NBtoaster said:
Well I should specifically say the baked environemnt shadows are what bothers me. At least they're dynamic in MW.
Why do they bother you? They are usually of quite good quality.
Hell, even Mirror's Edge, which gets always praised by it's lighting, has baked shadows..
Imp the Dimp said:
I always felt there's a distinct gray filter in both MWs. Plants aren't as green as in Crysis, white walls like the ones in the airport aren't as white as walls in Mirror's Edge etc. CoD obviously aims to look as realistic as possible without eye-catching post processing effects and yet it feels uncanningly 'cold'.
Half-Life 2 does a better job at conveying the image of a dirty, threatening environment despite its vibrant color palette.
With "gray filter" I guess you mean less contrast. Some areas far from the gameplay environments do indeed look a bit gray, but that's probably volumetric fog to achieve a better (?) depth effect, and make it feel like the environments have larger scale than they do.
Even then, dark areas are dark as they should, bright areas are bright. It depends on how you configure your TV and all that too, but either way I don't think the game is really lacking on contrast. At least not in a way that it makes it look bad.
It's been quite a while since I played HL2 so I can't really remember, sorry.