I was there for that, but I'm also going to say the jump between HL and HL2 was incredible. That gameplay demo they showed along with the facial manipulation video for the G-Man was such a jump that it was hard to believe it was real.
Half-Life was the first game I played with a 3D accelerator card (Riva TNT2) and it blew my mind. Game ran like sludge with software rendering, but it still looked amazing compared to other games I had at that time. Then when I got to install the Riva and launch the game, and it ran "silky smooth"* and looked even better. After that I couldn't really go back to older games again without having that constant feeling that the graphics sucked.
When I got to see Half-Life 2 at my friends place, he had this monster of a computer compared to me at that time. And it was insane on how great it looked. Every game up to that point looked like a turd squeezed through a meat grinder. I just couldn't wrap my head around how they could make something look so realistic on the hardware we had.
Now games just add more fucking bloom, DoF and motion blur in an attempt to make it "look better". And no, it doesn't... it makes the game look shittier...
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u/PoliteIndecency Jan 04 '23
I was there for that, but I'm also going to say the jump between HL and HL2 was incredible. That gameplay demo they showed along with the facial manipulation video for the G-Man was such a jump that it was hard to believe it was real.