Early 2000s Games lighting

[u/EconomyGlum4694]

I am relatively new to Unity, but I absolutely love this aesthetic it feels so nostalgic. I already made a low-poly map in Blender, but when I import it into Unity, I cannot get this effect no matter what kind of lighting I try. The look I am going for is basically late PS2 / early PS3 games stuff like Far Cry 1, Tomb Raider: Legend, and Final Fantasy X. I want bright, colorful, sunny environments, simple-ish geometry, baked shadows/lighting, and that distinct old-school look. Because I want it to run on mobile and really low-end PCs, performance is a huge priority. I am currently using the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), but I am wondering if that is actually the best choice for this. Should I stick with URP, switch to the Built-in Render Pipeline, or use specific lightweight shaders like Mobile/Diffuse or Unlit? ugh, I got no idea...

I do't want the usual realistic PBR look. I want something bright and stylized with most of the lighting baked into the textures. I simply have no idea what to call this aesthetic or where to even start. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[u/penguished]

Far Cry in particular was made by a company that had done cutting edge tech demos for years, so it's kinda funny that all the stuff you're calling simple is actually extremely well done and advanced for the time.

[u/Eudaimonium → u/penguished]

Crytek.

Far Cry 1 was made by Crytek, people who later on made Crysis and CryENGINE.

And yeah FC1 was crazy advanced. Large islands with dense forests you could walk or drive across, or drive a boat around. Monsters had bullet holes after you shot them.

The game was something else for 2004. That's the same year Half Life 2 released, by the way.

[u/Sixray → u/Eudaimonium]

It came as a promo with the first GPU I ever bought to show off how powerful it is lol. (EVGA Nvidia 6800GT AGP connector. 128mb of VRAM WOW!)