The rendering engine is good, for sure, but you need to give it the right stuff to make look good. If you don't have the budget for art assets, Unreal isn't going to magically make your game look awesome.
I mean, that's kind of goes without saying, doesn't it?
No game engine will make your game magically look awesome if you don't have the budget for art assets and don't have an artist on your team.
That said, the tools make it very easy for artists with no programming experience to make fantastic looking games with in depth game mechanics without using programming, so thats a plus.
The marketplace has quite a few high quality art assets, but they are pretty expensive, with each bundle ranging from $20-80 basically. The marketplace is lacking content for sure though, especially compared to the Unity asset store. More content gets added each week though.
Judging from the number of people jumping on to Unreal and Unity, I don't think it does go without saying. And if you use the marketplace assets, you're going to end up with a game that looks like everyone else's game that also uses assets out of the marketplace.
It makes certain aspects of connecting art assets with gameplay code easier, but I don't think it at all makes it "very easy". We're still talking about a non-trivial amount of programming here. If you're not a programmer already, gameplay code is still going to be a struggle.
uhh... What's your point? Game development requires knowledge of game development and that you won't have a good looking game without decent art assets?
Even with the asset stores, have UE or Unity reached the point of being a "one stop shop"? It still seems like an art tool like Blender or Maya is also a required link in the toolchain for anything but the smallest of projects.
By and large you do need to use another tool for generating the art assets. That's probably by design because a single program that could do it all would be pretty monolithic and probably couldn't be great at everything. UE4 uses some pretty industry standard file formats for importing assets though, so it should work pretty well no matter what tool you prefer to use to create your assets.
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but having used ue4 for the last 6 months on a side project and not having any real art skills, I've found that the particle effects editor is a fantastic way to mask my own art deficiencies, and secondly having a fully featured lighting system out of the box gives me another very good head start. I'm still stuck for texturing, modelling and animation, but having a powerful engine does give you a leg up.
No game engine will make your game magically look awesome if you don't have the budget for art assets and don't have an artist on your team.
That said, the tools make it very easy for artists with no programming experience to make fantastic looking games with in depth game mechanics without using programming, so thats a plus.
The marketplace has quite a few high quality art assets, but they are pretty expensive, with each bundle ranging from $20-80 basically. The marketplace is lacking content for sure though, especially compared to the Unity asset store. More content gets added each week though.