I don't get the flat lighting comments for fh2. The game looks Phenomenal. Obviously they went for a different approach to lighting the game world, I don't want everything looking the same. HOrizon is a testament of the xbone capability and the forza engine after all the bullshit about dynamic lighting.
Yeah, I'm not agreeing with the lighting comments, myself, but DC is a looker, no doubt. For my preference, I like racing/driving games to be free to escape from the plainer, more grounded visual reality that Forza vanilla and GT go for and, IMO, that works better with more unrealistic nature of past arcade-sim hybrids, like FH1.
IMO, the tenuous and intermittent video game illusion of reality is only important in those things that affect the gameplay experience and not just how it looks because I'll always know it's a fucking video game while I'm playing it. Why bother with color-corrected and desaturated cinematic realism since that's not important in any way to the real-time gameplay experience? So what that it looks perhaps more realistic in a video you're watching. I want replayability and dynamic appearance which both DC and FH2 offer, but one offers much more because of its focus on a larger number of cars, tracks, and a greater freedom in how to drive. That's much more important to me for the long-term appeal of playing a game over time because the game's visuals are more unified with its actual gameplay. So, in a competition over what looks like it could be included with a realistic CG movie, DC could possibly be much better to choose, but I want the color in games I play to pop (even unrealistically so), the spectacle to be far beyond what we see in reality, all so that the net effect is to make me feel some sense of the ideal of the act of driving. Video games aren't reality nor are they movies, so why treat them with the same expectations and limit them by doing so? Neither DC nor FH2 are realistic car sims, though I guess FH2 does offer the same Forza physics sim optional assists and damage modeling, I guess I prefer the arcade-look of games versus the camera-simulation look because what I experience in these games isn't something that matches a more realistic look and when these highly unrealistic moments occur, they don't stand in such stark contrast with the visual style and instead feel appropriate to it.