Color in Path of Exile

Oh no :( I really love PoE fo so many things, but one of them is, that it has completely wonderful colors and one of the greatest art styles in h'n's RPGs of all time. I didn't have any problem with colors, with anything described here.
So it's sad that so many people wants devs to change it :(
I want devs to listen to community, but in this particular thing, i hope they will have the Blizzard's D3 stance. I mean, no matter how many people hated the D3 colours and style, they didn't change it. So i really hope GGG won't change their wonderful style and colors.

Awesome, was gonna make a thread about this, but I'll just bump this one instead w/ my thoughts.

I'm not very good with graphical terminology, but will do my best to explain how I feel about how the color & graphical quality could improve.

Mostly I feel - as many others have said - that the color tends to make objects on the screen (both gameplay & purely graphical) blend together. I feel that the the darker areas suffer from this most.

Also, some of the darker areas look kind of pale to me. It almost looks like I'm looking at the world through a very thin layer of wax, or as if somebody turned up a Gamma slider a little too much.

Other than that, I have very few issues with the color in this game.

I sort of made a thread about this way before beta even started. I'd say one would be completely incorrect to say that dark and gloomy means less color. Path of Exile has detailed graphics, but every just seems so mundane. Some of the indoor areas and the ship graveyard are a good start, but many others just look like some random beach that just happens to have a lot of dead guys on it. I think weather effects would be one good way to ad some atmosphere. Like in the first level, have it pitch black and pouring down rain, with nothing but the flash of lightning to see outside your view radius. Maybe in that level with the Goatmen, have a dense fog roll in and have Goatmen leaping out of it at you.

The lighting itself seems a little off to me. It looks very artificial, like there's a spotlight shining on you. It kind of makes the environment have a harsh, sterile look to it.

I have to agree with the OP and many posters in this thread.

I got my beta key today and just called it quits for the day after reaching the cave of woe waypoint. One of the first things I noticed is how everything blends together in the screen. The player character, mobs, terrain, chests and barrels... everything uses the same (or very close) hues and similar lighting which means it's hard to distinguish things.

It's specially bad when the map is opened - and considering how labyrinthic your current algorith for dungeons is, the map is a necessity. On top of that, things like the caves in Act 1 are massively obscured by arches, they're mostly tight corridors, add in the shadows and the result is... well, let's say I played just with the map and split'd arrow my way out of that place.

As it's been said there's no need to dress the game in pink, but to use visual tricks.

On a side note, the gear looks very, very boring. To me, at least.

Actually i'd consider this stuation as "lightning" rather than colours. Cause on the example of this pic shows its dynamics and gamma distinction by lightning, not saturation only. Tha pale blending off the ground with player felt by the power lightning rays coming out of the skill/spell animations.

But in the picture i still see the brightness lacking for dead bodies laying there along with the ground itself, considering the skill/spell cast upon them, which unlike looks great on the players' armors.

Of corpse, this should be applied to other surroundings such as rocks, walls and such, for whatever close to it.

Otherwise, colouring could become betrayingly dangerous task right to itself.

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BrecMadak wrote:

Actually i'd consider this stuation as "lightning" rather than colours. Cause on the example of this pic shows its dynamics and gamma distinction by lightning, not saturation only. Tha pale blending off the ground with player felt by the power lightning rays coming out of the skill/spell animations.

But in the picture i still see the brightness lacking for dead bodies laying there along with the ground itself, considering the skill/spell cast upon them, which unlike looks great on the players' armors.

Of corpse, this should be applied to other surroundings such as rocks, walls and such, for whatever close to it.

Otherwise, colouring could become betrayingly dangerous task right to itself.

Yes, it is definitely a tricky subject and I don't want GGG to do anything rash. There are many tricks to solve this problem, which as you pointed out, isn't caused entirely by color. The problem is really finding a balance between style and practicality. Visually, the game as is right now, is fairly close to that balance, but could still use a bit of a push towards the practicality side.

Sorry about that screenshot. I should spend a little time making a better one. On that one, all I did was fool around with saturation and some other levels on just the 3 character models. None of the other areas were changed. There are plenty of tricks to make things pop using the background and other surroundings.

While the saturation is a problem, there is also the other can of worms you mentioned of everything just sharing the same general palette. This would be much harder to change or fix, because its not as simple as just changing a slider for an entire models saturation. Perhaps when making new armor art in the future, the devs could keep in mind that everything looks very similar colorwise so far.

The problem I have with using lighting instead of color, is the fact that lighting uses a lot of resources. Since the devs want PoE to run on a wide variety of computers, color would be a better way, at least in terms of practicality, to distinguish what is what within the game.

Just got my beta key and have played through act1 and the first part of act2 so far. i agree with much of the OP, though i'm finding it so troublesome that i have a hard time continuing to play the game.
While the first act had problems with that ghastly greyish lighting that made everything blend together, and your vision being obscured quite often by huge rock walls, it was act 2 that i really found incredibly hard to just look at. That contrast between way too high brightness in some parts, and the shadows blending everything together made it hard to just look at, none the less actually see whats going on.
Made a screenshot of a fairly ordinary area and encounter in act2, where i found it painful to watch: http://i56.tinypic.com/20qo1tl.jpg

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Erik wrote:

I've been keeping up to date on reading this thread and a lot of the feedback from here have been incorporated in the upcoming patch. I list the changes once it is done to get specific feedback on the changes.

Other than that I can mention that there is an on-going effort to make the game more visually easy to look at, reducing noise and making character and some monsters stand out more. I'm trying to do this while keeping the realistic and detailed look, but I think its possible to combine the two properly.

Most excellent work Erik. Hope the game would not give any sacrifice to grim, brooding dark atmosphere of the realm by any in the sake of retouching.

Great news, Erik.

Can't wait to see what you all been cooking.