I think this comment is slightly disingenuous, I think it's more obvious that the aesthetics of any game (let alone engine) will primarily depend on the quality of the Assets. If you loaded up these quake 3-era meshes and textures into Unreal Engine 4 or something else you'd call 'modern', I guarantee you they'd look the same or similar.

The lighting isn't even that bad sans indirect illumination, which unreal only just got recently and Unity is losing due to Enlighten being shut down.

This reminds me of people comparing open source software with proprietary software on account of aesthetics - it's not the licensing model, or the game engine, it's the presence or absence of artists that makes the difference.

It seems like you're criticising the examples for being less than elaborate and mistaking that for a shortcoming of the engine. It's not some "easy game studio 2020"-type thing that should spit out pretty games with 10 lines of custom code, it's a basic engine that can be built upon.

I question how much of "modern" graphics (IE things you can get a PHD for) is a manifestation of the engine, and how much is a result of the underlying libraries being used, and the fancy shaders being written. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe an engine like this could catch up.

That might be true for the most cutting edge 3D shooters. But nowadays that’s not all that matters. I’m sure this can find a niche.

It's a single person project. I haven't seen a more advanced rust engine. Adding better rendering isn't too bad once you have some engine architecture.

Could this not just be a case of using something on hand / creating them relatively quickly and not a limitation of the engine itself?