This is really cool! Not to detract from how awesome it is that Valve lets fans do this to their games without fear of legal repurcussions, but I've always been impressed by how little Valve games require visual overhauls. Even Half Life is stylized in such a way that it really doesn't need any changes, with it's bright cartoony color palette and angular space-age laboratory designs. I recently played through Black Mesa, and while it really is an accomplishment (completely remaking an entire game in a new engine is no small feat), it only made me more excited to go back to the original and remember how well it still holds up.
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 In either case, their art direction utterly carries the visuals of these games, and neither one feels particularly outdated (though Portal could probably use some better lighting).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.
I relaunched Portal 2 recently (on the Steam Deck) and the game is as gorgeous as it used to be. It could be a game released today and nobody would notice anything. And this game can run on any nowadays potato.
I don't disagree. I will say that I deeply wish Valve enforced the guidelines more fiercely with the community created items. The original games (I mostly play DotA 2, but some TF2 as well) were essentially aesthetically perfect and I really wish there was a way for me to turn cosmetics off entirely.
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.
I bet you could make a killing on Etsy selling MOBA abstinence coins a-la Alcoholics Anonymous sobriety chips. There's a nice sizable market of League of Legends players who could probably use one.
If anyone needs a fix of Portal related content and hasn't yet played Portal: Prelude I can't recommend it highly enough. It's been a while (10+ years, oof I'm old now) since I've played it so take my gushing with a grain of salt, but I recall it being well written, not enough to rival Portal, but perhaps enough to rival Portal 2. The puzzles however were the most fun of any portal based game I'd ever played.
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.
Does source support any sort of hardware-accelerated raytracing? I don't think there have been any other graphics advancements of the caliber of hardware RT since Portal 2 came out.
It really pushed the tools in terms of puzzle challenges. It threw out a lot of soft rules and let players expand their reasoning. I remember some puzzles requiring the player to fly through a complex series of portals that would look like complete chaos from a 3rd person perspective observer.
One of my favorite gaming moments ever is the transition from the old test shafts back into the enrichment center (which leads to the finale)
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.
"Act 3" of Portal 2 is perhaps surprising only by how short it is! I think it sticks in people's heads as the largest part of Portal 2, but it's only 8 levels (2 intro levels, 2 for Blue Gel puzzles, 1 transition, 2 for Orange Gel, 1 finale). By comparison, the wrecked facility afterwards with Wheatley is almost double, at 15 levels.
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.
My Portal 2 moment was thinking that the game was almost over at the point of falling down into the salt mine, only to discover this entirely unknown, enormous whole other environment.
Fully agree. Even Portal 1 did it for me starting right with the first chambers. Those pipes and cables emerging through the orange glow behind or underneath some platforms. What is that glow? Why orange? Where is that coming from? Where does it lead to? What's going on behind these white, sterile walls?
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.
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.
Valve is great. Especially in comparison to some other game companies. Were this a Nintendo project, the devs would risk at best a Cease and Desist. The vibe I get from Nintendo is that they would probably flog their fan-game devs if they could legally get away with it.
Let's see if Bethesda, under Microsoft, maintains their support of mods.
My head canon says that Valve allows fans of its ips to come out with these sorts of graphical remasters (theres also black mesa) because they are pretty preoccupied with steam.
I think it's more than that. Surely having a money printing machine like steam makes it easier to ignore stuff like this, but you also have to remember that Counter Strike was a fan-made mod in the beginning and now it's one of the most played games on the planet and Valve produces it itself now. There's got to be a baked in appreciation for how letting fans do these sorts of things can directly boost their profits.
Tangentially, my main game for almost the past year has been Splitgate which is heavily inspired by Portal (and Halo). If you like portal and arena shooters it is definitely worth a try.
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.
Thank you for this pointer - I've often thought that an arena shooter with portals would be fun, and actually thought about trying to mod Xonotic a couple of times to pull it off (I obviously never did - couldn't quite grok the build system or the code at the time).
I looked this up on steam and noticed it's f2p, have you noticed any negative impact from that?
I haven't seen any of the usual shady f2p dark patterns which is another reason I've stuck around Splitgate for a while. It was refreshing and honestly I was getting really tired of games predatory approaches. The community has really been great too, I haven't ever really hung around a games discord/twitch/community events before. There are "supercustom" events every weekend where people get together to play curated community maps which has been great but also from the variety there makes me think the game has barely even started tapping the potential they could have with non-traditional arena maps enabled by the portal mechanics.
I've always thought there was some potential for shooters with portals, but when I see Splitgate, it's not really it.
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.
For what it's worth, the Portal 2 community maps (available to download and play within the game itself!) are really good. Each week there are about 3-4 new really fantastic puzzles to play, and of course there's a healthy back catalog.
https://www.thinking.withportals.com/ was (is?) the big community for this. I was part of it around the time Valve released their easy map editor (the "perpetual testing initiative")---more than a decade ago now. I had the pleasure of testing the editor before its release. It was an exciting time!
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.
Given the Herculean efforts (and superb results) of Rosetta and Rosetta 2, I'm still appalled that Apple couldn't have found a way to keep running 32 bit apps, even at a performance hit through some level of emulation or containerization.
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?"
Recently tried replaying portal 2. The graphics aged just fine over the past decade; unfortunately the same is not true of the writing and humor. Has a very reddit-circa-2010 vibe. I guess comedy is one of the more difficult fields in which to create a real classic, because of changing social mores but also because most humor relies on novelty. Few video game memes have been beaten to a more thorough pulp than “the cake is a lie”, companion cube, etc.
If your humor relies on novelty and the novelty is gone, the humor is gone. It is different with story structures. It isn’t just those examples, though. Play the game or watch a video of the intro sequence and see for yourself. It’s just a lot of “snark” type humor that was prominent at the time.
Personally I never really like graphical overhaul mods that do more than just add subtle technical improvements to what's already there. The art direction is usually such an important part of a game that doing things like changing colours, shadows, and textures always seems to lose something that made the original coherent and unique.
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.
Man Im getting old, all I could hear in the attached Video was "We made it slower because our modern >$1K GPUs can run it, sucks to be you".
"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?
> Desolation runs on an in-house modified version of the Source Engine
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.
47 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 97.7 ms ] threadHalf 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/...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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?
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.