It would be a fairer comparison if you turned sprite outlines off. My eye is drawn directly to the outlines rather than the other subtle differences, making it difficult for me to see what else has changed.
After i overcame my schock from yesterday and played an hour or 2 today...i can honestly say...it was better before, but its not that bad now. On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being best i would say the old look was a solid 7 and now its still a 5.
For me it seems the Outlines are going to be a feature on smaller tablets. Maybe even on Tablets overall.
For PC the new look is still a downgrade in my opinion
It was a bit of a jarring ... surprise, switching game engines. Even after viewing all these screenshots, they failed to convey the in your face game playing experience the new scaling engine brings.. (and I think, even more noticeable, the way light sources affect sprites has changed a great deal as well. But, after playing for a bit, through a few combats, I have to say, I like it!
Honestly I don't see the big issue. I prefer the smoother sprites and outlines etc, I think it makes the game look fresher and a bit easier on the eyes while playing. Having everything jagged and pixelated isn't all that great to look at.
However I understand people have different opinions, but all of the "omg my eyes are bleeding!!" comments I have read over the last two days are ridiculous.
In any case even if you don't like the change, it is not all that huge when you turn the outlines off (although I don't know why you would, they are a brilliant addition).
Honestly I don't see the big issue. I prefer the smoother sprites and outlines etc, I think it makes the game look fresher and a bit easier on the eyes while playing. Having everything jagged and pixelated isn't all that great to look at.
However I understand people have different opinions, but all of the "omg my eyes are bleeding!!" comments I have read over the last two days are ridiculous.
In any case even if you don't like the change, it is not all that huge when you turn the outlines off (although I don't know why you would, they are a brilliant addition).
Mountains out of mole hills.
As has been demonstrated a couple posts above yours, the issue affects basically everything and not just the character sprites. The UI side bars are blurry (This was blurry in v1.3 too), the gameplay environment graphics are blurry and the sprites are blurry.
Depending on the condition of your eyes this small change can easily make your eyes water pretty quickly because it's like playing while wearing improper prescription glasses (You were glasses to improve your vision dammit, don't make the world negate them!). I will say though, it isn't as bad as say, Disgaea 2, which isn't saying much lol (That game excessively blurs everything!).
Honestly I don't see the big issue. I prefer the smoother sprites and outlines etc, I think it makes the game look fresher and a bit easier on the eyes while playing. Having everything jagged and pixelated isn't all that great to look at.
However I understand people have different opinions, but all of the "omg my eyes are bleeding!!" comments I have read over the last two days are ridiculous.
In any case even if you don't like the change, it is not all that huge when you turn the outlines off (although I don't know why you would, they are a brilliant addition).
Mountains out of mole hills.
As has been demonstrated a couple posts above yours, the issue affects basically everything and not just the character sprites. The UI side bars are blurry (This was blurry in v1.3 too), the gameplay environment graphics are blurry and the sprites are blurry.
Depending on the condition of your eyes this small change can easily make your eyes water pretty quickly because it's like playing while wearing improper prescription glasses (You were glasses to improve your vision dammit, don't make the world negate them!). I will say though, it isn't as bad as say, Disgaea 2, which isn't saying much lol (That game excessively blurs everything!).
My UI side bars are not blurry at all so I am not sure why yours would be....and the difference in the background is miniscule....and is an improvement in my opinion. Honestly the game has never looked better.
Sorry if you have an eye condition that makes things worse, I cannot see things from your perspective obviously. But to me, the game looks a lot better now.
Sorry, when I said the side bars I specifically mean the button graphics for each button. While the issue is present at 100% and zoomed out levels, it is pretty minor. It mostly becomes an issue when you do indeed zoom in (Or play with Scaled UI enabled which defaults the zoom level to zoomed in a fair bit).
You can also see the blurring disappear in the side bars when Scale UI is disabled. So in regards to the UI there is an option to get rid of the blur but it comes at the expense of making everything smaller, a nearest neighbour filter would allow us to keep the lack of blur while making things big!
Just imagine if Beamdog had restrained themselves to just the improvement of paperdolls, avatars, and weapon art instead of going in for this completely unnecessary UI overhaul. Considering all of the different armors and weapons you can acquire throughout the series they definitely could have added more variety and complexity to the paperdoll appearances.
I'm glad they made the character outlines, health bars, and highlights optional. Honestly, all of this just seems to take away from the immersion of the game. Your characters look totally separated from the game world like a bunch of paper cutouts with the outlines enabled. If anything I'd rather have those health bars just come up with my "TAB" key so that over each of my characters heads I'd see the name with the health bar.
We who do not like new scaling filter are not asking it to be removed. Just to be an option like everything else beamdog did in the game.
I am seeing a lot of people on other rpg forums and on youtube that people really have a WTF moment (negative) when they see outlines and the new scaling filter.
I both agree and disagree with the outlines. When I am zoomed in, I don't care so much for the outlines... but when I zoom out it makes things look a whole lot better. I've played the originals with my kids back in the days, and I have played all the enhanced editions on my PC and my tablet. What would be great is a shortcut key to enable or disable the outlines on the fly, beyond that; I feel this is gonna be a godsend for my tablet.
Just wondering who plays zoomed in like that? Or are people just bickering because something changed that they will only notice if they fully zoom in which one never does in regular gameplay.
Now I imagine people are like - I gonna check out Viconias ass! *zooms in on those pixels* - OMG RUINED! *cry* *outrage*
I'm bickering because I see that this blurred background have less fidelity and contrast. If you cannot spot the difference even zoomed out... well, you either have poor eyesight/colorblindness or bad monitor/tablet. Seriously, I'm just puzzled why Beamdog implemented filter cause ANY blurring always come with a price of lost details.
About zoom level. Why one would play so far zoomed in.
This may seem strange but I play at a zoom level around vanilla bg. That is how I got to know the game. Anything zoomed out too far really makes the world seem too small (you would think it becomes huge with the added playing area). The thing is that I roleplay charname and the npcs so I want to see the world at their relative perspective. I don't want to look down on them from a tall appartement building. To me that is awful. It makes the world less impressive, dragons become tiny animals, less scary.
Also, I really dislike the part that the icons on the gui bars are smaller than vanilla or are not filling the full gui space adequately. So much aesthetically unused space where gui buttons should be. So i play with my pc screen reset to low resolution, windowed mode or I use ui scaling in short sessions (But that is actually worse than the other two because graphics become more fuzzy with the scaling).
My reason to mod the ui is to play at my zoom level while going to a higher resolution screen to make the playing area wider. at the same time i refactor the ui to have less aesthetically displeasing blank sidebars and bottom bars. So I think only a complete icon placement overhaul will accomplish that, something pre-2.0 cannot do for me.
In the end I fear that I may have to overhaul all the menu screens so I hope nothing is hardcoded (but I understood the spell books are sort of :$).
Just wondering who plays zoomed in like that? Or are people just bickering because something changed that they will only notice if they fully zoom in which one never does in regular gameplay.
Afaik it's visible at all zoom levels, the intensity of the blurring does increase as you zoom in though. Enabling Scale UI causes the game to use a more zoomed in default view, making the default intensity of the problem worse.
You can also see its effect on the UI when toggling Scale UI on/off.
Somewhere buried in the beta discussions there was word the blurring filter could be disabled / turned back to next-neighbour scaling (the ugly but sharp one) in baldur.lua ...
Unfortunately i can't find the spot anymore and can't promise anything whether this was discussed as a feature request, an option for later, or actually possible to do right now. But maybe someone else remembers, or a dev @Dee could chime in to give details or at least a "not for now, but later"?
It was later discovered that although it wasn't a lie, the person providing the information was mistaken. He said to disable character outlines to change the filtering used but later on, after he spoke with other devs, he learned it didn't work they way he expected it to.
I'm bickering because I see that this blurred background have less fidelity and contrast. If you cannot spot the difference even zoomed out... well, you either have poor eyesight/colorblindness or bad monitor/tablet. Seriously, I'm just puzzled why Beamdog implemented filter cause ANY blurring always come with a price of lost details.
To me the difference is very minor at any zoon level, I have a decent 27" monitor, 20-20 vision, and no colorblindbess. Whether or not you find this an issue depends more on what you focus on most when you play the game more than anything else. When I play I am more focused on the story/text/battle than small details in the background.
I am not saying that this should not be fixed (obviously it is important to some people) just that there are may other reasons for people to not notice this change.
I play on a TV and I generally use the default zoom mode now that the user interface scales. Sometimes I will zoom out two notches on the original Baldur's Gate as it seems slightly larger than SOA at least to me. I like the outlines. Sometimes they look a little ugly but more often than not they make the character look more sharp to me. Less pixilation makes the overall image a little more solid too.
Just wondering who plays zoomed in like that? Or are people just bickering because something changed that they will only notice if they fully zoom in which one never does in regular gameplay.
Now I imagine people are like - I gonna check out Viconias ass! *zooms in on those pixels* - OMG RUINED! *cry* *outrage*
I am. Reason behind this is not so hilarious as you suggest, but here it is: I just consider idea of "improving" old 2d graphics by scaling it down simply ridicioulous. It's not looks improved to me, just, well... smaller. I believe even my Warcraft 2 units starts looking more significant individuals than this little guys in BG when you all the way zoom out. Next question.
Some people like pixilated better. My reason is that I wear glasses and the world is less inviting when not sharp.... That is why I wear glasses after all, to see clearly. So pixels is fine as long as it is not blurry.
I am seeing a lot of sprite bounding boxes artefacts in 2.0. Check my post in tech section. Also pure speculations:
They might have used S3TC (at least on Mac they do). Such compressions degrade quality of pictures. I am not happy with ST3TC because this means that older BG had better graphics (as it was uncompressed)
I took the liberty of linking this thread to the steam forums, where the graphics are a hotly debated subject and also to let people over on steam know someone is looking into the linear scaling that at least on a desktop pc fails to amaze me and a number of other users.
I am of the opinion that pixelated looks a lot better on the big screen and I am going to admit that this and the fact that the rollback to 1.3 is not working are currently my two biggest gripes about the update.
@Archaos , that is a photo not sprite art, so it's kind of pointless as a comparison of linear vs nearest neighbor. And you're arguing against it as an OPTION, no one is forcing you to toggle it.
Comments
For me it seems the Outlines are going to be a feature on smaller tablets. Maybe even on Tablets overall.
For PC the new look is still a downgrade in my opinion
However I understand people have different opinions, but all of the "omg my eyes are bleeding!!" comments I have read over the last two days are ridiculous.
In any case even if you don't like the change, it is not all that huge when you turn the outlines off (although I don't know why you would, they are a brilliant addition).
Mountains out of mole hills.
Depending on the condition of your eyes this small change can easily make your eyes water pretty quickly because it's like playing while wearing improper prescription glasses (You were glasses to improve your vision dammit, don't make the world negate them!). I will say though, it isn't as bad as say, Disgaea 2, which isn't saying much lol (That game excessively blurs everything!).
Sorry if you have an eye condition that makes things worse, I cannot see things from your perspective obviously. But to me, the game looks a lot better now.
Are you playing zoomed in?
No Scaled UI
Scaled UI
You can also see the blurring disappear in the side bars when Scale UI is disabled. So in regards to the UI there is an option to get rid of the blur but it comes at the expense of making everything smaller, a nearest neighbour filter would allow us to keep the lack of blur while making things big!
I have been playing with the SoD UI in BGEE since yesterday and it is very crisp. No blurry buttons or anything
Even when zoomed in it still looks crisp to me.
I can understand if you are playing BGEE without SoD then the blurry UI does get annoying.
I'm glad they made the character outlines, health bars, and highlights optional. Honestly, all of this just seems to take away from the immersion of the game. Your characters look totally separated from the game world like a bunch of paper cutouts with the outlines enabled. If anything I'd rather have those health bars just come up with my "TAB" key so that over each of my characters heads I'd see the name with the health bar.
I am seeing a lot of people on other rpg forums and on youtube that people really have a WTF moment (negative) when they see outlines and the new scaling filter.
Personally, I cannot imagine playing without the outlines now. They really help things to pop visually when playing zoomed out a bit.
The sprite outlines are a massive improvement in my opinion, they really help definition.
I guess after some time of testing and getting used to it I'll end up to turn it off on PC but keep it on on tablet
Or are people just bickering because something changed that they will only notice if they fully zoom in which one never does in regular gameplay.
Now I imagine people are like
- I gonna check out Viconias ass!
*zooms in on those pixels*
- OMG RUINED! *cry*
*outrage*
This may seem strange but I play at a zoom level around vanilla bg. That is how I got to know the game. Anything zoomed out too far really makes the world seem too small (you would think it becomes huge with the added playing area). The thing is that I roleplay charname and the npcs so I want to see the world at their relative perspective. I don't want to look down on them from a tall appartement building. To me that is awful. It makes the world less impressive, dragons become tiny animals, less scary.
Also, I really dislike the part that the icons on the gui bars are smaller than vanilla or are not filling the full gui space adequately. So much aesthetically unused space where gui buttons should be. So i play with my pc screen reset to low resolution, windowed mode or I use ui scaling in short sessions (But that is actually worse than the other two because graphics become more fuzzy with the scaling).
My reason to mod the ui is to play at my zoom level while going to a higher resolution screen to make the playing area wider. at the same time i refactor the ui to have less aesthetically displeasing blank sidebars and bottom bars.
So I think only a complete icon placement overhaul will accomplish that, something pre-2.0 cannot do for me.
In the end I fear that I may have to overhaul all the menu screens so I hope nothing is hardcoded (but I understood the spell books are sort of :$).
You can also see its effect on the UI when toggling Scale UI on/off.
Unfortunately i can't find the spot anymore and can't promise anything whether this was discussed as a feature request, an option for later, or actually possible to do right now. But maybe someone else remembers, or a dev @Dee could chime in to give details or at least a "not for now, but later"?
I am not saying that this should not be fixed (obviously it is important to some people) just that there are may other reasons for people to not notice this change.
Next question.
This is how 2D filters generally work. They fill the space between pixels but it results in making them a bit more blurry.
Personally, I HATE pixelated 2D graphics. Smoother but more blurry looks far better.
As for the outlines, I like them. It makes sprites more defined and helps you focus or find the characters.
About the zooming level, I play with both.
Fully zoomed in battles with few enemies, zoomed out on groups and fully zoomed out when I walk around.
Some people like pixilated better. My reason is that I wear glasses and the world is less inviting when not sharp.... That is why I wear glasses after all, to see clearly. So pixels is fine as long as it is not blurry.
They might have used S3TC (at least on Mac they do). Such compressions degrade quality of pictures. I am not happy with ST3TC because this means that older BG had better graphics (as it was uncompressed)
I am of the opinion that pixelated looks a lot better on the big screen and I am going to admit that this and the fact that the rollback to 1.3 is not working are currently my two biggest gripes about the update.