Indeed.
In my posts yesterday, I did not pre-judge the quality, or lack thereof, of the update.
My negativity towards it was on 2 counts.
First, that the level cap increase of it should have been a separate, free patch, available to all players of the original game.
Second, that it is a reprehensibly evil business practice to charge money for a mere graphics update, and wrap the useful update into that, in a way which will exclude gamers who can play the original version, but whose systems aren't powerful enough for the graphics update.
I was annoyed that I would not be able to even try this graphics update as the system build I did in November last year does not meet the minimum system requirements for the update.

Okay I played 2 hours and compared to the original a bit and here are down and dirty initial thoughts...

- The new global illumination looks nice but is super demanding. It doesn't change as much as you think it might to turn it off, and that boosts frames a ton. With it on low I can get to 60 but not sure if it's worth it or not yet. The lighting even without GI has been much improved already.... BUT...

- There's a difference between more realistic and "better," you know? This is something I frequently think about with ray tracing and similar tech like this GI. It is more realistic for the cockpit to be super dark, yes, but does it look BETTER? A designer chose how to make the cockpit look before, now a random algorithm did it with the goal of pure realism. Meh.

- Other improvements like denser grass and longer LOD distance look great. There's no argument otherwise.

- Whole game looks crisper, cause of textures and likely better TAA and it seems like they toned down the post-processing blur of the original. Faces definitely look better, and aren't as weirdly lit as the original (though again, that's how TOW is supposed to look so...).

- It seems like enemies damage you less on hard mode. I played back and forth with the remaster and original and they killed me waaaay faster in the original. Maybe a bug.

All in all it seems rather minor and probably not worth the $10, especially if you're not going to use the higher settings. Also I really think I kinda hate the lighting sometimes, but then other times it looks good. Frustrating.


All good man, I thought after our replies that you were in the right.