New Shadow Warrior coming

GoatLord said:

Bump/normal mapping is to blame. Despite the fact that bump mapping has been around for DECADES and normal mapping since the 90s, a lot of artists have an enormous amount of difficulty getting textures to look natural instead of glossy/plastic. Even a lot of special effects in Hollywood movies still suffer from this issue.

ALSO: Shadow Warrior remake is looking like a Painkiller mod circa 2008.

If you don't know the answer, then I suggest you don't speak on the matter.

As for the question. There's really no easy answer but I'll try to explain it without going into too much detail.
Anyway, there's a lot of resons this is the case. But usually it comes down to the specularity of light and shader interaction. Usually, a glossy look comes from the specular level being too bright and untextured. But even with a carefully crafted specular map (which do cost precious video ram) you will still in cases get some glossiness. You can avoid this by using very dark specularity. But in return you don't really get the benefits of having specularmaps which you would otherwise get also having very dark specularmaps tends to make things blend together more and that can be damaging for the depth of a scene.

It's a balance that generally is up to the artist. Some artists are obviously better at this than others too.

Now the reason why this is happening is pretty much because lighting and objects in games and even 3d programs aren't nearly as advanced as lighting and objects in real life. In particular organic objects such as living creatures like humans. Where a human body in reality got bloodvessels and layers of organic material that effect the look of the skin. Game models only got the skin really. Especially in games where you try to constrain the resources for the benefit of having more characters on screen.

GoatLord said:

Watched a little bit of the footage of SW and it looks really uninspired and not at all in the spirit of the original. Boo.

Everything I saw in that video seems pretty consistent with Shadow Warrior to me. The only thing I'm worried about is the level design, which, from the tiny little glimpses we got looks a lot arena areas. Flying Wild Hog doesn't have a wonderful track record on map design.

Nice to see colours though, and expanding on the sword seems pretty cool to me.

Didnt see this posted anywhere, but, the original Shadow Warrior got an enhanced rerelease on Steam, the same way Duke 3D did with Megaton Edition. It's pretty awesome.