Bloom in Path of Exile

I'm confused as to why it's impossible to disable bloom completely but you can have it a 25% intensity without problems. Can't you just give as an option that scales the intensity to 0.00001% or something stupid like that then without having to reintroduce fake bloom particles?

WOW!!! I thought it was just me, I was getting bad headaches from playing this league, so I quit playing. Turns out it's the new bloom system. awesome lol. Waiting for a fix.

Majority of people will still "appreciate" your artists work, even if you allow the minority to turn it down/off...

Your choices have been so wrong with this change that some people will never be satisfied until they can select "Off" in options even if you eventually (EVENTUALLY...) make it look decent. If people don't want it, then allow them to miss out on these "amazing effects". Like every other game, including your own until this update.

I definitely prefer your old "fake poor bloom" system over this new "amazing and advance high performance" system.

I mean whats next? Film Grain? I know 80% of the industry has a hard on for film grain, but man it looks so bad 90% of the time.

Omg, don't add a film grain! :O

Next step is forced motion blur, grain, dof.

"We heard you feedbacks but actually go fuck yourselves"

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.

This further exacerbate my vision that they don't even know what their game is anymore lol.

People are rushing maps at mach-5 and further encouraged to do that by league mechanics (legion pop all before timer go off, incursion pop all before timer go off, delirum pop all before timer go off).

They really think their players are paying attention to fancy lights? If so i hope they will slow down this game gameplay at least 20x from what it is.

That's disgusting...

"

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.

this is a quality post

I understand where ggg is coming from, but it feels like they need to play this game past the storyline on hardcore and most of them don't.

I say to myself "what the actual f#ck is going on here on my screen, I can't tell" more than any other game I've ever played (and then usually die and quit league).

"

We can't just turn outright Bloom off, or else various effects will not be drawn as the artists intend them to.

What your artists intend is irrelevant when people are being physically hurt by this. This isn't a performance issue, it's an accessibility issue.

I don't understand the issue, my seeds bloom just fine, although I don't get enough Primals to fertilize all my T2 Wild and Vivids.