Why would they do this to the Half-Life 2 speedrunning community.
the speedrunners already use an early patch of the game due to a specific bug involving box physics that was fixed over a decade ago.
decided to play some HL2 again because of this update and yeah HL2 is still one of the better ego shooters. The balance feels just right on hard difficulty
Very funny that the Gabe Newell interview is just transparently on a yacht, after he became known as the giant yacht guy earlier this year
whereâs vtmb
The prototype looks better in a lot of ways!
I honestly kind of hate the way the RTX version looks lol.
I havenât seen an RTX game that doesnât look like garbage, tbh
I love it when a game has less identity and readability
The way they replaced the ivy decals with an extremely garish model that floats in front of the wall is the worst part imo
I donât have any issue with real time ray tracing, its just doing what the level compiler does but in real time and I think folks tend to conflate the good things (no more hideous screen space reflections or blocky low res shadows) with the really bad (too shiny textures, ugly replacement models) that is more the fault of terrible art direction than the technology.
The most fundamental benefit of raytracing is it can enable a very dynamic game environment to have great lighting anyway. Be it a day-night cycle, destructible environment or just the devs had the flexibility to keep moving things around a week before release day.
In that light, adding ray-tracing to an old game designed not to really need it sort of misses the point
i need to keep a save file thatâs just the very end of âWe Donât Go to Ravenholmâ â Highway 17 â the very beginning of Sandtraps its the part of this game im always down to replay (besides Ravenholdm by itself)
I miss that post doom 3 period where every game got stencil shadows and dynamic moving lights and flashlights and muzzle flashes that actually illuminated a scene (and cast shadows), and feel like the generational switch to deferred rendering after that was a step back in a lot of ways because it made those techniques incompatible with modern rendering methods. Real time ray tracing finally brings the available palette of artistic tools back to that moment. But of course most people misuse it in these early days, applying it to games where it doesnât make sense, not applying the right parameters to their pbr materials so everything is too reflective, etc.
strong strong agree w this take