Hey.
I’m not sure there is anything very special going on in the videos you’ve shown. The look is quite old school…in a bad way (to my eyes at least).
Regardless of taste, what I see there looks like 5 factors.
- Nicely painted diffuse/color/albiedo textures that include baked in lighting.
- No spec/gloss/reflection in shader.
- Subtle fresnel/edge lighting.
- Fairly bright lighting that doesn’t let the shadows get too dark (It’s possible there is a small amount of diffuse going into the emissive to soften shadows).
- A lot of older games used vertex lighting where you set it up in Max/Maya then bake lighting directly to each mesh’s vertices. On “Burn Zombie Burn!” we used it extensively for level lighting and AO bakes of props.
Hope that’s of some use - all the best.
D