modern engines with their seni-automated way to light everything and to add reflecions via SSR with a simple mouse click made game artists complacent and worse.
there's a reason people think Arkham Knight looks better than most modern games. the amount of tricks Rocksteady had to apply, and the amount of UE3 engine tweaks they did to get the results you see in Arkham Knight far outnumber the work anyone at Ubisoft did in this remake.