Year release delay shows in the visuals

[Rocketman9mm]

threadstarter: your out of your mind. the visuals are incredible. sure it has a few glitches and things here or there, but so does EVERY game. In hl2 at the start of ravenholm I found a raven standing on mid-air grooming itself. I was a little suprised but that kind of thing pops up so much more in other games.

I am absolutely satisfied with the visuals of HL2. they are complimentary to the game. My jaw was on the floor the entire airboat level (when I wasn't dodging rockets, mines or other obstacles).

 

[Eon Blue]

HL2 is just immersive - and the more a game draws you in, the better it is.

I didn't really get 'in' to FarCry or Doom 3, though they are very pretty. HL2? I played it until 5 AM (when it was released on Steam), and spent a large amount of time killing headcrabs with paintcans.

Nothing gets better than that.

 

[ShinRa]

oh because silver has a "fast pc", noone else can see that the graphics are bad. a number of points, in my usual fashion:

1. my pc is faster than your "fast pc", and i take everything into consideration. i am not a hl2 fanboy nor any other game, i play them, and judge them AFTER ive played them.

2. hl2, imo...actually no, in about 98% of the worlds opinion, has better graphics than any game to date. not to mention the game can constantly be updated thanks to steam and the rendering engine itself can be upgraded thanks to the flexability of source.

3. im right, your wrong.

4. btw, pc gamer are also the people that said it beats doom 3 with its own flashlight.

 

[Razak]

lol come on

Doom3 has lowpolly models. Only thing that makes that game look great is the bump map texturing and dynamic shadows. That is it really. You said it had better animation. Hmmmm i dont think so. The way that characters in HL2 talk to while moving is enough win in that category.

Farcry while it looks great and could make awsome islands, it does not look real. Characters look like plastic army men. I think HL2 water even looks better. While HL2 doesnt have fish swimming below, but then again HL2 is not on an island.

HL2
Fluid movement (animations are great, dog's movements were amazing)
great textures (look closly and compare doom3's clothing to HL2's)
awsome effects(by far best physics in any game yet)
great lighting (minus dynamic shadows)

 

[Mountain Man]

Half-Life 2 has the occasional bad texture, but the graphics are outstanding overall. Much better than the "one-trick-pony" graphics in either Doom 3 or Far Cry. Half-Life 2 features some pretty good level diversity.

As for Doom 3, yeah, it had a great shadow system, but take away the shadows and the game is butt ugly. Low-res textures abound in that game, and the character models were so frugal with polygon counts that they have pointy heads and hands with fingers fused together!

All the games look great and have definitely raised the bar of PC gaming visuals, but I still say Half-Life 2 has them beat.

 

[Sadistic Turtle]

I think given the fact that what you are looking at is a 3 year old graphics engine, I'd be hard pressed to say what you're saying. Personally, I have never seen what this game is capable of. The way the world is represented has such authenticity. It nearly borders on photorealism. The way the characters interact and talk to each other. The way they look at you when you walk near. It's an astonishing test to programming.

I was impressed with Doom 3's atmosphere due to how well it was able to create tension using darkness and sound as components to the fear. however, half-life 2 had more than that. The minute I got off that train, and I started to look around, seeing the faces of the people around me..the way they were animating, reacting to my presence...the way the Combine Overwatch set up their posts in beautiful sections of town, contrasting everything there completely (the posts look gorgeous, they have that soft black, metal gleam coming off them). There is a great sense of oppression in the world. Fear. And it's not through using any kind of cheap scares. It's a general atmosphere. This is Half-Life 2's story. It's waht people should pay attention to if they aren't "able to find substance in this damn game".

Open your eyes.

 

[Biggleska]

Errr hello??

I read one review of HL2. PCGamer and they said that the graphics ARE NOT AS GOOD as Doom3.

Key word: ONE Review.

 

[shyy]

The enviroment and shading is great but yea some textures are low quality, but who cares when you have such a beautiful environment.

 

[Kel Thuzad]

Hmm...
Id say this game has the most beautiful graphics so far...
Doom3 - bye, bye...

 

[one day....]

I have to disagree with the op,this is the most stunningly beutiful game ever created,and the character animations are MUCH better than doom 3,especially the facial ones.

 

[Ahnteis]

HL2 needs some detail textures is all and it'd have best graphics ever.

 

[Ozzie]

Half life 2 graphics than Doom3.
Doom3 lokked better because it was dark and you couldn't see shit actually, did you look closer on the Doom3 crappy textures? They sucked badly.

I didn't play Farcry so I won't comment on that one, but in overall i think that HL2 has the best graphics on the market now!

 

[mutt]

its a known fact all the good looking bits of d3 are in the first 10 mins of the game, they knew no one would play past that.

 

[mutt]

ppl saying d3 textures beat hl2 textures need to look at the scientists jacket, near the start of the game. It was made out of about 10 blocks of color

 

[jimbones]

it looks far more believable than doom3. d3 looks artificial-barbie-plastickey-kinda fake but still very nice..

 

[The Dark Elf]

Doom3 looks great

FarCry looks great (I suppose.. in the spirit of christmas I guess I should be fair.. even if it is naff)

HL2 looks great


Doom3 and Farcry are geared towards spooky indoor environments and forest outdoors respectively. HL2 does a bit of both. You can't really compare the three of them.

 

[Pjotr]

Nice game, but the year delay in release shows so clearly in the graphics. Some of the textures are awful, a lot of the equipment looks like it is straight from HL1. There are even invisible objects & glitches.
FarCry and Doom3 raised the bar in terms of gfx and this falls well short of those two games on that front - especially FarCry's outdoor environemnts and D3s animations.
Otherwise it looks like a great game - nice atmosphere, story and very playable.
The reason I am suprised (and yes disappointed) with graphics (yes they are set to max) is that after 5 yeays I expected faultless presentation. Maybe my expectations were too high.

Why did you expect more? HL1 didn't bring fancy graphics, it brought a new experience, characters, story etc. HL2 brings all those to a new level, the graphics are closer to cutting edge today than what HL1 brought. I'm impressed they had time to do fancy graphics in addition to everything else that is world class. :cheers:

 

[ascii]

I'm not sure that calling HL2 a three year old engine is accurate. I'm sure they've added improvements to the engine since it's first revision. I think, honestly, that at this point, most graphics engines are limited by our hardware, not the engine. Afterall, i don't think there's anything in source that technically prevents them from putting crazy uncompressed texture images in the levels...it's just that our hardware would puke all over it.

 

[Setanta]

I don't know about looking better, but I find the graphics in HL2 more convincing than Far Cry and the character skinning "feels" more realistic than either D3 or FC. FC felt blocky and cartoonish - D3 the characters looked like Wallace and Gromit on steroids - plasticine looks. Yes I do have a high-end system and yes, I did run everything with high settings - before anyone asks

Maybe the other two games are technically excellent - but HL2 to me has more soul and is infinitely more believable.

I'll go slightly OT and say that D3 and FC were designed and published - HL2 was crafted - and you can tell by the impact it had on the user. Personally - I was bored with Doom 3 after 1/2 an hour of play - technically the scenery rendering is awesome... but as a game, it's crap. I was overawed by Far Cry's outdoors rendering and system requirements... but again - I got bored quickly - it's game experience design was poor. Half-Life 2 has my interest and hasn't lost it yet

 

[ThrasherX9]

Doom3 had nice shadows and good lighting. It's animations are pretty good, and the bumpmapping is nice. However, the textures are horrid. peoples heads are blocky, and they don't move quite as nice. Farcry has awesome outdoor levels. Um... yep, awesome outdoor levels. HL2 may not have the awesome shadows of D3 or the expansiveness of Farcry's out doors, but HL2 blends the best it can with both and does a pretty damn good job. IMHO, HL2 has the best graphics to date. Not to mentions it's animations are absolutely incredible.

 

[Mountain Man]

Half life 2 graphics than Doom3.
...did you look closer on the Doom3 crappy textures? They sucked badly.

Yeah, I was pretty surprised at just how bad some of Doom 3's textures were. What looked from a distance to be a detailed piece of machinery cloaked in shadows turned out to be an ugly, blurry, low-res texture when you got up close and shone your flashlight on it.

 

[Gotter]

I'm going to agree with most people here. D3 may have been more technically impressive, but it doesn't "look good", it looks overdone and out of place and tended to detract more then enhance (Though, I admit that the outdoors scenes, on the martian surface looked bloody amazing, they needed more of those scenes). HL2 looks so much better in the overall scheme of things, much more realistic and much more immersive.... That and you actually see the game as a whole instead of only what your flashlight showed you.

 

[HumboldtBlazer]

Well my system is not as good as yours but I think H-L2 looks way beeter than both FarCry and D3. Doom 3 was the more impressive of the two but that engine only models indoor areas, not vast expanses of open outdoor space. The Source engine blows everything else away.

btw my specs

P4 3.0 800mhz FSB
2 Gig 400mhz DDR
ATI Radeon 9800XT.

 

[jaycee86]

can u guys post your best screenshots of the game?