The water in Destiny is a colossal disappointment. (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Monday, July 21, 2014, 21:33 (3796 days ago) @ Oholiab
edited by uberfoop, Monday, July 21, 2014, 21:38

I hope there's CG water that I can admire somewhere...

The water in Destiny is a massive disappointment.

The shading sucks. The water simply doesn't sit nicely in its environment. Anisotropy doesn't feel right, and the specular seems too strong, especially when viewing water face-on (poor/nonexistent fresnel effect?). I haven't noticed dynamic lights interacting with water in any sort of interesting way. The screen-space reflections carry all the usual artifacts, causing the reflection to change nonsensically as you look around:

I mean, I'm a huge proponent of real-time reflections, but I don't want them if they mean an astronomical sacrifice to visual stability (yeah, my battle against SSR is a losing one, I know).

The water doesn't have the beautiful geometric response of Halo 3's either. It looks like it might be taking the Halo 4 approach of just normal-mapping the water. The way the water responds to dynamic objects splashing in it is short-lived and just plain not that great.

Waterfalls look alright from a distance, but they disappear as you approach and get replaced by a ridiculous animated "wet vision" effect across your screen that doesn't react to your location or view direction.

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Probably my least favourite water in any Bungie FPS.