Also thanks for the heads up on Tomb Raider, we hadn’t heard comments on that title yet.

BUT, I am a complete WATER WHORE when it comes to video games and have been searching for some games I may not have heard of with the best water effects.

Sure, like several posters have said, great LOOKING water has been around for a while…games with great looking AND dynamic water are few and far between!

Halo3 has excellent water since it’s dynamic and looks “alright”…it’s not the most realistic LOOKING out there, though.

I’d honestly say that the best combination of realistic looking AND dynamic water would go to Tomb Raider Legend/Anniversary for the 360. The water effects in that game are simply amazing!!

The demo the Unreal 3 engine had this year at GDC showing off the water coming in Gears 2 looked retarded… somewhere around 80% of what is already in Crysis… sort of disappointing.

I also agree, imagining a game like BioShock with *real* wave and water dynamics would have been incredible… really would have added to the sense of the game. I imagine that “real” water (whatever that ends up being) isn’t going to hit us until next-gen consoles and PCs where we have the GPU/CPU power to calculate that stuff on the fly and game engines provide models for that out of the box. After all, Halo 3 is the only game I’ve seen so far where the developers actually took the time to implement such a complex water system given water isn’t part of any of the core game mechanics (unlike BioShock)… I can’t believe MS paid them to do that, but I guess they were sitting around waiting for the multiplayer/portal aspects to get done.. and hell, I like it

It also has great water physics, if you drive the boat for example (again) it’s rocked up and down at high speed due to the waves. I think this game has the best water so far.

No game has real water types but only particle effects and a distorted “plane” that they call water.
I think Crysis did it better than any of the other examples, until we find a game that has real waterfalls that are actually flowing, and could change course if you blocked it.

and hydrophobia looks like it will have the best water once it comes out

I don’t really know much else about it but from what I can see it looks like it’s shaping up to be an interesting game.

It’s called hydrophobia and the link below will take you straight to the page about water.

http://www.bladeinteractive.com/hydro_details.php?section=2

just a shame there are no videos there yet

I still don’t see the behavior of water in any game being as good as Halo 3’s is… which is such a strange statement in an of itself.

It’s like your local Citco gas station having the best Chicken Alfredo in town. You just scratch your head as to why

@DY357LX: That is true, the water looked good effects wise in HL2, but it was a little flat in presentation however the behavior of objects *in* the water was pretty damn slick… like breaking boxes apart just to have the pieces float, or throwing something in that sunk.

@FurballMK3, awesome link. That is some pretty damn good water. I had never played Kameo, but I included your link in the original post with creds.

@wilson326, I hadn’t actually *ever* heard of that game, but looking it up it looked pretty slick… I’m surprised it didn’t get more coverage back then. It reminds me of a Lithtec game or that 1 game with the deformable environments where you could dig holes with the rocket launcher… forget name.
The glass does look decent for that time:
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2003/screen3/534963_20030528_screen008.jpg

all breakable and everything. Thanks for the heads up.

@Master Kim, it is definitely weird that a FPS with no water dynamics (vehicles, fighting, gameplay) gets the best water out there… what that says to me is the dev team had a lot of time on their hands. Halo 3’s multiplayer is so frigging expansive and polished that my guess would be portions of the team had a lot of time on their hands and just included more polish to the game.

So for Halo 4, I want a completely physical/simulated weather system… that ties into weather.com

The water doesn’t look very pretty in that game, but it reacts realistically when shot at or when you walk into it. And unlike most recent games, glass and wooden planks actually break in chunks. Wood chips can be shot off piece by piece, the glass is as realistic as the glass in Resistance: Fall of man. While in Half Life 2, you shoot water and you get little white circles… You shoot glass and you break off square pieces of it..

Kameo: Elements of Power also has fantastic water.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=NN2nbep3E40

I do love the new water effects that have shown up in games recently.

I hate seeing “Sweet tech” and then 5 years later finally seeing it in a game, while the new “Sweet tech” is another 5 years off… too much lag

http://www.bladeinteractive.com/hydroengine.html

I’ve got to say its still in a pretty unpolished state and who knows what it’ll actually be like as game? Plus the video is seriously cringe worthy and shows nothing of note!

Anyway, the reason I mentioned it is because it actually has physically calculated fluid dynamics in it – kind of like the stuff you can get in high end 3d apps I think, just optimised for a realtime setup. Everything else including Halo 3 is faked in some way (of course even these fluid dynamics are also faked in a way – its not reality is it?)… I read about it originally in the games magazine “Edge”.