I'm ready for all the abuse, and the expletives that will be probably thrown in my direction when I say this, but I played the demo of FEAR after just playing Half-Life 2 again, and I felt that the graphics were a bit on the crappy side. I mean, I had the settings on full whack, (well, most of them anyway), but all those sparks and shadows just didn't cut it for me. Am I the only one who thinks this? :inquisiti
I agree, I don't think the graphics are revolutionary or anything, they're nice, but I prefer half life 2 and battlefield 2 to be honest....and the smoke is dreadful!
They are a different style of graphics to HL2, personally I perfer HL2 visually. But FEAR adds a new gameplay style.
I thought they were crap, but my system isn't very good(9600pro, 2.5ghz XP, 1Gb). Now bear with me before you yell "it'll look crap on a crap system", y'see, HL2, Doom3, and Farcry all run nicely in 1280x1024 with either an average of medium settings, they look great, they play great.
However, I play FEAR and I need to run in 1024x768 with low settings, not only does it get worse frame rates then any of the above games, but it looks worse because all the settings are on low. It looks crap, it plays crap. In my opinion, of equal importance to the way a game looks on maximum settings, is the way a game scales, and this game obviously does not scale at all well. It's a shame, because it's intresting and I might have bought it just to have a good FPS to play, but as it is, no. Scalability is a big thing devs!
When you see FEAR running on a nice card like a GT or GTX you won't believe the sheer volume of special FX on screen all at once ;)
But no, the GFX aren't particulary impressive on their own :)
The graphics on its own isn't that impressive, but the combination of all of them makes it a winner.. they just added just the right amount of bullet debris, the right amount of blood and the right amount of volume ripples to make this a pretty darn scary and good looking game...
MGS fans, don't compare this with Metal Gear Solid 4... I know that old man looks really good on a PS3...
looks like swat4 imo. they both suck
I knew I wasn't on my own, many reviews especially US have rated it on its graphics like "OMG, OMG these graphics r0x0r 111111" and like it the best out there. Crytek's The Project has the best I've seen for ages.
The problem with fear (imo) is that the creators have cloaked the much of the game in darkness/shadows, without these the majority of the scenery is pretty average. An easy way to demonstrate this in the demo is to turn off all dynamic lighting/shadows - leaving you with a well lit (non scary) level. I think similar comments where made about Doom 3 using this type of trickery!
Although in all fairness with most settings at max/med on a x850XT PE @ 1280 the overall game looks quite good!
=TcQi=