Oh, you should have seen the skybox stars in early Elite Dangerous, then: They had a
distinct, matte, sharply outlined pin-cushion-shaped aperture flare -- looked exactly like the sprites you'd see in some old Commodore 64 demos, "glinting" off predetermined locations along the edges of some scener group's logotype. :9
The tone mapping in Odyssey is indeed terrible, IMHO, I am sad to say.
I do happen to highly like that the lighting is stark: If I see some sort of cylinder drifting in space, it is blindingly bright on its star-ward side, and black on the other, with a relatively narrow penumbra -- this is good, and as it should be!
Unfortunately this comes with utterly crushing the whites, when shoehorned into SDR gamut -- there is always something shiny that loses all definition because of this, and often it is impossible to read the number on a locker in a settlement, without moving around to view it from a different angle, because the white figures can not be distinguished from the background, whose diffuse colouring is about medium level, but the specularity of the material turns it solid white in view. :7
Oh how I wish we could see how the game could look on an HDR capable display, without that aggressive tonemapping.
The imperfectly implemented adaptive aperture problem is exacerbated in VR: Because you can look around freely, it becomes doubly obvious that just turning your head a scant degree or two, causes the entire universe to sway up and down in brightness around you, like it was routed through a dimmer switch, and on top of that, it does this separately for each eye, so you often find yourself with a bright nebula in one eye, and a dark one in the other - really upleasant to look at.
It also seems to me that frequently this adapting works contrary to how it should: Sometimes you look toward the sun, and for some reason the milky way background behind it brightens, instead of, as you would expect, go black, as your simulated irises contract. It's peculiar...
The whole: "the entire star system is lit depending on whether
I am in line-of-sight to a light source or not" thing is also highly annoying, with planets and moons turning on and off like light bulbs when you move around, but I guess that is just the limitations of how one have so far chosen to implement the lighting. (This happens on-foot too: Enter a building at an offline settlement during daytime, and the interior will go from inexplicably being just as lit-up as the exterior, to the darkness it should be, after you've been inside for a few seconds, and the game catches up to the situation.
)
Elite Dangerous, with its procedurally generated, and constantly moving universe (forget about prebaking lightmaps, etc- (save, possibly, for some interiors))
needs raytracing and global illumination more than any other game.
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