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Modding Community Putting HD Textures Into Resident Evil 4
jones_supa writes: The Ultimate HD Edition of Resident Evil 4 does not fully adhere to its name, as terrain textures are actually not in high definition. A couple of fans called Cris and Albert are chipping in to help fix this deficiency. The pair is working for free to create the RE4 HD Project, a mod which is cleaning up the game's chunky textures and producing some nice and sharp screenshots. At present, it looks like the project is already about half complete, and an HD texture pack for the Village section of the game is available at the project website.
"HD" is an unfortunate bullshit marketing term that should be taken out and beaten to death with the same shovel used to dig its shallow grave; but that doesn't change the fact that there are 'textures that look really atrocious on a contemporary high-ish resolution LCD; despite having looked OK in my memories of the game as played on by a CRT TV being fed a composite video signal'. And, because Capcom are just that lazy, Resident Evil 4 HD apparently has them.
The fact that "HD" carefully avoids meaning anything specific, while vaguely suggesting better sensory experiences worth paying more for, is obnoxious; but that doesn't change the fact that time has not been kind to some games; and some of the sins that phosphor dots and analog video used to smear into a warm glow just turn into a swarm of razor-sharp jagged pixels and offend your eyes mercilessly on newer hardware. Low resolution textures are one of those sins, probably among the worst(low-poly models don't look very realistic; but they don't grate on you), and one that doesn't get fixed as often because redoing a big chunk of art assets is a lot of trouble.
If I can overlook the choice of words, perhaps you could. "High resolution" would have been a good fitting term.
If we can see well, our daily life treats us with a good amount of eye candy. So, if we couldn't see the texture on a object any better than what was released on that game, we would get glasses, or stronger glasses.
It's projects like this that make good game better.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Generally speaking, I'd say you can consider an "HD texture" to be any in-game texture where you can't see the individual pixels sized significantly greater than the native resolution of your screen. That is, if it looks blocky on-screen, it's not HD.
There's no way to say exactly what resolution this entails, because it all depends on how far away the camera can get during typical gameplay, combined with how far the artist stretched a single texture across a given set of geometry. Naturally, the bar as been raised quite a bit with 4K monitors and resolutions, but I think most people would still consider never seeing a scaled texture at 1080p to be a pretty good visual experience.
Sure, there's no official definition for "HD textures" in a game, but you tend to know it when you see it.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Really?
I went back and played the original X-Com again (for the first time in a decade or so) after I finished the remake. And what I found was a game whose graphics hadn't held up quite so badly as others of a similar vintage, but whose gameplay was showing serious signs of age.
On the tactical side, squads felt overly large, micromanagement was excessive by any reasonable estimation and the random number generator was allowed to become far too dominant in determining the outcome of combat. The need to play "hunt the last alien" before you could successfully complete a mission made certain missions, particularly some of the terror missions with complex cityscapes, an absolute grind.
By contrast, the remake is slicker and smarter. I felt like it was doing more than the old X-Com to make me use all of my assets in the field and was striking a more appropriate balance between luck and skill. Moreover, with the troopers being a little less vulnerable and having more defined traits to carry over between missions, I felt a sense of connection with my squad that was missing in the old game.
Now, the remake isn't perfect; I think allowing an extra 2 soldiers in the tactical squads (so 8 rather than 6) would have struck a better balance. The strategic game is undeniably less sophisticated than in the original (though also less repetitive in the late-game stages).
But on balance, I would rank the remake as being the better game, in objective terms - and in terms of both gameplay and graphics. Admittedly, the original was a far more striking game when it was first released and had a genre-defining impact that the remake didn't. But put them side by side and I'd take the remake.