Digital Foundry recently put out a video showing off a mod to the original Half-Life that adds ray-tracing (and a few other things) and it was maybe the first time I've seen one of these complete ray-traced overhauls that I think I actually like.
Looking at other RT mods they've highlighted in the past or, say, seeing Minecraft with "HD" textures, these efforts can often feel pretty "Nintendo, Hire This Man" as, while technically impressive, they fail to recreate the feeling the original styles provoked. Half-Life, perhaps due to its already sophisticated and convincing baked-in lighting, translates well to this new approach however.
(videos of) I think the reflections look way too severe (and as a result pretty silly), but aside from the artistic choice to add mirror-like reflections where there previously were none I really like the way this looks.
My PC is nowhere near powerful enough to run something like this so maybe this post seems a bit unnecessary (the Digital Foundry video exists and I'm effectively just recapping it) but this has got me thinking about a few things. It's easy to point to films that have been modified post-release and claim that meddling of that nature that sullies and tries to paper over the original work, but I think it's a bit more of a nuanced subject when it comes to games.
When moving an old game to a new piece of hardware is the goal to accurately reflect the experience that people had at the time or to simply reproduce the existing work under current conditions? Playing an old 32-bit game on a low-resolution CRT might look very different to an emulator running that same game on a 4K LCD, but would adding filters and noise back into the image be appropriate? Is that original, sort-of-fuzzy appearance even worth preserving?
Obviously this does apply to films and television as well (should the image be cleaned up? should clearer recordings be sourced?) but given how closely video games are tied to the specific hardware they were designed for I feel that this is almost always a pretty thorny topic. Motion smoothing and interpolation for films seems like a pretty clear artistic change that'd be worth avoiding, but is running a game at a higher framerate the same thing? I realize I'm rambling and going in circles here but this is some of the stuff I've been stewing on since I watched that video.
If I wanted to be topical I'd talk about the recent Dead
Space and Resident Evil 4 remakes but I, uh, haven't played
either of those so I can't really comment on them.*
Ultimately this is a mod so it's not necessarily any better (or worse) than, say, a fan-edit of a movie and Half-Life, in its original form, is still widely available, but I think it's worth looking at how something like this "updates" Half-Life when compared to Black Mesa or even Gearbox's "HD Models".
This was initially just going to be a Twitter thread because writing out a whole thing around a single YouTube video seemed a bit silly, but I realized I have a blog now so I may as well use it. Twitter's future also looks a bit rocky so keeping my thoughts somewhere else seemed like a wise choice.
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| The (apparent) Twitter logo at the time of writing |
*Not yet, anyway. Stay tuned.
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