Fog Of War and Lighting Effects Obscuring the Game

[ericpar]

Hello,

 

I'm playing on a 27" iMac at its native resolution of 2560 x 1440, with the camera zoomed all the way out. With these settings, I'm finding the game almost unplayable due to the overly dark fog of war, tiny sight radius, and some sort of mist-like particle effect. These problems seem to get worse the higher your resolution and the more zoomed out the camera is.

 

Here is a screenshot showing what the game looks like at these settings. This is a screenshot of an outdoor area at around 10:00am in-game time, yet it looks like I'm in a dungeon that is being lit by a harsh prison floodlight. The fog of war for explored areas is way, way darker than necessary. The effect just needs to provide enough of a cue so that you know where your vision ends, yet be subtle enough that it's not distracting and ruining the game's artwork. Have a look at this screenshot of BG2 for comparison. Note that I'm not referring here to the fog of war in unexplored areas -- that of course should remain black.

 

The sight radius is woefully small. As it stands, it feels like my party is constantly under the effects of the BG2 spell "Blindness". I understand that changing this is probably not trivial, since it can affect game balance, difficulty, scripted events, etc. But please consider increasing it nonetheless -- it's really ridiculous as it stands. I have to practically bump in to something before I see it.

 

The mist-like particle effect that I mentioned is also a major culprit in degrading the visuals. Have a look a these side-by-side screenshots. They show the same subregion of the screen, one where it is aligned to the bottom of the screen, and the other aligned to the top:

 

 

As you can see, the effect is very noticeable at the top of the screen. It sucks all the contrast and color vibrancy out the image, and makes it hard to see foreground objects, like party members and NPCs. At centre of the screen (where you'll be looking most of the time), the effect is somewhere between these, but still very much noticeable.

 

It also gets more pronounced as you zoom out. The following two screenshots were taken with the party centred in the middle of the screen, with no change other than adjusting the zoom level (images were cropped and resized so that they can be compared):

 

You can see that the particle effect gets more intense the further away the camera is from your party.

 

This effect should be removed entirely, except where it makes sense thematically to add atmosphere (e.g near a swamp). I'm seeing it in every area of the game that I've visited (about 10 areas so far).

 

I'm not someone who would ever describe themselves as a "graphics whore"; I value gameplay and story over graphics any day. However, these settings are ruining so much of the game's visuals for me that it's really detracting from my enjoyment of the game. Even if I zoom in all the way, I still find myself very much distracted by all this. Please consider changing some or all of these settings in the next patch, or at least give the player some control over them. Thanks!