iqzulk
Augur
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2012
- Messages
- 294
HL1, I think, is the game which kinda expects you to stick your nose in every single wall in order to see every single little detail of every single painted texture and to (pardon me) masturbate to every singly strange piece of machinery you encounter on your way. I also get the impression that it kinda wanted to be a some kind of survival horror game, with accent on environment interaction, all that strange and deadly machinery with unclear purposes all around you, etc. and counting every single bullet trying to survive with 10HP.
There are two problems, of course. The first one is that the hardware renderer with default gamma settings produces a pile of blurry gray vomit with absolutely washed out colors (didn't I mention gray?), texture filtration (didn't I mention blurry?) absolutely destroying all the lovely painted textures. The environments look "unrealistically" empty and the actual game just feels wrong - and not in the conceptual "strange research base with alien mechanisms and otherworldly beasts" sense too - wrong, empty and really, really boring. And the very LAST thing you'll actually want to do in such environments is to stick your nose into yet another pile of dark-grey vomit, which is meant to represent yet another piece of "strange machinery".
The second one is that Half-Life, even of hard, is kinda too easy game to be considered anything even close to any form of survival horror (and, well, there just isn't any survivalist resource management other than your usual FPS bullets-armor-HP fare). Moreover, its mechanics are completely unfit for it because three biggest risks in the entire game are instadeaths from falling/machinery, hitscanning marines and the grenades tossed in your general direction by the aforementioned hitscanning marines. And any sort of difficulty rebalance (not that I'm aware of any, mind you) heightening the risks would only make the two of the latter already frustrating mechanics proportionally more frustrating.
As for countering those two problems, I can advise you the following.
First of all, play the game using software renderer ONLY (or at the very least, if on hardware, with texture filtration set to nearest instead of bilinear) - Quake-style - AND with gamma and glare reduction set to absolute minimum. Thus, you'll have at least some really interesting painted textures and some really interesting colors, which would at least somewhat reignite the interest to exploring all the lovingly modelled and textured surroundings. Plus the jaggies noise will "fill up" the empty spaces enough for them to look tolerable. I would also advise to set resolution to 640x480 (sadly, too much moire due to the crapload of high-contrast directional patterned textures) or 800x600 (not enough jaggie-noise to completely fill up surroundings, still extensive moire so there's no distinctive advantage over 640x480 in that regard, the sky textures look dead wrong in this res compared to 640x480), so that the visuals don't look too clean, empty and sterile.
As for the second issue, I'd just advise you to play on hard and regard this game as some kind of highly atmospheric yet casual "curious textures, strange gadgets and weird alien creatures eyeballing simulation" with some occasional tough fights here and there (surroundings - first, baddies - second) - and that's that.
There are two problems, of course. The first one is that the hardware renderer with default gamma settings produces a pile of blurry gray vomit with absolutely washed out colors (didn't I mention gray?), texture filtration (didn't I mention blurry?) absolutely destroying all the lovely painted textures. The environments look "unrealistically" empty and the actual game just feels wrong - and not in the conceptual "strange research base with alien mechanisms and otherworldly beasts" sense too - wrong, empty and really, really boring. And the very LAST thing you'll actually want to do in such environments is to stick your nose into yet another pile of dark-grey vomit, which is meant to represent yet another piece of "strange machinery".
The second one is that Half-Life, even of hard, is kinda too easy game to be considered anything even close to any form of survival horror (and, well, there just isn't any survivalist resource management other than your usual FPS bullets-armor-HP fare). Moreover, its mechanics are completely unfit for it because three biggest risks in the entire game are instadeaths from falling/machinery, hitscanning marines and the grenades tossed in your general direction by the aforementioned hitscanning marines. And any sort of difficulty rebalance (not that I'm aware of any, mind you) heightening the risks would only make the two of the latter already frustrating mechanics proportionally more frustrating.
As for countering those two problems, I can advise you the following.
First of all, play the game using software renderer ONLY (or at the very least, if on hardware, with texture filtration set to nearest instead of bilinear) - Quake-style - AND with gamma and glare reduction set to absolute minimum. Thus, you'll have at least some really interesting painted textures and some really interesting colors, which would at least somewhat reignite the interest to exploring all the lovingly modelled and textured surroundings. Plus the jaggies noise will "fill up" the empty spaces enough for them to look tolerable. I would also advise to set resolution to 640x480 (sadly, too much moire due to the crapload of high-contrast directional patterned textures) or 800x600 (not enough jaggie-noise to completely fill up surroundings, still extensive moire so there's no distinctive advantage over 640x480 in that regard, the sky textures look dead wrong in this res compared to 640x480), so that the visuals don't look too clean, empty and sterile.
As for the second issue, I'd just advise you to play on hard and regard this game as some kind of highly atmospheric yet casual "curious textures, strange gadgets and weird alien creatures eyeballing simulation" with some occasional tough fights here and there (surroundings - first, baddies - second) - and that's that.
