According to me I-Novae Studios really need to work on their atmospheric rendering,outer space planet rendering.Their terrain engine is already pretty good but it can be improved. Games like star citizen also started to implement planetary landing and the graphics of star citizen are great like really great. Nowadays most people buy games because of its graphics not of its content. In order to compete with other games I-Novae Studios really need to consider, atmospheric scattering, volumetric clouds, seasonal changes etc before shipping their game in order to stand out of other games
Are you asking what the comparison is like? or are you posting examples?
I donāt see any benefit in comparisons when the games are all there to be seen. It is a highly subjective matter unless there is a particular technology implementation that is being compared.
Iām not sure any graphic comparison would do any good for now, for various reasons, among others on the top of my head:
It is still in dev access. Pre-alpha, if you want, so weāre not even in alpha and thereās a lot the devs would like to polish by the end product, Iām sure.
Itās not a AAA game. True, the I:B graphics are pretty amazing so far, probably outclassing quite a few āindieā games or even AAA gamesā¦ but theyāre still a pretty small team and any AAA studio can make even better graphics on a defined context. That would be like comparing the best flyer between a mole and a whale. Which gets me into the third pointā¦
Whatās the gameās style and purpose? You can get a huge content with sometimes minimalist graphism. See āDwarf Forteressā for instance. Sometimes the game is kind of OK for graphics but concentrates on gameplay, like MInecraft (with mods ).
Overall, itās like @selbie wrote before: itās quite subjective and hard to pronounce a judgement until you define very precisely the context and the similarities / differences between the games.
And yet here we are, on a game with no gameplay for the momentā¦
Thereās nothing wrong with wanting a certain level of good graphics. Itās important though to look through gameplay as much as graphics, yes. Then again, itās all about what the gameās goal is. No wonder āBattlefrontā or the latest āCoDā sold so wellā¦
The I-Novae engine appears to have the most realistic atmospheric lighting of any of them.
It might not be the most shiny and cinematic, but it is the most realistic which IMO is ultimately the most beautiful.
Yes volumetric clouds would be nice and the developers are well aware of that, the terrain generation has room for improvement and we are yet to see oceans officially in-game. However, spending time developing all these things would mean less time working on stuff like gameplay, especially when there are so few engine programmers on the team.