The effects punch below their weight in those games, though. I like to call it "Unity Syndrome", but it applies to any widely-adopted engine.
Well-made video games focus on the experience of playing them. Visuals, audio, setting, gameplay, user interfaces, they're all made with the same goal.
In a fast action game, you'll want menus to get out of the way quickly, dialogue that can be delivered while the player is moving, particle effects designed more like fireworks than sparklers, etc.
In a slow-paced story game, you'll have more leeway to let players stop and smell the roses. You'll want to pay attention to different details, make cues last longer, etc.
Open-world games need more attention to dynamic level of detail and story progressions. The list goes on.
When people wrote their own engines, these assumptions were baked in from the start and the engine was developed and tweaked according to the game being made. When you shoehorn your idea into a general-purpose off-the-shelf solution, you end up making more compromises on things like performance and verisimilitude.
You can see it in the default shaders/effects that many modern budget games use, but my favorite example of this is actually The Witcher. The first game in that series used Bioware's Aurora engine, which was designed to simulate d20 games like Dungeons & Dragons.
Well-made video games focus on the experience of playing them. Visuals, audio, setting, gameplay, user interfaces, they're all made with the same goal.
In a fast action game, you'll want menus to get out of the way quickly, dialogue that can be delivered while the player is moving, particle effects designed more like fireworks than sparklers, etc.
In a slow-paced story game, you'll have more leeway to let players stop and smell the roses. You'll want to pay attention to different details, make cues last longer, etc.
Open-world games need more attention to dynamic level of detail and story progressions. The list goes on.
When people wrote their own engines, these assumptions were baked in from the start and the engine was developed and tweaked according to the game being made. When you shoehorn your idea into a general-purpose off-the-shelf solution, you end up making more compromises on things like performance and verisimilitude.
You can see it in the default shaders/effects that many modern budget games use, but my favorite example of this is actually The Witcher. The first game in that series used Bioware's Aurora engine, which was designed to simulate d20 games like Dungeons & Dragons.