light sources indirectly brighten up or change the color of other objects locally/accurately.