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@LukeAlmighty These days you can just mark a mesh as a static shadow caster.

I watched the stream, the game slowed down when E;R turned the shadows back on to solve the star puzzle because it was barely visible without them.
The drop in performance is telling.
It takes a special kind of incompetence to make a scene this poorly optimized.
I wouldn't even consider optimization in a small room like that.
Some of the meshes there must be VERY detailed for no reason, and have no LODs.

Also I forgot to mention, the fix for this is trivial, and would've taken 20 minutes at the most, per scene.

Some people still bake shadows, but usually only when they want their stuff to look good while working on a potato or mobile.
Some games bake shadows into textures, which is usually frowned upon, but it can help improve performance a lot, since it can save on use of normal maps.
I think Borderlands 1 did that.