Bloom always on?

GGG is really out of their minds if they think they can push whatever and get along with it.

Ironically, white knights over here (but specially reddit) don't seem to understand that not getting any more players is bad but not as bad as losing part of your more critical players.

We're not just talking about a bad league (everyone can forgive GGG for a bad league, it's not the end of the world) but now we're talking about health issues playing the game. Bloom has to be an option, not forced.

And also what the heck with performance? Why the game was working flawless at the end of delirium with Vulkan and now it runs like crap? Is it, in fact, related to the goddamn bloom? Seriously, that's beyond me.

It's just not acceptable for a game that has like 8 years or more to run like hell for a rig that can run perma-75fps RDR2 on ultra. And here you get rekt because there's like 30 legion monsters more now which weren't before. That's a bad joke. And instead of fixing that they introduce more forced graphical options. Jesus Christ.

Given the amount of money they got from me I seriously can't see what the fuck they're doing with it.

I feel like Tencent wants to force the game to look as good as possible to new players for first impressions, or on Twitch streams, so that they can make as much money as possible and therefore GGG has to comply. It's the only thing that makes sense to me because if GGG could give us the option to turn off bloom I feel like they would have by now.

I honestly don't even notice what you guys are talking about. The game looks normal to me as it has in other leagues.

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FriendlyGamerGuy wrote:

I feel like Tencent wants to force the game to look as good as possible to new players for first impressions, or on Twitch streams, so that they can make as much money as possible and therefore GGG has to comply. It's the only thing that makes sense to me because if GGG could give us the option to turn off bloom I feel like they would have by now.

The best part about this theory is that a significant amount of people think bloom makes the game look worse, not better, even on streams.

It's a dumb strategy to begin with, but then backed by an assumption that is probably not even accurate. Just layers upon layers of poor decision making.

And then the cherry on top is GGG failing to acknowledge it as a problem. I have no words... so disappointing.

Yeah I don’t think mandatory bloom is especially good for making the game look better on streams or YouTube. The bad compression/bitrates makes it look even smudgier.

I want to be able to turn off bloom.

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FriendlyGamerGuy wrote:

I feel like Tencent wants to force the game to look as good as possible to new players for first impressions, or on Twitch streams, so that they can make as much money as possible and therefore GGG has to comply. It's the only thing that makes sense to me because if GGG could give us the option to turn off bloom I feel like they would have by now.

You don't need Tencent pressure for them to want to do this (why is Tencent somehow supposed as the reason for every unpopular decision GGG makes?), and there's some ready reasons one can think of for why GGG isn't in favor of allowing us to switch it off at this stage - https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2907664

My previous post in this thread was just kinda a guess. I'm hoping they fix the issues with bloom at least so that it won't be as big of a problem if it remains forced.

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Gulch wrote:

I honestly don't even notice what you guys are talking about. The game looks normal to me as it has in other leagues.

well there are bugs and people don't wanna bug hunting.

AFAIK:
- bloom in olde-worlde games was a way to randomly make assets/scenes look brighter. The "JJ Abrams" style of bloom, and this was used in POE (I imagine that the innocence battle was carved from bloom particles)

- bloom in modern engines is a substitute for HDR. If part of the scene is too bright to render (brightness >255) on a normal screen, use bloom to indicate that this bit is too bright for you to see it.

- bloom on modern displays seems to be mostly replaced with HDR. If something is really bright, just render it.

So the problem with bloom in 3.11 isn't necessarily that it's too strong or over-used, but that some parts of the game are simply too damn bright.