Besides the obvious answer of "it was some of the first of its kind." We like to blame the early UE3 "look" on devs building on the engine's stock settings, but that early and frankly awful lighting was clearly a limitation of the renderer out of the box, so unless you wanted to rewrite said renderer you were kinda stuck with something of that look until later iterations. Working within that renderer didn't leave you a ton of options.
So why was it so awful? Did a tools focus and performance on consoles demand that kind of shading early on until the engine could be better optimized down the line or what? It still kinda baffles me that UE3 didn't offer something of UE2.5's lighting systems as option out of the box, considering how much better lit UE2 games were next to UE3 early on, unless I'm totally wrong about that.
edit: I'm in the minority in that Gears didn't blow me away graphically at launch. Some of the early pc demos with much better lighting did, but the game at launch was impressive in select details but also incredibly ugly in other ways. And not just aesthetically
So why was it so awful? Did a tools focus and performance on consoles demand that kind of shading early on until the engine could be better optimized down the line or what? It still kinda baffles me that UE3 didn't offer something of UE2.5's lighting systems as option out of the box, considering how much better lit UE2 games were next to UE3 early on, unless I'm totally wrong about that.
edit: I'm in the minority in that Gears didn't blow me away graphically at launch. Some of the early pc demos with much better lighting did, but the game at launch was impressive in select details but also incredibly ugly in other ways. And not just aesthetically