This was one thing that surprised me when playing the remastered version of Halo. It looked exactly as I remembered it. Then I swapped to the original graphics and realized my nostalgia and memories had added lots of extra details.
Somewhat, you can still see how the sky looks unnatural from the HDR effect which just ruins everything. The top is a more natural realistic sky. Shoreline is kinda weird too.
But I don’t think it is just simple HDR tonemapping, it doesn’t do that, but rather some type of color grading going on. The bottom is over saturated and over contrasty.
Far Cry 3 was miles better than the first two. In fact it was because of the success of 3 that every later game was just a copy of it, and the franchise stagnated.
Far Cry 3 and subsequent games were pop fun with little replayability. FC2 was a game I've lived in, with a printout of the map, marked up for patrols, so I could navigate safely from A to B for each mission.
Better? I'd rather say less challenging, more accessible, but also far less rewarding. More successful, no doubt. But the only sequel I spent a lot of time in was Blood Dragon.
There's a lot to be admired by Far Cry 2: the environmental mechanics, the introduction, the lighting effects, the gritty and exotic atmosphere... but to me it was not a fun game. Not in the way that Far Cry 1 was fun.
The immersion is what sold it to me. No hud, no on screen markers. Need to look at map? Pull it out, hold it in your hand and look at it. I'm surprised no other AAA game has tried this formula.
FC1 lost its fun with the mutants. FC2 never stopped being fun to me, because it was essentially a giant open world game of Thief: get from A to B without being detected (since enemy patrols respawned, there was no point killing them).
> (since enemy patrols respawned, there was no point killing them)
This is the main thing that made it not fun for me, lol. There really is no point in partaking in random combat in the open-world. It's always better to run away or sneak past them. Fine in a stealth game, but FC2 didn't have great stealth mechanics beyond crouching and staying far away from enemies.
I thought it simulated reasonably well the dynamics of a lone gunman on a mission in a civil war. It seems to me the only way to navigate such warzones would be stealth or disguise.
All the other FC games are stealth games too, BTW. The later FC games made it even more explicit, with bonuses for never setting off alarms and so on.
True but it just felt too fast with the respawns. Maybe my memory is wrong but it felt like going far away enough to despawn that zone from RAM was enough to make them respawn. I would have preferred a few days. If I clear a camp enough, maybe have them bring backup.
I stopped playing the series after 3 because they did feel that way, but without gameplay features I wanted to match. Games that rewarded stealth, but without stealth-specific mechanics like you'd find in Hitman or MGS. It feels like the writers want to encourage stealth but the game designers didn't. At least for 1-3. The original I definitely accepted it more because of the era.
If they’d re-release Far Cry 2 with graphics on par with FC 5, I might never play anything else. I could hike around all day admiring the scenery in FC 5, or ride a jet ski from one end of the river to the other. But the story was hokey and tropey, most of the characters were uninteresting, and the ending was enough to put me off of Ubisoft for good. FC 2 had a great story, great characters, lots of interesting mechanics. And of course, the Standard Ubisoft Paradigm (climb a $TALL to unlock a map quadrant, sneak into $PLACE and fight $HEAVY, $SNIPER, and $LIGHT, have a $FORCEDENCOUNTER with $SUBBBOSS for some exposition), was still new enough that we weren’t tired of it yet.
> FC 2 had a great story, great characters, lots of interesting mechanics. And of course, the Standard Ubisoft Paradigm (climb a $TALL to unlock a map quadrant, sneak into $PLACE and fight $HEAVY, $SNIPER, and $LIGHT, have a $FORCEDENCOUNTER with $SUBBBOSS for some exposition), was still new enough that we weren’t tired of it yet.
FC2 didn't have that. FC2 was set in Africa. It's still my favourite of the bunch for a lot of reasons (only a little because I understand the local language the mooks are screaming to each other when you're in the middle of a firefight).
It's funny, when I first bought FC2 I played for about 8 hours and I hated it.
When I went back to it after about 8 years, I found that I appreciated the immersion a lot more, and it quickly became my favourite.
I liked Far Cry 4's setting and characters, but the game otherwise seemed very lazy and uninspired. Bland map and very little do to in between outposts. Little emergent fun to be had, except for doing missions or clearing outposts. Same complaint with Far Cry Primal; really neat idea but lazy/rushed execution.
What is really interesting, is that lots of people would accuse you of rose-tinted spectacles and similar, I have continued to game from about 1998 until today.
the gaming industry is in a very odd place, and not unlike the film industry. Rehashes and sequels to increasingly aging 80s and 90s franchieses is the done thing. It generates nostalgia bucks from the older folks, the new folks are ignorant of the originals so just consume them at face value, and there is the magic 3rd property of being much cheaper to develop than creating something original.
This has lead to a huge drought of good new things because MBAs are not condusive to creative risks.
In gaming, what also follows the same line is stuff like graphical development. It's far more economical to take the Original game engine, and just gradually modify it as each generation passes. As a result, the most recent Far Cry game is almost identical in graphical quality to the last 3-4 at least (and it's not massively far away from the original either).
Because of cost-saving increment culture. Now, there is an additional element at play here, increasing polygon counts are exponentially uneffective - if a car with a circular wheel has 3 points, it looks awful. Double those points to 6, and hexagonal wheels look a hell of a lot better, and are passable in many older games. Double it again to 12 and it becomes indistinguishable from a circle at a glance. Double it to 24 and you would barely notice, double it again and it looks no different to the last generational increment.
The other issue is despite tooling coming so far, we it still takes a human artist the same amount of time to draw and design something. If that has to be done at increasingly extreme levels of detail, it's going to require more artists (and artists also don't even work well like that). So that also presents new problems.
So along with all the cost-saving and business optimisation of the pipeline of games production, there are real factors at play in how things have improved that really change how things look and feel.
I will say, if you watch a youtube video of the original game being played in high detail on a high end machine (this would have been before 1080p was a thing I believe) and watch a video of FC6 with a modern high-end machine at max settings, it's still impressive.
As a Far Cry fanatic, even the difference between Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 is substantial. Far Cry 3 is one of those games where the gameplay is so good, you don't even pay attention to graphics, but with 4, you are on a different planet.
Stopped gaming years ago but saw my cousin playing Far Cry 6 the other day and it looked better but not that much better. After 17 years. Crazy.