To be honest I'm not really buying the aesthetic they came up with. There is a jarring disconnect between textures, models and lighting system. It doesn't really look like an old game (let alone Hexen 2), it's like a PS3/Xbox 360 era game with very inconsistent geometry and texture work.
This is actual Hexen 2:
If you want to imitate this, environmental geometries should be toned WAYYYY down compared to those trailers (just the staff in the new game probably has more polygons than an entire screen of the old game). Conversely, if you want to make it look more modern than Hexen 2, as in general this seems to (let's say 2005-ish?), what in the fuck is going on with the textures? Are they from bloody Doom?
The rule for 3D games around 1995-2000 was that you made up with textures for what you couldn't represent with polygons. Since complex geometries were too taxing to render, you had to draw all the details in the textures and then apply them to flat surfaces to make them look more detailed. This is the complete opposite, detailed geometries but with hideously pixelated textures, some far worse than those from Hexen 2 itself.
The game on its own might be good to play, I don't know, but the "nostalgia operation" really doesn't work for me. This feels like what somebody who never actually played a pre-2000 game thinks old games looked like.
www.theastronauts.com
