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Rym wrote: »

Greetings, fellow adventurers!

As we are approaching closer to the release of the Alpha 2 (copium), I have come across a peculiar but rather unavoidable thought regarding the graphical quality of the game.

In the past, games used to use AA solutions different from today. Today, the most widespread AA technique, and the most performance-friendly is probably TAA, which is also used for DLSS and, as far as I know, FSR and other upscaling methods.

TAA brings performance-friendly AA solutions to the table (for reference, TAA means Temporal Anti-Aliasing). I won't bother everyone with how TAA works or why it works like it does. What I want to bother everyone with is how it looks visually.

Due to how TAA works, it has a very powerful negative effect on the experience of the majority of players, this negative effect is called blur.

In short, TAA permanently introduces a blur effect to the image. As a real life example, someone who needs glasses to see well can perfectly understand the blur I speak of.

For example you look at a tree, and you take your glasses off, and something is off, the tree looks blurry, without detail, you can't quite focus on it properly. You put your glasses on and voilla, the tree looks lovely, with details and you can properly focus on it.

This is basically what TAA does to a game, it "blurs" together frames to eliminate aliasing. Good examples can be seen in Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Black Myth Wukong benchmark tool available for free on steam.

Enter: The Solution

There are 2 main solutions to TAA from the perspective of the player, both are brute-force. Higher resolutions reduce the blur effects of TAA. In fact, higher PPI brute-forces TAA into looking clear and sharp.

Of course, only the top most expensive gaming rigs can even run the high resolution required for TAA to look good. You either use a 1440p screen to brute-force a 4K image with the use of super resolution tech (such as DLDSR) or you outright use a 4K native screen.

Most people use 1080p, 57% in fact going by the steam results, while 20% use 1440p, only 3.6% of gamers use 4K and for good reason. 4K looks great, but is extremely difficult to run.


From the perspective of the developer, TAA can be optimized so that, put frankly, it doesn't make the game look like a smeared mess of blur where you can't make out details farther away than 2 meters in front of your character. I will give again the example of Black Myth Wukong which even at 4K does not look great, and it's the same UE5 engine Ashes will run on, the difference being different optimizations as we're talking different games.


I'm writing this post more or less to bring it to the attention of the developers in case they don't already know of the issues that TAA implements. If possible, I would check with a native 1080p and 1440p screen to make sure the game looks acceptable at those resolutions, this is because, again, TAA negatively impacts player experience the most at 1080p and 1440p. I don't want the game to end up being a shimmery, smeary, blurry mess due to this blessing-curse we have that is called TAA.

(Note that disabling TAA as the player more often than not breaks game engines entirely and makes the aliasing explode into a shimmery mess, so you can't just disable it and use FXAA or MSAA or other methods. Also, DLSS and DLAA use TAA to work well, so they don't disable it either as far as I know).

All in all, TAA is an amazing solution for performance-friendly AA, but if optimized poorly or wrong it can destroy the experience entirely, so it's the most double-edged sword of AA solutions there is atm, as far as I know at least.

For players interested in how TAA behaves visually, I urge you to try out the free Black Myth Wukong benchmark tool from Steam at 1080p and 1440p. If you happen to notice even at max settings that the image looks off or blurry, that's because of how TAA works. Tbh, 4K does not fare much better either in this test so it's rather extreme but a good example nonetheless.

Kallysha wrote: »

an eclipse would be so cool too (at night a blood moon)

Kallysha wrote: »

or even rainbows, not quite certain if aoc already has it;

Kallysha wrote: »

or somewhere an event happening triggering a tornado, like maybe not 100% to happen all the time the event happens, but there be a percentage of a possibility of it happening, could be in more than one region: in the desert or in the open sea, or even near the volcano area (fire tornado)!

GreatPhilisopher wrote: »

First, I want to say I appreciate the devs and their work, like adding zones quickly and constantly touching them up. This isn't meant to take away from their work — it's just feedback (and a bit of a rant), and it's going to be a little long.

After looking at the zones for quite a while now, and with the addition of the first pass of the Jundark (well, more like Junlight), I sadly have to say that none of them seem to capture the feeling of what they actually are, due to a few problems.

1st: The Riverlands
The Riverlands is the most complete zone out of all of them, but it's just so boring and uninteresting. It feels flat, and everything looks the same — same trees, randomly scattered everywhere, no zones with different types of trees, no open lush grassy windy fields, nothing. There are POIs, but none of them make you stop and think, "Wow, that looks cool, I want to explore that."
The only one that gives a little bit of that feeling is Carphin, and while it will change, right now it's just a fancier-looking cave (aka a pocket dungeon) where you aimlessly grind mobs.
That's the Riverlands, and the problems of randomness, lack of interesting POIs, and the whole zone looking the same instead of having unique areas inside the biome carry over into the Tropics and the newly added Jundark. The desert has another problem too.

2nd: The Tropics
Same problem as the Riverlands — it all looks the same. There's nothing interesting. This one barely has any POIs (and I get that comes later), but there's no point if they're going to end up like the Riverlands ones. I also get that there aren't many different types of tropical environments you can make, but they didn't even try to begin with.
There's another problem that adds to all the zones looking the same, which I'll touch on later.

3rd: The Jundark
The newly added biome — while it's a first pass — you can already tell it has the same problems. It's just one tree repeated everywhere. Right now it looks more like a new part of the Tropics than a jungle.
I understand they can't make it super dense because of performance reasons, but they don't need to do that. It's all about atmosphere and presentation.
All they had to do was make giant trees with big leaves, vines and branches intertwined with each other, covering the sky and barely letting any sunlight through. Smaller, but still bigger-than-normal trees should fill the lower levels, with tall grass and vegetation like banana trees, totems, and whatever else fits a jungle.

A jungle should be dark and green everywhere you look. It should barely have any light — it should be dark, gloomy, wet, damp, and feel dangerous all the time. It should be filled with tall and lush vegetation that blocks your view, where you can easily get lost. It should have dark clouds above it 90% of the time, be rainy most of the time, and have fog constantly filling the area.
And it already feels scarce; whatever POIs and roads they add will only make the "jungle" part feel even more non-existent with how much space those nodes take up.

4th and lastly: The Desert
I can tell they put more effort and thought into this one — finally, a biome that doesn't look exactly the same all over and has different, mini-like desert biomes inside it.
Yet, none of them get to shine. Why? Because they're all mashed into each other — a piece of this here, a piece of that there, etc.
Why is that though? I can see there are different types of deserts within the biome — why not make each of them their own mini-biome instead?
You could've made a big Grand Canyon with a node on top of it instead of that random node on top of a random rock in the middle of the sandy desert.
You could've had caves under it with spiders, snakes, etc., even a pocket dungeon or an actual dungeon deep below.
Then at the end, it could transition into an area with dry ground and lots of desert trees and cacti where the Minotaurs are, and place a node there.
Then that could go into a giant area of sand and dunes (which, by the way, looks like Play-Doh instead of sand???), where if you go right, you find an oasis with a node area nearby.
If you go left, you find an area filled with the bones of giant monsters and a node nearby that meshes with that boney aesthetic. Same with the rest of the nodes — mesh them into their environment.
If you go forward, you find that god spike with a dangerous atmosphere and lots of dunes and monsters leading to it, etc.

Remember the desert showcase? It felt good because it showcased those areas properly and let them shine — not like what we have right now.

while i admit that a part of the lack of interest in the POIs that exist is already knowing that there is nothing to do there other than grinding mobs that is still just a small part of the problem.

Other problems with the biomes:

1. The same-looking random rock formations that are in every zone and take up way too much space for no reason.

2. The grass and lack of vegetation — so scarce. And whatever happened to the tall, lush grass we saw in all those showcases? If their fix to the view distance was to have these small, short, bad-looking patches of grass all over the world, then I'd rather have less view distance but better-looking vegetation. Also, it didn't even fix the problem because most of it still disappears at just a little bit of distance. It's supposed to be a world that no man set foot in for hundreds or thousands of years, yet it looks like it's been maintained and mowed on a weekly basis...

3.The nodes — right now, the nodes lack the assets and layouts needed to blend and combine well with their environment. They and the zones also lack ambient effects, small wildlife, thick vegetation, etc. I get that the node thing is something that will come with time, so it's not really a big problem for now, but I hope they do it right.

4.Last but not least: it's like Intrepid forgot that this is a fantasy world — high fantasy, last time I checked the wiki. They're not chained to making only real-life, realistic assets, areas, and POIs. There's barely any fantasy feel to any of these zones and areas. Just because the Tropics in real life don't have much variety, they could still create their own tropical areas with a touch of fantasy — same with the other zones.Same with the mobs — a huge amount of them are just real-life animals: elephants, rhinos, lions, bears, otters, and a huge number of random human bandits who somehow seem to have entered Verra before everyone else... If you're going to add those, at least give them a fantasy look and make them bigger. We have spiders, scorpions, and frogs that are huge and have a fantasy look to them, so why are the elephants, rhinos, and hippos look normal and so tiny by comparison? If I wanted to look at real-life animals, I would just go to a zoo. Please make more weird, huge, and small creatures!

5. pick a style : the environments are too cartoony , the sand in the desert feels and looks like play-dough instead of sand while the characters look horrible like skinny ugly realistic looking drug addicts and you cant make a decent looking character in the CC non the less an actual good looking one

6. i dont know if this is just me but the scale of everything dosent look right , espically the environments they just feel and look smaller than they should be and characters are too small.


7: another positive of having mini biomes where nodes reside instead of the same looking place everywhere is that it would lessen the fatigue of seeing the same view over and over again as more likely than not like at least 60-80% of nodes gonna be the same human looking nodes instead of other races but if at least the area a node is in is different from the node next to it and so on, with the unique area seeping into the node it self it will make it look and feel a lot more unique and more personalized to the citizens of that node.

Apologies if this went a bit too long or felt a bit ranty — and for any mistakes, since English is not my first or second language so i did use an AI to fix any mistakes and make it better presented.

While I might have forgotten to add or missed some stuff, this should conclude what I think about the biomes so far.