It doesn’t need it. Game is fine since launch.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Main takeaway is the HL2 still looks pretty good
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.
I think it looks better just some parts are probably too bright compared to the original but the shadows being physically accurate is a noticeable improvement.
Yeah, the lighting was done for the regular lighting system. If you change that, you change how everything appears and basically have to redo all the lighting in the game.
It'll probably be heavily modable , at least I hope so.
It's just a mod for HL2, so I imagine it can be modded the same way as HL2
RTX on - everything is bright as fuck
Makes sense.
It is the fundamental problem with anything with "realistic" "raster" lighting. Visually you want it to look like what a city street actually looks like. Lamp post there with a nice bright bulb in it. But the actual lighting needs to look like it was filmed on a sound stage with a blue filter because THAT is "realistic". So you have a lot of lighting trickery and so forth. The texture of the light source/bulb might be super bright but it is actually three invisible light sources that project the light that was baked into that scene.
When you switch that over to RTX? Maybe you hand tweak it so you actually get light from that street light. And, as anyone who has actually walked around a city at night can tell you, that shit is bright as hell... which makes all the areas where a street light isn't REALLY dark and kind of creepy. Or maybe it is the phantom light sources that made things look nice that now make things look wrong.
We ran into this a lot at the start of the RT generation. Some parts of Control looked AMAZING and other parts look like... an office building. Some parts of Cyberpunk 2077 looked gorgeous and straight out of a Nicolas Refn film and others looked shiny and splotchy.
And its why one of the best demonstrations of ray tracing is... still kind of Quake 2. Because that is a game that was designed around the concepts behind ray tracing (dynamic lighting from real light sources) but also looks alien enough that our brains won't say "That cave full of aliens looks wrong"
Its why I am so excited that the new DOOM is going to require Ray Tracing. That is gonna REALLY suck since I am "Team AMD" but it also means that level designers will be targeting one lighting scheme and can design around that.
I've been saying for some time that the biggest reason ray tracing looks lackluster is because it's being held back by games needing to support rasterization. We've mastered rasterization which means any scene you can rasterize will look almost identical to a ray traced scene. And you don't see scenes where ray tracing would blow your mind because those scenes most likely can't be rasterized, which means they don't added to the game. So for the end user ray tracing looks kinda meh because you don't really get any significant benefits and the marginal differences between ray traced and rasterized scenes are not worth the performance cost.
It's like having a 3D engine but you can only use it for 2D games.