My first thought, too. I was recently thinking about a replay of it, but I didn't want to ruin the nostalgia if it looked terrible, but I'm kinda excited about it, now. Those graphics hold up pretty damn well. I wish I had a release date on the mod so I could know if it's worth waiting to play it that way, or if it's still 2 years away.

Yeah, it's always had really strong art direction - still holds up, and you don't notice missing shadows so much in the middle of a frenetic sequence anyway.

Good to see ray tracing coming along. You could get the same shadows and lighting in a modern rasterising engine now as demonstrated in the RTX version, but at the cost of much more development time. Graphics like that being available to smaller studios and larger games being feasible for bigger studios would be great. HL2 is massive compared to modern shooters, and not having to spend forever tweaking each scene helps with that.