I know I’m far from alone when I say that the game now looks absolutely atrocious when compared to how it looked before. In the past 30 minutes I’ve seen this complaint voiced elsewhere on the internet but it’s so bad that I feel I too should chime in, because it literally hurts my eyes to the point that I had to stop playing after 15 minutes. Maybe it’s simply due to the very sharp difference. But changes need to be made here.
Turning post processing off helps… I guess… But before this patch, I loved post processing. It made the game look so much more alive. And without it, especially now, the game looks extremely dull and washed out… Bland, lifeless, grey.
Full screen mode is not an option for me due to flickering that occurs when that’s enabled. I’ve always had to play Grim Dawn in borderless windowed mode, which is fine. Regardless, it’s not a simple gamma increase that’s happening here. I switched into full screen and lowered the gamma, and while it was not so painfully bright, the game still didn’t look as good as before, and of course my UI was too dark to read.
Long story short: Whatever you did to the brightness - you should undo it. Thanks for the patch though. I still love you guys.
I don’t mind the change as much as most but I do agree it makes the colors look sort of washed out. At least touching the contrast levels would go a long way.
Well everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but I’m wondering how you enjoy this new look over the old look when you say you required darker shaders for D3. I played D3 for a while and while it had a bit of a bright look, it never seemed overly bright to me. Grim Dawn’s shaders always depended heavily on your “shaders” setting. Low with post processing on looks absurdly bright and, frankly, awful. High/very high with PP looked great. High/very high without PP looked alright, but a bit bleak and washed out.
But now, if you were to turn PP on and turn shaders down to low… Damn. It’s bad. Check this screenshot I just took. I can barely tell where the terrain ends and my character starts. Reminds me of that episode of Bojack where Todd, Sarah Lynn and Bojack do a bunch of drugs and their outlines start to disappear and Bojack freaks out because he can’t tell the difference between himself and the rest of space. Image: http://i.imgur.com/w9xmlaa.jpg
Yes, if you’re interested to compare what the game looked like before and what it looks like now:
Before:
After:
It’s painful. Hearing that this was an intended design change is like a bucket of cold water dumped on my head.
EDIT: I’m still holding out hope that maybe something just went a little wonky with changing the graphics and this isn’t the actual intended visual design for Grim Dawn.
Sounds like other people’s monitors are maybe brighter / lower contrast than mine as it doesn’t look bad to me… however, I agree it came out a bit brighter than was probably intended.
Looking at the before and after screenshots, they both look kind of bad to me in different ways… so I’m thinking maybe we need to adjust things more toward the middle.
What happened is we fixed an error in the specular shader for terrain, which then required a bunch of adjustment. Some terrain textures were also replaced with higher resolution versions, which may tend to look less… bumpy? when the camera is pulled out… but also less low-rez and crappy.
Then on top that, I made some significant adjustments to the post-effects for two reasons - 1) I cringe everytime I see the game being streamed and it’s so dark in places you can barely tell what’s going on. It looks flat, sort of drab and a lot of people have said the same. 2) I was running through Homestead recently and it was so yellow and drab, I just got sick of looking at it and basically flipped out on the post effects / lighting.
I then also asked for the sun angle to be changed around because it was coming from in front of the camera, which resulted in the player and scenery objects always being in shadow from the default view. It also makes enemies blend into the background more… I feel like things pop a bit better from the scenery when the light is behind the camera. This change made everything brighter. The sun angle was also raised a bit, which may have caused for less normal-map relief at noon in-game.
If you look at the before and after shots above, the before looks really flat and overly dark to me but yeah, there is greater terrain detail closer to the camera. The after shot is washed out and overly bright, I agree but it has more depth and looks more dynamic.
Changes have been made to reign things back in a bit. I’m sure there will never be universal agreement on what looks best but I think with some iteration we can arrive at something that will be better than the “before and after” above, for most people. Changes will take effect when the hotfix rolls out in 1-3 days.
Can anyone confirm if the camera angle was changed? It seems to me that it was, and I saw other people (both here and on reddit) saying the same - it seems as if the new default camera is somewhat zoomed out in comparison to the old one.
Was this change made, or is that appearance only an effect of the brightness changes? If it was made, will the hotfix return the old camera angle (which would be great, in my opinion)?
I’m sorry to hear you were so dissatisfied with how the game looked. The gloom is what attracted me to this game. There are lots of ARPG’s. There aren’t many with the detailed, haunting beauty of Grim Dawn. I walk around enchanted. I’m not exaggerating. I show off this game to people who don’t even play and they oooh and ahhh at the environs.
For me, the “after” shot is the one that is flat and less dynamic. It lacks the detail, shadows and contrast that the “before” shot has.
I hope so. I’m optimistic. Correcting the specular shaders and adding higher resolution textures certainly sound like good things.
I also noticed the same thing that krell is talking about (the camera angle being different), and I can’t find the answers to his questions in Medierra’s post. Honestly, I read it a couple of times, and I don’t see him mentioning changes to camera anywhere, he seems to be only adressing the brightness and light direction.
I wonder how much of that is people either not having the bandwidth to stream at full res, or not changing the default streaming in Steam, as by default Steam lowers the res from even just 1920x1080 when streaming. As I’ve not ever encountered the overly dark and unable to tell what’s going on myself while playing.
Looking at the 2 screenshots, I personally really, really like the first, you can see detail on the water, the shadows from the tree, the grass, the rocks… everything is much more detailed / sharper and clearer. While the 2nd looks like a very low res shot with all the detail removed and washed out…and very not Grim anymore.
I’m stunned totally by the difference in these shots as I hadn’t noticed while testing, but that could be because I was only seeing a small bit of the world between homestead / PV and the rest being the new areas.
Well, I am reading this forum regularly and I didn’t notice recently a thread where people were complaining about overall visual quality before. But maybe I missed it. Darker maybe, but it is causing much less distraction. Next thing is, if something is relatively bright then additional effect will cause much more distraction and highly overexposed areas or FX become much less detailed and much less colorful. Maybe more options for post processing is the right way how to deal with it. Also I think that light should not be right behind camera, everything will be much more flat. It is just my opinion.
There was definitely a camera angle change at some point, though it may not have been this patch. It’s most noticeable when zoomed in:
Before:
After:
The camera now remains more top-down when zoomed in. I’m not really complaining, since I don’t play zoomed in, I just do it to look at things closely sometimes. But I slightly preferred the old camera since you could see more around you.
Thanks a lot Flix, for demonstrating that camera height change, I thought I was losing my mind. or imagining things.
It would be great if the devs at least gave us the option of having the old camera angle, there seem to be people who preferred it over the new one (myself included, obviously)
Yep, +1.
What disturbs me is that beyond the technical aspect, it really changes the feeling and ambiance of the game.
To avoid any “personal judging opinion”, perhaps in the next iteration add a “filtering choice” in graphic option for people preferring the “darker ambiance” or for people preferring the new one (the crappy one… Wait… Woops ! Fxxxxx, I said it :p) )
