Aielyn said:
The fact that you think that was the point of the argument shows me that you really didn't comprehend what he was saying. It's not the fact that the HD remakes had bad fog resulting in worse atmosphere. It's that, in the original game, the plan was for less fog than what was there. The reason for there being so much fog in the original is that the hardware didn't have good enough draw distance to go beyond that - the fog's original presence was due to necessity, not atmosphere. But it added to the atmosphere, and that's why they chose that particular solution. They came up with a great solution, fog, because there was a weakness in the hardware. A similar effect is used in the Endless Ocean games on the Wii. In other words, you seem to be focusing on the "look at Silent Hill HD" part, when the point was "look at the original Silent Hill". The observation of what the game was like in the HD remakes was merely a matter of contrast, demonstrating how the fog contributed to the atmosphere. |
The fog was present in the game anyway during development, in early alpha versions the fog wasnt as thick and the distance at which fog cut off the view distance was much higher, developers played around with the color, density and distance of the fog until they were happy with the atmosphere, "you don't really comprehend what he was saying", i comprehended it, but since it was wrong and based purely on what reviews of the day assumed was the reason for the density of the fog, i figured there was no point dipping in to it, but since you want to make a point of it there you go.
If you go grab yourself a debug console and the alpha version thats floating around the internet, or even just a gameshark, i'll gladly dig through my dads old archives and pull some memory address for switching between the various 'modes', and you'll see for yourself that the original console hardware was happily capable of running with the fog settings toned down.
Very early versions of the game didnt actually have fog at all and used the same textured geometry fade-in as Tenchu Stealth Assasins.
Incidentally the game switched to a different fog present during some of it's cutscenes for scenematic purposes then switches back when the effect of closing the player in is more suited to a denser array, so again, his point about how technical limitations effected the eventual atmosphere is just wrong.
Draw distance for later gamers (hd remakes, hello) was delibrately cut knowing the fog that had become a trait of the game would hide the geometry load-in.
Fact of the matter is the cull distance is 25% less than the hardwares limited because of the developers preference, not because they were forced to.
