How does Half Life 2 still look so fucking good? It's probably older than most posters on this board...

Half Life 2 looks miles better than your pic.

it had goodt lighting and good textures here and there, but most of it is muddy shit and all surfaces are completely flat because it underused normal maps, and it could only dream about shit like parallax or tesselation back then - naturally also had to juggle real geometry
and no it doesn't look
>so fucking good
it looks like fucking shit today

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The devs knew what they were doing and did the best with the tools they had available.

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far cry 1 looks like garbage especially in motion what are you on about

That's not the release version. Doubt you can even play it since it was tied to Steam fuckery form day 1.

lmao @ the 2 retards with zero reading comprehension that replied to this post

the engine updates have barely done anything to improve HL2's visuals
the only noticeable differences are the flashlight shadows and the slimy vortigaunts

As opposed to you I was around when Half-Life 2 came out and I played it on release. It looked just like that.

Bait thread

Tell me, how does that screenshot differ from how the game looked on release?

Nah, you just got filtered. Sorry it doesn't have enough lens flare and chromatic aberration for you.

Oh no I never noticed these before. Are these... are these electrical lines? Oh non nonnonn nononon OP delete this no one can expose valve

I played a bit of the first FC recently, credit where it's due that must have been some mindblowing shit at the time.

Good skyboxes

Not a hard question: ART DIRECTION
Have good art direction, use the tools well, consider things like colour, form, space, and hey presto, your game visuals don't look like shit and probably still won't in 15 years

I'd say the pre-shader games have aged far better. HL2's geometry and texture work was damn good when it released and still looks good today. The early normal map games instead look like lumpy porridge.

I pulled this from the IGN review. Looks like GoldenEye64 compared to what you posted.

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HL2 was normal mapped

>Overwatch
wtf valve stole from blizzard???

>How does Half Life 2 still look so fucking good?
you have serious sight impairment. get your eyes checked.

Both of these screenshots are how the game looks, they're just different areas

Most of the games made around that time and later still look good. UE3 games, HL2 and other Source games, id’s Doom 3 engine and later, the Cryengine and later, etc.

Especially if you force these games into higher resolutions with AF maxed and whatever AA works and is best. I’m talking vanilla using driver control panel, not mods. The mid 2000s games couldn’t do HDR and MSAA at the same time but later on they could, however, post processing stuff that became popular doesn’t usually work with MSAA. You can brute force really old games to SSAA. 4x is all you need max. Downsampling has similar results. Transparency AA if it works. Forced AO. Forced 16xAF (which makes ALL textures look higher res not just ground textures). You can’t even max these things out at 4K on the best of GPUs without dropping below 60fps on some of these games. Don’t know about HL2. I avoid mods and just use the vanilla stuff with graphics driver control panel options. Even New Vegas looks quite good like this

>reflections look 1000 times better than modern reflections while running at 300fps on a toaster

Not him, but I can tell you that the current version of source HL2 and friends were updated massively. Basically when they rebuilt all their games to work with macs (and later linux for steamplay/steamboxes) they overhauled the lighting engine and shadow mapping and other stuff. Basically HL2 was DirectX 8 and a bit and had some DX9 extensions for the handful of shaders they used. In order to work well on non-windows they had to go for modern OpenGL so all that clunky old DX8 code had to be shaderised, and why emulate DX8 when you could modernise your engine? So they did that. The early versions of mac HL2 looked WAY different because of this, then they sort of normalised the windows and mac versions.

From a glance that looks just like Cradle

Not extensively. The vast majority of surfaces are just flat. As opposed to Doom3 where literally everything was normal mapped (with a comically low-res normal map so it looks poor).

Dont forget updating the health pack texture

the maps are small as hell and all the geometry is low poly. there isn't all that much to render as a reflection compared to modern games.

Damn this was a good time for FPS visuals. I remember how awesome F.E.A.R. looked with all the particle effects and dynamic lighting, firefights in that game were a sight to behold

yes extensively, it just looks good because they didn't overdo it, like doom 3

What OP posted is 4k with max antialiasing, that certainly is not. You dense motherfucker.

The lighting plays a big role. Instead of being calculated in realtime, all of the lighting is baked into the map when it's compiled, which allows for very realistic lighting at the cost of very little processing power. For instance, light casted by the sun will bounce off of surfaces in direct view of the sun, and illuminate nearby surfaces that are in the shade.

I'm convinced that Source runs on magic.

>are the coolest enemies in any video game.
The helghast are cooler.

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anyone else get vertigo from playing this part? this would kill me in VR.

>OMG they're like nazis but ever more eviler looking!!!1!
>cooler than the combine
There is absolutely nothing unique about the helghast. They wear fucking armbands and they have "Hell" in their name. It's been a very long time since I've encounter an opinion as shitty as yours, assuming it's not bait of course.