Lets hope it meets the standards of the original.
The original Half-life, or the original Half-Life 2?
Half-life Forever.
owned by Farcry
I’ve never seen Far Cry in action, nor have I ever laid eyes upon Half Life 2 (duh!).
All I can say is that in the “Battle of the Screenshots” Far Cry wins with ease.
I have to admit that I’m not overly impressed. Of course, it’s hard to judge the graphics if you haven’t seen the game live in action, plus they are said to have neat facial animations and whatnot. The water doesn’t look that good since the tiles/patterns make it almost look like a carpet. In terms of texturing STALKER seems more detailed and less artificial (it’s a handy example since both games have similar settings). Naturally, some of these issues may not be present in the final version of HL2 anymore.
As long as the gameplay is there I won’t care that much about the graphics anyway. Are the levels supposed to be very linear or more open?
Those all look like DX8 (in which the bump mapping in the jail cell is, in fact, possible), and no AA or AF has been enabled. Notice how blurry the floor gets by the fence to the left, in the image with the three guards standing around. This isn’t HL2 in all its glory, I think, and I’ve heard from some that these are nothing more than screen grabs from an old dev build.
They’re just graphics. We’ve seen those before.
I dunno, I’ve reached the point where I think graphics in every game are good enough for me, and I’d like to see more time spent on making the gameplay fun. Stuff like the physics in Painkiller is a great example of a game feature that makes the game more fun, certainly more so than doubling texture size or upping the poly count on the models some more.
Half Life 2 : The Return Of Steam
Half Life 2 : Steam Fucks You All
Half Life 2 : How I Learnt To Love Steam
Half Life 2 : Steam City
Half Life 2 : Soylent Steam
Half Life 2 : You Will Be Steamed
Half Life 2 : Steam Reloaded
Half Life 2 : I Am Steam
Half Life 2 : Valve Does Steam
Half Life 2 : All Your Steam Belong To Us
HL2 might, in fact, be “owned” by Farcry, but only if it does the following things:
-Have guards which say stupid, annoying things (SUCK ON THESE!)
-Have an engine where the controls feel like you’re trawling through slime.
-Have a ridiculously overused physics engine, where shooting a corpse in a foot will cause it to do a backflip off the ground. They would also need to rip out the physics system from the environment, and just make it so corpses and boxes were affected by it.
-Have a terribly uninteresting and cliched story.
-Have extremely open (read: boring) level designs, which consist of mostly ignorant guards, a terribly half-assed stealth system, and lots of poorly rendered grass, which strangely doesn’t seem to move when you crawl through it.
-Have an engine that everyone claims looks good, but doesn’t. They could do this in any number of ways, such as overusing standard pixel/vertex shaders for water, or using a Black and White-esque “blur everything at a distance” renderer to get really big levels, mainly just to show off the overused shaders. I think the best way they could do it is to take out all the special shader features that we saw in the E3 video last year (lighting through stained glass, shaders and partial opacity on actors, and the like) and just make them all water effects. That seems to work the best, as everyone seems to shit themselves over Far Cry’s stock water-rendering techniques.