After getting repeatadly ar5e whipped by VS with reflex sights at night, in smoke on a misty hossin when i was using NV (I notice NC and TR tend to use NV a lot more than VS?) I decided to drop my graphics settings to minimum. How many people do this? do you consider it an advantage? Is it 'cheating'? What i found is: No shadows means people cant hide in them. Night is much brighter, so much so i dont use NV anymore on infantry. No mist on hossin. I wouldnt play on hossin with mist as i was dying before i saw who shot me. any smoke or debri is a lot less frequent and more solid. its on then off. The downside is NV is actually a hinderance as it seems to of lost some of its finer detail, and its still needed at times. It doesnt look quite so pretty Takes a bit of getting used to and tweaking as it looks a bit weird on low, low settings. My take is, on a competitive fps like this, low settings are essential for a more rounded and fairer game. What do others think? Its a pity as id prefer to play on max settings, if i didnt feel so blind doing so.
I don't really play the other factions (I'm VS) so when it's night I can clearly see the cyan blue morons running out in the open along with the giant red pimples firing everywhere on the other side of the map. Turn your monitor brightness up? Idk what to tell ya, maybe you can try the terrible flashlight but that will be a dead giveaway at night.
Whether I play on low detail or high, night isn't any darker/brighter; and while I'm playing, I don't even notice much of a difference between night/day... the night/day cycle isn't noticeable enough to impact game play in any form. I play on low, because it's the least distracting of the graphic settings... I have synesthesia, so it's more of a gameplay issue that lets me visually see the patterns I need to see to play. As for Esamir and Hossin; low settings + fog shadows = zero fog.
I know they toned down the effect of night (used to be pitch black in beta)... but there is still a pretty big difference between night and day.
It's pathetic that there's advantages to be had in the right graphic settings. It's even more pathetic that players can turn off smoke from smoke grenades for instance or set their viewing distance to certain distances to make any vehicle light up in the sky the moment it can be rendered, mainly aircraft users can (ab)use this. They need to fix it. Such unfair advantages over players who don't mess with .ini files and play fair, or the incredible advantages you can win by the right graphical settings, making spotting and shooting people much easier, are both bad for the game. Any graphical setting should give the same gameplay, should a graphical setting give an advantage, than other graphical settings should give a different advantage. That way all players have something going for them regardless of their setting. It seems to be the only way to really balance the current melting pot of bugs and "hidden features" as I would think the developers might call it...
i used to play at the lowest settings, with render quality at 75% at 1024x720. i did all that because i lacked the hardware to play at a consistent 60fps. the key word here is CONSISTENT. for a true PC player, any level of graphical fidelity is worth sacrificing in exchange for a steady FPS. sadly, even with such low Settings i was still suffering on zergs, with FPS dips down to 20fps. if i could have sacrificed more graphical fidelity for more FPS i would have in a heartbeat. a few months back i invested on a mayor PC upgrade, currently i can do 60fps rocksteady everywhere at max settings. so i went from lowest to highest on one go, and initially playing on the highest settings resulted on a dip in performance, the main problem was target acquisition. but over time, after i got used to it, acquisition time is the same, if not better, and the advantage is strictly a steady FPS. a steady fps IS the main advantage a player can have over another. not even latency is such a huge factor. and given that this is PC, the discussion is over before it begins. if you cant do 60, deal with it. and if you can, then there's still people doing 120fps who get a few milliseconds of extra reaction time. don't get me wrong disabling smoke should be considered a cheat, but playing at low settings is fine, even if you don't "have to" and just want to lower the clutter on the screen. whats the big deal? stuff moving on the screen results on light changes, eyes perceive them and the brain interprets it as movement. whether the contrast ratio is high or low, it doesn't matter. your brain doesn't react to movement more or less, it either does or it does not. if you cant see movement when the contrast increases then the problem is on your end. and you should probably calibrate the contrast on your monitor to match your ambient light. if you still cant see movement, or distinguish elements on the screen then you should see an optometrist. that said, disabling smoke should get those ****ers banned.
While I agree with both of you that PS2 Devs should make PS2 so that "good graphics" go hand-in-hand with "good playability", it's just not the culture at SOE/SBG. Art Leads are obsessed with making the game look good at high graphics settings, even if the game's playability is tanked. I had MANY artist friends at SOE/Sigil, and almost all: 1) don't play the game(s) they work on (other than begrudged mandatory sessions at work) 2) are obsessed with how the game looks as a visual experience 3) have no interest or almost no interest (depends on the person) on how the game actually plays I had many fights at Sigil trying to get content past art (I had the Orcs riding Boars, not Horses... but art didn't like the look of the Boars as mounts and didn't want to put time into fixing it... so I had to swap the Boars for the standard Horses), and I had many arguments with various SOE artists over the importance of playability vs. aesthetics. If they had their way, people wouldn't be able to adjust their settings at all, because they want to control the exact visual experience of the game. For me, art style/look *is* very important. But the most important thing is how the game plays. Most players will completely trainwreck their graphics settings, if it means they will be able to compete (or have an edge) against their opponents. It would just be better if Art Leads realized this, and made a game where the artists were building for playability (for many, you'd have to train them to understrand playability or hire new ones who did), and not just how it looks when just looking at the world while strolling through it. All that said, aside from a couple Artists at Sigil (out of tons of them) and aside from their frequent obsession of look over play, Artists are usually AMAZING people to work with and most have really top-of-the-top great personalities. Some ex-SOE/Sigil Artists are some of my best friends.
The "graphics quality" setting affects thermal and NV optics. I play with it on high, though I believe medium works too. For everything else, I have it turned all the way down, except with ambient occlusion on. Render distance around 2000, render quality at 100%. I also enabled super sampling in the Nvidia control panel, but I don't know if it works because I see no difference. For me, the idea is to have the smoothest frame rate and best clarity I can have. This helps quite a bit while flying as it makes spotting other air and vehicles out of the corner of my eye much easier. When the game goes to night, I change my monitor brightness settings so I can see better. Call it cheating or whatever you want, it's less of a strain on my eyes, and it makes seeing people with darker camos(VS) easier. And I'm not at a disadvantage to other people who do this, which I'm sure there are quite a few of, since the game practically becomes day again just from changing a few monitor settings.
I don't even notice it, at all. It's a very subtle difference. I can see as clearly in the night as I can in the day, there's no game impact whatsoever.
