I love valve. Not just because they’ve made one of the greatest series of all times, but the way they generally run their game company strikes me as being the right way to do things. I also love counter-strike. Well, it’s more of a love-hate relationship, but over the past 7 years, it’s the game that I’ve poured the most hours into and always seem to go back to every 3-6 months. The main reasons for this are it’s addictive gameplay, the fact I usually score in the top few players on the server (you’d hope so after so many years) and that you can pick it up, play a couple of rounds and quit in anger before Battlefield 2 has even loaded up a level.

So when valve decided to add HDR to Counter-Strike: Source (well, DOD:S first, but who plays that?) I was a little confused. Over the years I’ve come to terms with most game companies focussing on pumping up their graphics and then putting the time that’s left into gameplay, but when a decision like this is made it baffles me. To me, HDR isn’t that great to begin with, but when you add it to a multiplayer only game, you’ve gone from being ‘not great’ to completely pointless. Let me explain why….

HDR or High Dynamic Range means trying to represent the light levels seen in the real world on a computer screen. There are a number of different ways of implementing it, both correctly (using PS3.0 and above) or by faking it on lower end cards. You can tell a game has HDR as when the majority of the screen is dark, the bright parts will become really bright and visa-versa. For example if you are standing outside a room and look inside, the room will appear really dark, but when you walk into the room it will become brighter. This is supposed to mimic how the real world works, and it does, to a degree. In real life however it takes our eyes quite some time to adjust to the different light levels rather than a second or so as it is in games. Of course, it wouldn’t be feasible in games to take this long as all you’d see is enemies standing next to each other waiting for their ‘eyes to adjust’ so they could see each other and shoot.

Whether you think it is realistic or not, one thing is for sure, it’s the current fad, so any self respecting graphics coder is learning how to implement it and putting it in their latest 3D engine. The problem lies in how HDR affects the gameplay. The only effect HDR has on gameplay is to make life more difficult. Even with a one second transition time, when you enter a dark room, everything will be hard to see until the scene adjusts and makes everything bright. In a single player game, that’s fine, it looks cool, the games a little more realistic and harder. What about in a multiplayer game? The only reason for playing is going online and defeating other opponents. What if those opponents have such dodgy old video cards that HDR won’t run? They won’t be blind for the first second they run into a room and so they’ve got a distinct advantage. So by going out and spending $900 on the latest video card, and valve spending some of their valuable time adding it to a few of the Counter-strike maps you’re now at a disadvantage. Doesn’t that seem a little pointless? I think HDR has its place in today’s games, but please, will developers stop wasting their time implementing it in a game where we’ll be turning it off after the first 2 minutes because while it looks cool it’s actually impeding my ability to play.