Nullity wrote on Mar 18, 2025, 15:19:

jacobvandy wrote on Mar 18, 2025, 15:11:
Of course it's going to be significantly brighter overall, that's just the reality of having light bounce around properly. Any flashlight that isn't a cheap toy should easily fill an entire room, and a fucking bonfire will illuminate an entire city block... Does anyone really think it was an intentional artistic decision to have a humanoid enemy that is engulfed in flames from head to toe *not* project a large amount of light around it? Don't you think they would have liked that to happen, but just couldn't achieve it 20 years ago?

With that said, there is a brightness slider in the options which I did lower a fair amount, as the default made it look pretty washed out. That doesn't do anything to change the number or placement of light sources, though. Many of those in Ravenholm are industrial floodlights, so...

Yeah, big fire is going to be big bright, I get it. I wasn't even talking about fire. Did you watch the video? Most of the comparison shots didn't involve fire and the new version just seemed overly and unnecessarily bright to me. I'm not even trying to say it isn't realistic, using ray/path tracing, I'm sure it is. But as I alluded to in my previous post, it can still be realistic yet maintain the atmosphere by turning down the dimmer switch a little (where appropriate).

I love HL2, and I'll be playing through this. I'm not shitting on the game and I even said I'll reserve judgement until I can see it for myself. I was just voicing my preliminary opinion based only on this video. Chill people.

No, I get it, it's just a coincidence that I happened to be typing my reply at the same time as someone else. I chose fire because it's one of the most stark comparisons in the early parts of the video I linked. After a bunch of examples showing where the remaster offers the higher level of small details we expect in games today, there comes a real shattering of rose-tinted glasses when an enemy is set ablaze in the classic version and it has no impact on the environment whatsoever. In fact, he continues casting the simple drop shadow from the nearby overhead lamp: https://youtu.be/QHRS0TO89UI?t=460

This is still an early version of what they're creating, as can plainly be seen by the many assets in these two levels that have yet to be updated. I'm not saying they couldn't continue tweaking things like scene composition, but apparently I'm just not that bothered by what they have going on now. If anything, I feel the remaining dark spots are even more impactful in contrast to the areas that are now brighter.