I don't need or want games to look better than Half Life 2

R

radioheadrule83

Banned
I played this for the first time earlier in the week. Holy. Crap.

I played through past the sewer area, and I'm just gobsmacked by the amount of detail and care put into everything.. including the gameplay. It's just so well oiled. In many respects, Doom 3 and other games may be doing more technically fantastical things, have more bump maps or whatever - but they don't have shit on this game. The faces os NPCs, the soldiers, your comrades... they all seem more human than anyone in most games I've played. Their animations are that fluid. The world is so well done too. There is so much that you can manipulate. The physics are fantastic fun to play with. And the non-human element? HE IS THE FREEMAN. I love it!

It's well scripted too. At no point did I feel like I was being told where to go or what to do next. Even though, early on I am making an escape bid along a fairly linear route, every action I took, I decided to take myself - because it made sense in the situation to do so. But the way they take you down that path makes it a true adventure on a grand scale. Orwellian authorities chasing you down, War of the Worlds-esque tripods, pieces of the resistance movement you meet along the way... it's just so well done.

I played multiplayer too. I can't convey to you how much fun knocking a car down the road with gravity-gun zaps, or actually picking up tables, chairs, oil barrels (and pretty much anything you can lay your hands on) AND then throwing them at everyone is. I can't wait for a new Team Fortress or something and all the other mods.

This is one of the best games ever. Other much lauded games this year really don't compare IMO. Games don't need to look better than this. It looks great enough, and plays just as well.

Late to the party I know, but I thought I'd chime in.
 
Yeah. I thought the same way when I saw The Way of the Exploding Fist for the very fist time on my Commodore 64. I mean, that cherry tree looked like a real thing!!!
 
Project Midway said:
Yeah. I thought the same way when I saw The Way of the Exploding Fist for the very fist time on my Commodore 64. I mean, that cherry tree looked like a real thing!!!
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Little Computer People looks better than The Sims. ;)
 
Project Midway said:
Yeah. I thought the same way when I saw The Way of the Exploding Fist for the very fist time on my Commodore 64. I mean, that cherry tree looked like a real thing!!!
Click to expand...

Well said! But it is really painful to go back. I started exploding fist it on a emulator a while ago, and my god... my memory and the reality was not the same thing....

In my memory it was alevel with a beutiful background with an old man. I remember just how he looked, in detalis. But now when I see it he is made of like 3 pixels :lol

Kind of sad really...
 
I agree on the graphical standpoint. There are just instances in some of the latest games where you have to pick up your jaw from the ground. No way in hell you could say 10 years ago that people will play games that LOOK shitloads better than the arcades of old.

Personally I still think that there's a bit of juice left, not in just big realistic in your face graphics, but small tiny details that are being implemented today and you find yourself walking around and saying "wow that looks really nice" even if it did cost the development fund an arm and a leg.
 
just wait until we get to the point where games such as Madden are indistinguishable from broadcast, the only difference being when i press down, Payton Manning moves!

.... you get what i'm saying.

Once we hit that point, then i'll be happy.
 
This thread reminds me of the first time I played Goldeneye, and a friend who was watching said, "Oh my God it looks exactly like the movie. It looks real."
 
I think it will be a long time until most people are satisfied with graphics in most games, until we hit that wall when nothing really can be improved in terms of draw distance, framerate, image quality, animations for example and well...loading times too. ;)
 
I thought that way about Toshinden. I thought to myself 'omg how the hell can graphics get better than this'

I booted this game a few weeks ago and almost barfed. Yes, it was that disgusting. That game didn't age well at all.
 
jenov4 said:
I thought that way about Toshinden. I thought to myself 'omg how the hell can graphics get better than this'

I booted this game a few weeks ago and almost barfed. Yes, it was that disgusting. That game didn't age well at all.
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I think all gamers have thought "how can the graphics improve?!?" at some point. The thing is though, we really are getting to the point where that statement can be made without eating too much crow. While the plastic dolls and dark areas of DOOM 3 don't push it, games like Half-Life 2 do. There are improvements yes, but not nearly to the extent we used to see. Imo, we'll be seeing real life level visuals by late next-gen or the generation after.
 
ManDudeChild said:
I think all gamers have thought "how can the graphics improve?!?" at some point. The thing is though, we really are getting to the point where that statement can be made without eating too much crow. While the plastic dolls and dark areas of DOOM 3 don't push it, games like Half-Life 2 do. There are improvements yes, but not nearly to the extent we used to see. Imo, we'll be seeing real life level visuals by late next-gen or the generation after.
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I agree to a certain extent. I think that the limiting factor won't necessarily be the technology, but the artists' ability to create sufficiently realistic models and animation without destroying whatever budget they have.
 
no no....there's still a very very looooong way to real-life looking graphics. Just walk outside and look around. Real-life has soooo much more better textures, animation and lighting than HL2 its not funny. =) HL2 might look realistic when you are playing it, but when you are comparing it directly to nature/real thing, it looks fake.

Sometimes when I'm driving a car, I mean really driving a car,heh, I take notice about the reflections anf shadows and other details and suddenly all the games look like crap again. :lol
 
As great as Half Life 2 looks, we've still got alot of improving to do in the graphical and performance department. Games are presently lacking the little details that make things life-like. I really wanted to see more ambient stuff in HL2 then the occasional crap-happy pigeon. So many times did the world in HL2 just seem dead (and I'm not just referring to the Combine corpses around my feet). Plus the whole, move two feet, LOAD, move another two feet, LOAD thing got old. Give me one bigass load time if you need to, but then keep me in the experience - mid-map load points don't cut it, Valve.
 
Reminds me of the time me and some friends were playing All-Star Baseball for the N64. Dad walks in...

Dad- "Hey guys, who's playing?"
Friend- "Umm.... we are."
Dad - "Holy crap, that's a game!"
 
LakeEarth said:
Reminds me of the time me and some friends were playing All-Star Baseball for the N64. Dad walks in...

Dad- "Hey guys, who's playing?"
Friend- "Umm.... we are."
Dad - "Holy crap, that's a game!"
Click to expand...

Que laughter from all three as game's logo fades in accompanied by cheesy voiceover: "All-Star Baseball for your Nintendo 64. Shit's so real, you think you be all up in this bitch. Rated E for everyone."
 
Honestly, I think that it is more or less the way our imagination was as kids.... I would play Double dragon or Bad Dudes or Narc and although I would see what they were doing on screen, In my mind I would make it so much more... and when i go back and play those games I dont see the same thing...

also can you imagine playing a game with just two buttons nowadays...
 
Malleymal said:
Honestly, I think that it is more or less the way our imagination was as kids.... I would play Double dragon or Bad Dudes or Narc and although I would see what they were doing on screen, In my mind I would make it so much more... and when i go back and play those games I dont see the same thing...

also can you imagine playing a game with just two buttons nowadays...
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I think a big part of that stems from the fact that we simply didn't understand the technology behind the games as much as we do as we age. When I first played Doom, I about peed my pants from the evil sorcery that surely powered the game. I had no idea I was just moving through this static environment fighting low-res sprites. Some of the mystery and awe has been lost...
 
tedtropy said:
As great as Half Life 2 looks, we've still got alot of improving to do in the graphical and performance department. Games are presently lacking the little details that make things life-like. I really wanted to see more ambient stuff in HL2 then the occasional crap-happy pigeon. So many times did the world in HL2 just seem dead (and I'm not just referring to the Combine corpses around my feet). Plus the whole, move two feet, LOAD, move another two feet, LOAD thing got old. Give me one bigass load time if you need to, but then keep me in the experience - mid-map load points don't cut it, Valve.
Click to expand...

Half-Life 2 has better resolution than real life.
 
ManDudeChild said:
Half-Life 2 has better resolution than real life.
Click to expand...

Perhaps, but I do not carefully tip-toe through my office in fear of triggering a load point in real life.

[While walking down a hallway]
"Hey Bob, how are those numbers for th...LOADING" :lol
 
tedtropy said:
Perhaps, but I do not carefully tip-toe through my office in fear of triggering a load point in real life.

[While walking down a hallway]
"Hey Bob, how are those numbers for th...LOADING" :lol
Click to expand...

You don't? Man you're luc ... loading


...

ky.
 
DJ Brannon said:
Actually it goes like;

You don't? Man you're luc ... loading



...

k-k-k-k-ky-y-y-yyy-y. :p
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Hah, too true.

Hey guys, let's play some H-h-h-h-half Life 2 multi-i-i-i-i-i-i-iplayer!
 
Stryder said:
God that stuttering was annoying, have they fixed that yet? really tainted the experience for me. :(
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i'm pretty sure the major stuttering (as in longer than a second or two) has been fixed.

i still get tiny (less than a half-second) sound pops/stutters whenever coming to a new area, unrelated to autosaves. so there's still work to be done.
 
I remember 1994, when it seemed visuals had gone to a level that didn't need serious improvement. I remember first seeing Ridge Racer about a year prior and being amazed, and then seeing Daytona and having my jaw drop to the floor. To see that many cars, going at that sort of speed, with that sort of resolution, colour, clarity and texture detail, was a total shock to everything I thought I knew about gaming. What frightened me more was how this alien-like "Model 2" technology was going to be married to the Virtua Fighter formula, a game who's visuals I didn't particularly like at that time, but saw a ton of potential for due to the fluidity of movement. And despite having an idea of what VF2 would bring, I was still floored when I first saw it. This, after seeing Killer Instinct for the first time just a couple days prior and being floored by that. When I saw both games running side by side, with two completely different approaches being used to create scenes that a year prior had simply been unimaginable, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. And the best part was that the next generation of consoles were going to bring this same quality of graphics to the home!.....

....yeah well, that never happened. The capabilities for those machines were ridiculously overrated, though it's hard to say by whom. Wasn't long after that that we saw M2 looking to fry everything in it's path, PC 3D cards that improved every other month, and Model 3 fry everything in the solar system for a year or two. Amazingly enough, visuals could improve (though I'll admit I preferred Model 2's look in parts a lot more then Model 3's).

Nothing's really changed...Dreamcast's NFL2K looked like a TV broadcast when I first saw it. DOA2 looked like some sort of CG movie come to life. Soul Calibur, Shenmue, F355 and Crazy Taxi absolutely floored me. Then PS2 came out. Then Gamecube. Then XBox. While DC is a hell of a lot closer to the current machines then the previous ones, it's old tech. So's the stuff we've got now.

For the first time I can recall, I personally have no real gauge regarding what the next generation of consoles may bring. System 16 games provided a glimpse of what the then-unknown Genesis could bring. While Model 2 and even System 22 were far beyond the consoles of that era, they at least offered a few clues for that generation. Model 3 certainly provided a pretty good preview for the Dreamcast and subsequent machines. That's the last time a purpose-made, balls to the wall arcade platform was created (Naomi 2 hardly counts, with it's PS2/XBox-equivalent tech). Doom 3 and Half Life 2 on PC are about the only gauges for what's possible next gen. And I reckon games will make 'em look old by the second generation of games, which is what I judge a platform by.

I guess the point of my long rant is that you should never kid yourself into thinking that you've seen it all in terms of visuals. We haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible. One only needs to look at any of the CG movies by Pixar, Dreamworks or Square to see the sort of detail (if not realism) that can be acheived. HDTV-standard resolutions will make a huge difference.

I wanna be able to walk into a town that has say, five hundred people moving around with various sized structures all around, animals, dirt, grass, trees with proper leaves, weather effects and their cause and effect (footprints left in the snow, dirty brown watermarks left from snow on the floors of inside structures, breath showing in the cold, people getting more and more soaked during a rainfall, etc), even better indoor and outdoor lighting, patches of garbage on the ground, and so on. And that doesn't include the cars...though I guess it depends which era this town is set in, heh.

I guess it's the details and vastly improved physics calculations that I think about for next generation. With racing being my favourite genre, I'll offer up a couple examples. Rubber beads strewn on a race circuit from the tires of race cars, with a clean line being formed on the circuit after a few laps. Or in a rally race (which has staggered starts), when the first car hits a snowy or gravel stage and has to sweep the gravel and snow off the road, slowing it down, while making it easy for the following cars to follow it's tracks, as well as make them quicker. To a lot of people, such things will be seen as trivial. For a racing fan like me, such things will be a revelation. And for a lot of genres, I reckon subtle improvements like that will really make the next generation of consoles stand out.
 
Shinobi said:
I guess the point of my long rant is that you should never kid yourself into thinking that you've seen it all in terms of visuals. We haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible. One only needs to look at any of the CG movies by Pixar, Dreamworks or Square to see the sort of detail (if not realism) that can be acheived. HDTV-standard resolutions will make a huge difference.
Click to expand...

Completely agree. It annoys me when I hear people saying that videogame graphics are plateauing, or that the customer won't notice the difference next gen (either between more and less powerful next-gen systems, or between this gen and next gen). The eye is a remarkably precise and discerning tool. The regular consumer, imo, becomes more and more sophisticated in terms of their demands with each generation.

I think that can be observed in the whole early PS2 days. When people first saw the demos they were blown away. But then when the games came out etc. people's eyes honed in on the flaws. "Jaggies" became known to EVERYONE, even casual gamers. But if you look back at the first PS2 demos, they suffered from the same visual artifacts. People just didn't notice them at the time (leading many to say that Sony lied about PS2's capabilities), but I think it was simply a case of growing consumer sophistication. It'll happen next gen. People will see flaws, and people will see differences between more and less powerful systems (imo).
 
epmode said:
*looks at tag*

this i have to hear.
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*rolls eyes*

For one thing there were tons of fences in the game, all of which used alphablending textures, over which MSAA could not be used, and as a result created tons of jaggies that look worse than object corners without AA. For another, texture quality could definitely improve and most environmental objects either have too few polygons or too sharp edges/corners in Half Life 2 compared to Doom 3 which handles smooth and spherical objects/surphaces much better (Garbage bins look like they were ported from Half Life 1/CS, for example) For a third, the game has very little vegetation/foilage, most outdoor areas use flat grass/ground textures without any kind of mapping (bump or displacement) which makes it look pretty bad compared to, say, Far Cry. I could go on and on. Graphically, it's still a very good game, but I don't think it's as good as games should get.
 
i still pretty much wantt game visuals to keep progressing. I need and want it!

evilromero said:
I would've preferred games stopped progressing around 1994, before DKC but after Super Metroid.
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:lol :lol

Yes, the age of 3984893843949823749824793874982344 me-too platformers. Oh, how glorious.

Thank freakin' God we progressed.
 
Amir0x said:
i still pretty much wantt game visuals to keep progressing. I need and want it!



:lol :lol

Yes, the age of 3984893843949823749824793874982344 me-too platformers. Oh, how glorious.

Thank freakin' God we progressed.
Click to expand...

Yes, thank freakin' God we progressed to the me-too fps.
 
Society said:
Yes, thank freakin' God we progressed to the me-too fps.
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Yes, because the majority of the games this generation are FPS, and not a crazy amalgam of every genre ever.

Back during the SNES era, it was sports game, RPGs... the occasional racing title... and one trillion platformers. And then maybe there's a cross over, like a beat-em'-up platformer. And not only that, almost every platformer that wasn't Mario was garbage. Almost. The vast, vast majority was platformers. It was bad.

These last two generations have a shitload more variety. It is not even in the same realm.
 
Half Life 2 is purty, but it never blew my doors off. The physics gameplay had some ingenious moments, no doubt. Graphically, the stuttering crap significantly impacted the experience..

In terms of graphics overall, when I can charge out the gate of Minas Tirith into the Orc Horde choppin' and swingin', look up at my friend and say 'holy crap, Dynasty Warriors XVIII: LOTR edition looks just like the movie!!!111 I'll be happy.
 
Amir0x said:
Yes, because the majority of the games this generation are FPS, and not a crazy amalgam of every genre ever.

Back during the SNES era, it was sports game, RPGs... the occasional racing title... and one trillion platformers. And then maybe there's a cross over, like a beat-em'-up platformer. And not only that, almost every platformer that wasn't Mario was garbage. Almost. The vast, vast majority was platformers. It was bad.

These last two generations have a shitload more variety. It is not even in the same realm.
Click to expand...

I kinda agree...I thought the platformers back then were pretty good, and '94 saw a lot of quality platformers released. But it got to the point where a lot of people had simply gotten sick of the formula. This coupled with the expectations for the PSX, Saturn and N64, and the ridiculous visuals provided by Ridge Racer and Daytona, gave people a high craving for any sort of 3D.
 
Yeah. I thought the same way when I saw The Way of the Exploding Fist for the very fist time on my Commodore 64. I mean, that cherry tree looked like a real thing!!!
Click to expand...

:lol Awesome ... just awesome!!



Well said! But it is really painful to go back. I started exploding fist it on a emulator a while ago, and my god... my memory and the reality was not the same thing....
Click to expand...

The music still kicks ass though.
 
IK+ looked mindblowing on C64...until I saw it on Amiga. Just a thing of beauty. Still has one of the coolest game tunes of all time.
 
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