I understand why some might feel it looks good, but it actually really ruins the feel of the game. Darkness and contrast is a good thing.
I honestly don’t think this looks very good. The lighting and assets look good on their own, but this remaster completely changes the art direction of the original, and it ends up losing a lot of the atmosphere that the original had.
I hope they make some last minute changes, or we at least get a mod to restore it to the original game’s aesthetics.
I think a simple color grade, and tweaking/removing some of the lights could basically fix it, so I’m a bit surprised they took this approach. It looks like they prioritized tech demo over faithful recreation.
It’ll probably be heavily modable , at least I hope so.
Half-Life Alyx looks fantastic. It’s a modern but faithful representation of the Half-Life universe. You can jump from HL2 to Alyx and feel like you’re part of the same narrative and story. Even though there are almost two decades in between.
Half-Life RTX has more polygons, higher-resolution textures and a much more resource-hungry lighting system. The entire Half-Life universe was cast as a cameo to star in another guys remake.
This looks bad. You can’t just slap new tech on a game and expect it to be great. Half Life 2 is stylized a certain way, based on the tech available at the time. This makes the game look… Off… Not a fan of RTX remakes, they always look like this. Bland, flat, no soul.
Some parts look fine, but those Ravenholm scenes look terrible compared to Vanilla HL2. Completely kills the dim, gloomy vibe that defined it when every light source is basically a floodlight.
