Bloom in Path of Exile

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Orcasauce wrote:

I'll distill down my distaste with excessive bloom, and that's what my problem is with, "excessive bloom", not "bloom in general":

1) When there are extensive sources of bloom (spell cascade, volatile dead+detonate dead + spell slinger) there is so much bloom that it all merges into one massive cloud that emulates a haze sitting between me and the art. This makes it feel like I'm playing the game through a dirty monitor with a net result that the game just looks washed out and many game mechanic telegraphs become unreadable. Sacrificing the readability of a game to make it "look better" falls into a category of "simulation over gameplay". In this scenario game quality takes a back seat to making things look "more real" to fulfill some misguided belief that "graphics" are the ultimate goal of game quality. The game already had a bad rap for excessive on-screen spell clutter, and this makes it worse. One fire ball is pretty, 3 fire balls is very bright, thirty fireballs with my friends magma orb and a swarm of flaming arrows is a cacophony of madness that needs to be toned down. Restraint is the ultimate skill of an artist and in this case we need the ability to limit how much bloom impacts spells when many many instances of the spell are on screen at once.

2) I actually agree the new bloom does, in fact, look great. Just because something is great doesn't mean every single element on screen needs to become an emitter of that thing. It also doesn't mean that you can naively ignore the impact on core game elements. Not everything is a blooming light source. Not everything emits equal amounts of light. Plants on the ground shouldn't be blooming like cathedral stained glass windows. Not everything needs to pretend it is a light source as bright as the sun. And everything doesn't need to pretend it is a light source when it is clearly not.

3) You honestly cannot expect the majority of players to be able to quantify such exactly what is causing "excessive bloom" in such a fast paced game in a forum post to help you sort out what looks bad. Most players won't take the time to articulate to you what looks bad. They'll just tell their friends to play Diablo 3 because it looks better than Path of Exile. Only the real fans that truely desperately don't want to stop playing the game are going to go out of their way to try and make their degraded experience workable. Everyone else will just assume the game looks bad and not waste their time trying to interact with the developers who have retreated to only communicating in snark or Blizzard/Riot Games-esque "we know what is fun better than you" manifestos.

edit:

4) It actively makes me want to take off my purchased mtx effects because they make it harder to see what is happening on screen.

edit edit:

bloom should be subtle, if it's spewing haze particles all over the screen "so you can see it" you've put too much icing on the cake.

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wullack wrote:

WOW, just WOW.

Here's GGG giving a detailed and thorough explanation as to why they can't just turn the Bloom effect off and the reply to this is "wHy cAn'T i TuRN it oFf??!!^^111".

GGG: Thank you for the explanation! For me the "slight" option works just fine. The game looks better than before the patch.