In this topic, after 2k gameplay hours, i wanted to give my personal feedback on GD visuals that may have some insight for potential sequel to the game. I don’t expect GD visuals to have changes at this point of development. Remember these are purely subjective and don’t get offended by any of these:
Animations (-)
My possibly biggest gripe about GD is the main character animations since day 1. Not that the current animations are terrible themselves (altough mediocre to me) or anything, but the lack of variety (like no off-hand mage stuff holding animation, no proper rifle/crossbow hold animation on idle and blunt idle poses etc.) and the “way animations work” bothers me. What i mean is, character returns to idle pose way quickly after animation is executed. Like after swinging a massive sword, the sword should stall in hit point a bit longer after each attack before returning to idle pose. You can also notice like when you spam cast Replicating Missile at 200% cast speed, your characters hands should stay in front a bit longer. Currently it looks like his hands hit something very hot and he draws back them to his chest at lightning speed.
2d - 3d Item Art (+)
Your 2d item designs (inventory item art) is really good. Wolcen is a game that is known for its visual quality (although terrible and amateurish UI design) and GD has significantly better 2d item art. Whoever doing this should know that they did a great job, seriously. Devotion visuals are also really nice, altough probably much simpler to do those. Also 3d art is great. I found that there are many way too strange shoulders and helmets that i never use, but the sheer quantity makes up for this. You always find something looking good. Another great point is, that your gloves for instance, are not just hand textures but have actual volume. Last but not least, all 2d art perfectly matches 3d art which is admirable.
Environment (±)
I know most people loves this, but i have issues with environment and they are not about how beautiful they are. Games levels look good and clearly a lot of effort put in this, however, one should also think a bit more on practicality and gameplay about environment design in my opinion. Meaning that there are a bit too much stuff that can block projectiles and hinder movement in game. I belive designers went a bit too much into realism rather than gameplay practicality in this area.
Combat Readability (-)
My bigger issue in the game is how readable things are in the heat of combat. I had some suggestions on these but Zantai replied he finds things like my suggestions a bit too “gamey”. Its a personal matter of course. But i strongly belive the future Grim Dawn game needs to have more distinguishable effects, less blurred stuff, easy to see dangerous abilities, easier to see AoE boundaries etc. I slightly fixed this issue simply by disabling Post processing. With PP on, the lights in this game is simply too overwhelming and eye hurting to me. Another big issue is that especially circular AoE abilities visuals do NOT match their actual AoE. For instance, War Cry has (im making the numbers here, dont know exact numbers) 3 or so visual ranges. Lets say, you have 5 to 7.9m range, you get a fixed small AoE visual. Then you upgrade to 8 - 12.9 range and you get medium visual. Then anything above 13m+ has the fixed “big” AoE visual etc. Readability issues are not limited to visual design, but also about game having (in my opinion) a bit too much procs and could also be helped with some audio balancing on more important spells. (For instance i never hear Ascension’s sound effect in crowded combats, so sometimes i cant tell if its on without looking buff bar etc.)
Sorry for huge wall of text and thanks if you made it this far. I might edit this in case i forgot something or i want to add more stuff.