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It doesn’t actually have that much to do with Unreal Engine itself so much as it is more about how many games have a certain similar “look” that is characterized by realistic lighting, lower color saturation, and detailed texturing and materials on the 3D models. The reason that we associate it with Unreal Engine is because that’s what Unreal Engine looks like with default settings. The majority of games with the “look” are using some or all of the default settings (tone mapping, post-processing, lighting, etc.) for their visuals. You can see this in many games like RoboCop: Rogue City, Immortals of Aveum, Remnant 2, and so on.
Obviously Unreal can be (and is) used to make stylized and visually-distinct games that do not have the “look”. There are plenty of games where the art team took the assignment seriously and made a visually-distinct game. Some examples include:
- Yoshi’s Crafted World
- Hi-Fi Rush
- Shin Megami Tensei V
- Fortnite
- Dragonball Fighter Z
This is actually a pretty normal thing. Historically, games of the era would often share a popular “look”. In the early 2000s era, the “look” was extra bloom everywhere (Oblivion, Fable 2, etc.). The early X360/PS3 era (mid-2000s), everything was brown and washed-out, the “realistic means brown” era. In the mid 2010s, we got the “shiny oily” era with specular lighting tuned to 11, making everything look like it had just been dunked in water (Fallout 4, Batman: Arkham Knight, Dragon Age Inquisition). These popular “looks” usually follow the popularization of some big technical advancement (e.g. PBR becoming popular caused the shiny oily era) and the “Unreal look” is no different – we’re basically seeing a lot of people utilizing stock megascan data and stock lighting/visualization settings because it’s new and it’s available. Eventually things will differentiate as devs get more used to the development tools, and then we’ll see some new advancement become popular and then we’ll start a whole new era of similar looks.
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