Nier Automata had a realistic design and didn’t have any realtime GI either. The only open world games that I can think of that had dynamic GI are the new Far Cry, Horizon Zero Dawn and The Witcher 3, and I’m not even 100% sure on the last two. My overall point is that dynamic GI won’t make a bad game good nor will lack of dynamic GI make a good game bad. I argue that in the grand scheme of things, not a single quantifiable thing about a game - reviews, sales, concurrent players etc. will be affected in the slightest by dynamic GI. Actually scratch that - I believe it can only affect it negatively due to increased hardware requirements. This makes it, in my judgement, a useless feature when it comes to game development. If anything it’s juts another “GDC showfloor” feature to cater to the archivis and offline-rendering crowd.