How often do you root through boxes or crates and flip them over to scrutinize their undersides in real life? My answer: Never. How often do I do those things in Half-Life: Alyx? Far more than I should.
Valve's return to the Half-Life universe checks all the boxes fans expect from installments of the franchise: A dirty dystopia, weapons with heft, environmental storytelling, and scalable tech. All of that coalesces to present a world that feels lived in, and that you live in. Hallways are adorned with paintings, photographs, debris, and all sorts of objects to tinker with--and without feeling recycled.
Grab a box, turn it around, and note its unique textures. Pick up a bottle and shake it to note the way the liquid inside sloshes around. That's a testament to Half-Life: Alyx's physics, sure, but as any fan of Half-Life 2 will tell you, physics goes hand-in-hand with visuals to inject (literal and figurative) virtual worlds with verisimilitude.
I don't even feel encouraged to poke my eyes into every nook and cranny. I just want to. The visuals make exploring feel natural, especially when hunting for ammo and resin with which to upgrade my weapons. It feels like a real place, and while I'd never want to live in City 17, I always enjoy visiting.
Check out the other winners from The Shacknews Awards 2020 in our Year of the Games: 2020 article.
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Shacknews
replyDavid Craddock posted a new article, Shacknews Best Graphics of 2020 - Half-Life: Alyx
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These were all deliberations that occurred before the GOTY 2020 vote. You shouldn’t draw any conclusions either way.
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So the same percentage able to play Cyberpunk as intended. Cool.
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I got VR set up on my 1070 with an Odyssey+ for $350 and this was a couple of years ago. Also VR sets were selling out right before Alyx came out so it was definitely driving up interest. More and more shackers are getting VR. 3080s are todays new hotness, eventually their sales will start to die down.
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So?
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What difference does it make how many people are able to play it?
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I can swing the cash but VR makes me sick and I desperately want to enjoy it. I’m bummed because I think this will kill the tech (at least for me.) I am more hyped for AR these days.
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I bought the vive when it came out. It’s been collecting dust. VR got hyped into oblivion and silly awards like this doesn’t help. Sure, strap on your crazy expensive vr headset to experience the “best graphics of 2020” in all its screen door glory. Get tired of punching the air after 2hrs and go play a game you can relax with. Or maybe you just don’t feel like rearranging everything to make that VR space again. I sometimes hate on ray tracing too but at least nothing fundamental like motion sickness/physics is standing in its way. Might as well have given this award to Cyberpunk.
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Nope, it didn’t. It was nominated and didn’t win as it scales extremely poorly.
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They do a lot with techniques that have been around for a very long time.
The humans aren't realistic by any means, they're halfway between "real" and a Pixar cartoon. It is stylistically consistent and they look great, that's all that matters.
The massive indirect lighting that gives environments a realistic overcast look is all baked in while indirect specular lighting I assume uses local cubemaps. It looks like baked lighting on static objects and some real-time on objects you can manipulate. I assume its a lot of the same techniques that were used in The Last Of Us Part 2.
With both games I assume a LOT of time went into baking everything into the maps once things were locked down. The large indirect lighting effect in both games looks expensive as hell from a computational standpoint, but on the plus side you can either run on lower-end hardware (a PS4 slim in the case of TLOU2) or maintain the extremely high framerates necessary for VR-
Given Cyberpunk has dynamic TOD they're not using baked lighting and would be using dynamic probes. Differentiating the lighting model based on static and dynamic geometry is a little bit archaic at this point, most things would use a unified model. Especially with PBR where even the diffuse contribution is somewhat view dependent.
At the very least "baked" lighting would mean precomputed probes and everything would still use a unified lighting model. But once you have dynamic TOD you need to be able to recalculate the probe data regardless.
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I'm working my way through it now and I'm blown away at how good it looks sometimes.
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Very little screen door effect in the latest headsets. The Vive is like 4 years old now.
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This is my GOTY.
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