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The developer of Hard Reset Redux has addressed concerns that the remastered first-person shooter has suffered a visual ‘downgrade’ from the original game.
Flying Wild Hog was attacked on Reddit and the Steam forums by a number of players unhappy with what they perceived as ‘lackluster’ visuals, defined by an apparent lack of ambient occlusion, absent lighting effects and blurry textures.
The studio has since issued a statement to PC Gamer, explaining some of the technical changes in the re-release.
“One of the main undertakings that we made when developing Redux, was to upgrade the game to the new version of our in-house Roadhog game engine (RoadHog v2),” it states.
“The new Dynamic system is one of the changes that came with this move of engines, as our new engine no longer uses Baked Ambient Occlusion (none of the games we’ve released have used this post the original Hard Reset).
“The new Dynamic system used in Redux is an overall improvement, as it works on ALL OBJECTS instead of ONLY STATIC ones. This is an important change in a game like Redux, as it features a ton of dynamic objects with physics. So this new system works better to highlight more of the objects that players will be directly interacting with during their playtime (e.g. characters, barrels, terminals etc).
“Nothing has been removed from the game, as it just currently uses a different system which highlights more objects instead of a pre-determined selection."
It continued: "As with the Occlusion system, we have changed the post-processing filters we used in the original Hard Reset. Redux does not use the same Image Sharpen Post Process which was used in the original H.R. This change was made to decrease aliasing, which cause flickering during camera motion. Because of this the game can at times look worse during static screens, but it looks better in motion.
“Hard Reset Redux is a game where players will constantly be moving and shooting; so this change was made to improve the overall visual experience that the game delivers during gameplay.”
Flying Wild Hog added that it would examine claims that lighting and particle effects were missing, with fixes issued as and when problems are identified and solved.
“Overall we all feel confident that Redux represents a solid improvement over the original Hard Reset,” the developed concluded.
“Not just because of the new content and features that we added which improve gameplay and add new variety (even for seasoned HR players), but because Redux is a considerably better performing game which offers players a smoother and better balanced overall experience.”
