I'm in the process of developing a small indie game for the Oculus Quest. It's not easy to get good graphics, but one really obvious thing that is missing from Horizon World's is really simple -- textures.
I suspect the development team ditched most textures entirely as you can reduce virtually all rendering to a very small number of draw calls by having everything share a single texture. This saves the engineering teams (which must be quite large) a lot of time consuming issues with optimization
It could certainly look a lot better. I mean DOOM 3 runs on the Quest 1 and has normal maps, shadows, and nicely baked lighting.
If I were to guess, it comes down to probably one thing -- too many people are probably working on the project, and high level decisions like "adding legs", or using normal maps and non-shitty textures are simply too difficult to coordinate. It's the mythical man-month problem. That's why when you want to start off a game dev project, you need like 8 skilled people, not 160 headless chickens.
Serverless is just letting the cloud provider do you task using their own managed account under the hood. It creates a very strong vendor lock-in. K8s can be migrated to any cloud or even on-prem with some amount of "ease"
I suspect the development team ditched most textures entirely as you can reduce virtually all rendering to a very small number of draw calls by having everything share a single texture. This saves the engineering teams (which must be quite large) a lot of time consuming issues with optimization
It could certainly look a lot better. I mean DOOM 3 runs on the Quest 1 and has normal maps, shadows, and nicely baked lighting.
If I were to guess, it comes down to probably one thing -- too many people are probably working on the project, and high level decisions like "adding legs", or using normal maps and non-shitty textures are simply too difficult to coordinate. It's the mythical man-month problem. That's why when you want to start off a game dev project, you need like 8 skilled people, not 160 headless chickens.