We never got to see In the Valley of the Gods, the indefnitely delayed game from the makers of Firewatch after the studio was bought by Valve and shut down.
However, a former developer on the game has shared footage on what could’ve been. Matthew Wilde, a visual effects developer at Valve and previously on the In the Valley of the Gods team, shared a clip on Bluesky of what the water looked like in testing, and it looks incredibly realistic.
Even the compression on the video from posting on social media can’t hide that. Recommended Videos Related Square Enix just set a new bar for video game demos with its latest RPG Wilde, who most recently worked on water effects and shaders in Counter-Strike 2, previously wrote about how the team accomplished this.
We’ve seen similarly realistic water physics over the past couple of years, but in 2018, developers at studio Campo Santo had created a GPU-based simulation that would take into account the water’s depth, velocity, and distance from a “blocking object.” The resulting textures were then fed into the shader.
You can see the clip in the post linked above, but it’s been a number of years since many of us have thought about In the Valley of the Gods.