Comment on Let's discuss: Half-Life
winety@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
I’ve only played the first few minutes of the first Half Life (I know, it’s on my list™). I had to turn off texture filtering immediately; the game looks terrible otherwise. Question: Why did games of this era (Morrowind also comes to mind) look this way, i.e. blurry?
I remember my brother secretly installed a graphics card on the family PC and I first noticed because when I started playing Half-Life it looked all smooth and “milky.”
I think they did it because they could? Like more pixels = more hi def. But of course the textures weren’t actually high res, so everything is interpolated
SteposVenzny@beehaw.org 6 months ago
Blurry looks more realistic than blocky, especially on the low-resolution CRT monitors old games were designed for.
Now that we’ve got better screens and games with better graphics, we see early 3D as a stylized aesthetic and a lack of texture filtering fits that retro aesthetic better but these games’ actual goal they were made with was realism.