Dynamic lighting creates a massive resource hog and it just isn't needed. Baked shadows could easily improve performance and possibly image quality. eg. L4D uses this method and you can run it at 4k on a potato.

If dynamic lighting weren't needed, then maybe Bethesda wouldn't have used it.

I'm sure they would, if the fallout and TES game franchises weren't based on an engine that doesn't support it.

How would you bake shadows for massive open world with dynamic lighting? And by dynamic I don't mean just weather.

Dynamic lighting is one of the best things to happen to computer graphics in a long time! Don't wish it dead already!

I really love the shadow system in place. very kewl to see them move with the Sun! wouldn't get that with static shadows..

For outdoor scenes, pre-baked lighting and shadows wouldn't work because there is a day-night cycle. They could have used pre-baked shadows for indoor scenes where the light source doesn't move, but then people would complain that the game looks like it's from the 1990's.

They really can't please everyone here. If they don't advance the tech, they get accused of being lazy devs who keep limping along with an outdated engine that looks like crap. When they do introduce new features like dynamic lighting (which I personally think is great), people complain that it's too resource intensive and they can't run it on their 6-year-old laptop.

I don't know about you, but every shadow I see in the real world doesn't become a extremely jagged saw tooth when moving, nor do they move "periodically". Pretty much any game not made by bethesda has better shadow rendering.

This it would also disable stuff like moving or switchable searchlight.

And yes baked shadows is part of the reason why FO4 don't look so good as some other games who uses is.

+1

And then some complain about the textures as if the game isn't already pushing the limit for most systems. I must say I love the dynamic lighting effects in an open world.

this shadow system saved my butt once xD, where a bad guy on the elevated highway above me cast a huge moving shadow on the side of a building like 100 yrds away from me xD....he died shortly after that

Any game with dynamic lights needs dynamic lighting or it'll look like crap. Even when games do use pre-backed lighting and shadows with generally static scenes, the pre-baked lighting and shadows rarely interact elegantly with the dynamic elements: actors, SFX lighting, etc. Trying to use it with a dynamic day/light cycle, weather, many moving light sources, etc. would look so bad as to render the game unpublishable.

Even in situations where pre-baked lighting can be passed off as approximating "realism," it really only has a place if the performance gained is absolutely needed. Dynamic lighting is visually superior in every case.