Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
The area is like a bunch of platforms supported by gigantic springs. It made me stop and appreciate how mysterious, thoughtful, and interesting the entire environment was. I really just wanted to explore more of the depths after experiencing it.
sp_a3_03 (the intro to the underground area) and sp_a3_end (the climb you mention, with the new facility hoisted on top of the springs) remain some of my favorite examples of excellent level design in video games.
If you're curious, you can see the level here if you want to study how it works in a bit more detail https://noclip.website/#Portal2/sp_a3_end;ShareData=AY[=[9qH...
The Portal games have this mysterious, unnerving feeling of being trapped and it makes you want to explore and peek behind the curtains. And the Devs let / make you do that. They knew what they were doing.
I'm starting to think that the environment / facility is the real antagonist. GLaDOS merely enhances it.
Let's see if Bethesda, under Microsoft, maintains their support of mods.
As were DOTA and Team Fortress! Taking well loved mods and giving them some AAA shine has been a rather successful strategy for Valve.
Half Life 2 and (to a lesser extent) Portal are in much the same boat. HL2 is a very gritty, filthy game that uses it's detail to expand on the story. By comparison, Portal is more sterile and mysterious with it's white plaster walls surrounding you on all sides, evoking feelings of solitary confinement or an insane asylum. In either case, their art direction utterly carries the visuals of these games, and neither one feels particularly outdated (though Portal could probably use some better lighting). Compared to the other mid-2000s games that came out alongside it, these two titles still feel comparatively fresh.
What else is there to even say? Team Fortress 2 is a modern classic, and probably has the most "timeless" art style of their entire catalog. Dota 2, albeit not my cup of tea, also recognizes the merits of having a strong visual presence. Portal 2 might have the strongest art direction of them all, contrasting the perfectly and meticulously arranged design of dozens of test chambers with the ramshackle, decomposing internals of a forgotten facility. I'm sure there's still some improvements to be made, but even today I think Portal 2 holds up marvelously.
In particular, this document is a fucking masterclass, I've learned more about making good visual choices from that FAQ than I have from any other single resource. I just wish it were law, not just guidelines.
[Dota 2 Workshop - Character Art Guide](https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/0688-7692-4D5A-19...)
P.S. Don't play DotA 2, but it's also the deepest multiplayer game ever made, except maybe Go, and I'll be playing it till the day I die.
I was the one who suggested making it a prequel and have scientists watching you and from behind the windows (tough I'm pretty sure Nyko forgot by the time he completed the mod). Odd seeing this mentioned here.
I still have a toe in the Source modding community and I'm watching Desolation with great interest. An absurd amount of effort went into this, augmenting the engine, the editor, inflicting vgui upon themselves…
Source is _not_ a flexible and cooperative engine, lots of hardcoded stuff, necessary workarounds, complicated workflows, but there's still a modding and mapping community and my only wish is for our Lord and Savior Gabe Newell to release the sources of Source (1), GoldSrc, and the tooling around them. So much could be done. I should mail him, iosource needs to happen.
The biggest improvement Source saw was in Source 2 with PBR. There's mention of raytracing in Source 2 [1] but I don't think anything was released.
[1]: https://github.com/SteamDatabase/GameTracking-Artifact-Beta/...
"no baked lights, reducing compile time from hours to minutes"
Logic error, my brain hurts. If they managed to optimize lighting subsystem to make it run at realtime speed then Light compile time could also take minutes. Why trying to sell it as some kind of speed optimization?
Sadly that editor was geared towards single-player maps, whereas my interest was always in the coop ones. If you'll forgive the shameless plug, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=89692... was my favourite to make. I put a lot of time into that, but sadly I lost the hard drive with the map's source files some years ago. It's done quite well on the workshop---which always surprises me. I had very little idea about level design or what constitutes a fun puzzle. Beginner's luck, maybe?
It was a lot of fun/pain/curiosity to work with and fight Valve's hammer editor. I remember thinking "this feels like a tool designed to make half-life maps". I can still remember tying brushes to func_detail entities so that they wouldn't contribute visleaves. Good times!
While I'm at it: I'd recommend the "sendificator" series: https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=29165303... . These introduce a new puzzle element entirely contained within the map file. I'm guessing it must use some kind of lua script to implement it, since it's entirely contained in the map.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1255980/Portal_Reloaded/
Portal, also with time travel. The puzzles are excellent and the environments are gorgeous. I remain dumbfounded that efforts like these come from people who are volunteering their time.
At the top competitive level especially having Portals in a FPS makes for interesting, intense, and fast paced games. It also makes camping essentially impossible.
I looked this up on steam and noticed it's f2p, have you noticed any negative impact from that?
For me, a Portal shooter would include stuff like grenades, gun nests, smoke bombs and flashes, guns that are really heavy and slow you down, etc. Stuff that would reward maneuvering and outsmarting your opponent, ambushes, and lateral thinking.
Gameplay hightlights would be the moments where your opponents thinks they're sneaking up on your by shooting a portal behind you, only for you to sneak up on them because you knew they'd come out of that portal; sniping someone through their own portals, etc.
Splitgate just feels like an arena shooter with lots of teleportation.
The official remasters of Halo 1 and 2 are good examples of how not to do it, Halo CE Anniversary edition in particular is truly horrid. Initially I was quite warm to Halo 2's treatment, but on a subsequent replay I felt that the new graphics took something away from the composition of many of the scenes.
Games' graphics and level design are designed for a specific level of graphical fidelity at that time in history. Going back to things and adding more greebling everywhere and making the shadows fancier won't necessarily improve the game, signposting is a subtle art and it's easy reduce clarity with additive changes.
Doing graphics overhauls and remasters right, without corrupting the original art direction is really really tough. Most of the time it tends to go wrong, hopefully Desolation turns out great.
It might be enough to ensure that my next purchase is a PC, despite finding Windows loathsome.
In addition to countless classic games being dead in the water, my Mom was completely blindsided by the change, suddenly losing access to several old-but-trusted productivity apps, and she had to scramble to find replacements. I don't recall there even being a generic warning during the upgrade process, let alone "the following apps will no longer function: [...]; do you wish to proceed?"
The "improved" lightning is not improved at all. Source 2 relies even more on backed lightning rendered on gpu farms because valve cares about majority of the people with non optimal gpus playing their games at 4k in vr, that's why you see crappy unreal engine games running 40 fps whilst HL Alyx is running at 90 with way better graphics. The desolation team is basically saying "welp you better get a 4090 Ti Super or you won't be running this at 120" .
Aside from that, I which them the best of luck, fan made portal games are always a treat.
Can't help but notice the lack of any concrete data in their press, though. I have no idea if I'll be able to play it on my computer.