‘Half Life 2’ Is Getting a GeForce RTX Remaster! Yay! Many Fans Hate the Visual “Upgrades”! …Oh.

If there’s any one group of people who are the most “precious” about their nostalgia bumps, it’s gamers. So, I suppose it was inevitable when NVIDIA GeForce dropped a trailer for a remastered Half Life 2 that fans of the series would react… erratically. Simply called “Half-Life 2 RTX,” the project is a community effort to renew one of gaming’s most beloved titles. However, there’s an ongoing divide between fans over certain visual enhancements. But, what do y’all think?

Me, I’ve never had any close bonds with the Half Life series. I can’t say I particularly have a dog in this fight. But, judging by the comments surrounding the trailer? It seems Half Life 2 RTX suffers from a bit of the Silent Hill HD Collection “remaster” syndrome. Where “cleaning up” the game’s graphics actually led to a lesser final product. Here, let me show you what I mean:

“Bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes the lighting is too strong. Other times the remastered textures somehow look worse than the old ones. Sometimes it just looks like the scene is plastic. There are scenes where it looks gorgeous, but rarely does all of it come together like that,” one commenter said. And that’s the consensus regarding Half Life 2 RTX at the moment.

‘half life 2 rtx’ limps out of the gate rather than sprints, according to fans

“Our goal with Half Life 2 RTX is to deliver a new way to experience Valve’s classic, using cutting-edge rendering tech to bring the game to life in a way never before possible. At the same time, we’ll be remastering all of the game’s assets. To be made available to the community for free. With Half Life 2 RTX and the release of its assets, we hope to ignite new passion within the community to explore the potential of RTX in remastering classic mods, or making new mods with RTX in mind!” says a statement on the project’s official website.

According to many, the remaster takes areas intended to be dark, gloomy, and foreboding and strips them of all those lighting/environmental nuances that made the original setting iconic. However, it’s one thing to criticize a project before it releases and another to see how that feedback is taken and potentially implemented. Additionally, players will be able to see how Half Life 2 RTX plays in motion when the Steam demo releases on March 18.