Just the art direction, I guess + YouTube compression.
For the inside of that house, the lighting happens automatically within the engine or you have to do something in particular? I see the light from the lamp going through the table, that would be the "classic" sign of rasterization. Can you have the lamp cast it's own shadows (the bulb from it) and not go through the table, can it be interactive, destroyed? How many shadow casting lights were usable back then? And most importantly, can the engine switch between what casts a shadow and what doesn't automatically, based on how many shadows casting lights are in your view?
The lamp on the table isn't shadow casting, notice also its glowing through the shade? Yes i can have it cast its own shadow, that's what i did with the lamp in the celling that i'm shooting at, i can have it turn off if i shoot it, in the same way i had the celling lamp turn off once disconnected from the cord, its all just backend programming.
The lamp on the table its self, like the lamp shade in the celling is not a destructible 3D asset, so while i can physicalise it, like i did with the celling lamp it will not break apart no matter what happened to it, you have to create a very different asset for it to be destructible, i actually did that later on in the video with the wooden structure and the corner of that wall, as well as a brick wall which i did a little differently, i simply physicalised each brick and then stacked them.
How many shadow casting lights you can have depends on engine optimisation, that's assuming the engine is capable of it to begin with, remember CryEngine was one the most sophisticated engines of its time, still is in its current V5.7 form (kingdom Come Deliverance) but also the performance of the CPU, this was 9 or 10 years ago, with the 4690K i had at the time i could put about 5 or 6 in view, after that the frame rates would tank, this sounds like a lot but its not, you may or may not be surprised at how many light sources are often actually in a complex scene.
Yeah Direct Storage and Rebar are a lot more common in games now.