All the colors are Muddy!

General Discussion
1

None of the clothing/decorations/stash/caves/lights/fires/etc are bright enough or vivid enough. Except the puddles. Which look fantastic, except first thing my brother said when he saw them is they look weird. And after playing for a couple of days, having trouble finding things on the screen under all the brown-ness of everything, We finally realized why he said that.

The water is beautiful, but it has color values (white, black) that aren’t seen anywhere else on the screen, so it looks ‘other’. If the rest of the screen was corrected, then it would just blend in nicely.

Also, it’s reflecting what I assume is moonlight or daylight, not sure (another problem), but that same light is not being reflected elsewhere on the screen, or when it does (on metal helmets, armor, etc) there’s no corresponding white or dark value. It’s just all muddy.
Even the fire doesn’t have a center of white flickering in and out. And if you toggle to the original, it did.

Which brings me to the colors. Oh dear. The colors. Toggle to the old version to see what I’m talking about. Bright greens, bright purples, bright colors in general. The wash of sepia over the screen is dulling everything down and making it all look muddy. Not dark, muddy. And because everything, even the air, even the light, is muddy, it makes it really hard to see anything, like finding your stash.

Is that another brown log? Or is it my stash? Is that the ground or is it a building? Is that a wall hanging? Or is that dirt? I had to bring the brightness value all the way to max to even begin to be able to play, and even that wasn’t bright enough because it didn’t make the colors more vivid, only more visible.

Please look at the color values and color range of the original.

2

I dint know why this isn’t the #1 problem being talked about. The color of the game is off… way off.

3

Agreed completely. This should be the biggest topic of the game community. The color’s need work.

To emphasize why this so important. Consider going to a play house theatre. In such a theatre you get theatrical makeup. it is often grotesquely overly bright and flashy to a point that it would be taken for weird if seen on the street. The reason they do this is because from an audience you would never be able to make out the expressions if you didn’t do this.
Similarly as another example, the statue on the top of the capitol building in Austin Texas (and likely others, but this is the one I know) If you look at it from close, it’s ugly and deformed, sickly maybe (Seriously. look it up “Austin Goddess of liberty” images), but from afar you can make out the expressions which you would never be able to do without this.

The equivalent of this in D2 is the contrast and emphasizing brighter and darker colors. By nature you are always looking at D2 from afar, so this kind of emphasis is critical.

4

I’d have to agree on this.
The game looks spectacular, don’t get me wrong, It’s far beyond anything I would have expected! My only issue with some tonal contrasts here and there. Some scenarios look overly dim (especially on Act II), and metal parts of weapons/armor are waaay more matte than I would have liked. I’m not saying we need mirror polish, but the Paladin looks more like a grizzled warrior than a knight in shining armor!

5

Agreed, well-described.

6

I actually think this described the issue better than i did when i made a topic about it on day 1 of the beta.

The monster colors in D2 aren’t bright in a D3 sense - they are vivid and you know what you are fighting. There isn’t enough contrast between the colors - and sometimes between the environment itself and even objects in the environment.

Something that is missing is that when you mouseover a monster in D2:R there isn’t a red ‘hue’ over that monster like there was in the original.

A seperate issue is that many of the monsters are now ‘humanoid’ proportioned which isn’t the case for D2(for example, fallens have a disproportionately large head in d2 but in D2:r they’re humanoid proportions).

7

Try raising the setting for sharpness to 125 or 150% That helps make it look less blurred and more detailed imo.
The actual colors themselves seem fine to me.

8

as absolutely beautiful and stunning the game looks, i am also annoyed by how “muted” and non vibrant the colors.

the most obvious changes are the skeletons in the act 2 sewers… the bright red burning dead is now a dull matt red, and the pitch black of radament’s skeles is barely even a dark gray.

9

You do realize you control all that with your monitor settings, hdr, contrast, 422 10 bit, 444 8 bit, contrast, Nvidia color boost or amds equilvant, I can make the colors so bright on my oled it would burn your eyes. Even on my monitor I can make the colors more vivid or dull.

That’s not even getting into things like enb that change everything to how you want it. You could add parallaxing or what ever that make objects stick out, too it if you donate to that guy that has the mod for it.

10

I like it better now, it’s more grim. But yeah it felt more vivid on D2, can’t deny it.

11

And if all I ever did with my monitor was play D2R (and well, it might be for awhile), I wouldn’t mind adjusting all those things just to get it to look right.

But that’s not reality.

12

Well I don’t know what to tell you then, I always adjust my settings to how I like them, guess just whine that they didn’t make the colors how you want, maybe they will change then.

I honestly don’t think I ever met some one to lazy to change color settings haha.

13

welcome to classic, dark aesthetic of the classic diablo games. This is what players wanted after d2 was too cartony.

I quite like both styles. and if they added more color sturation to the ressurected version it would look kinda like classic wow, with all that color saturation.

14

Well yes if they just saturated everything, you’re right and we’d be back to D3. But there IS color in classic, it comes in pops especially on some equipment. There is a difference between a dark palette and muddy colors. Through most of the underground areas I felt like they’d swapped in the Quake color scheme.

15

I honestly didn’t notice this being much of a problem. Some of the more muted colors, which I will agree there was, also helped show off elemental lighting effects such as lightning and fire.

Overall I felt the tonality of the color palette was fine but I am in now way saying others are wrong in saying it wasn’t fine… just different perspectives

16

I completely agree. The colors seem very dull and it’s like there’s a fog/haze over everything.

17

I think there’s a way to increase the colors here and there while leaving a lot of it as-is, replace some of the browns and tans with greys and blacks for nighttime, and yet still keep it classy. For instance, in town in act 2 there are rugs on the ground and on the buildings that basically look like dirt. Not shadow, dirt. Dirt with a vague pattern on it. Why not give them some color?

The pink of the walking girl npc top is pale, dingy pink. The green outfit is grey-green, not vibrant green, etc, etc. The white is dirty white. The skin tones are greyish, not shadowed, they’re greyish tan. Greyish tan is called taupe. Grey is not a color a non-ill person should ever be. This is not ‘nighttime’, it’s just an overabundance of tan and brown over grey skin tones. I can’t actually tell what time of day it is from the visuals. The bright bright moon reflected by the water isn’t anywhere else. So maybe it’s daylight? In a constant dust storm?

That’s not something you can adjust out of your computer settings. That can’t fix that you can’t make out the muscles because they are barely delineated and don’t have enough shadows in their artwork. (And don’t get me started on the vaguely ethnic, non-muscled, runway model npc’s. With perfect hair. Compare those to D2classic. The ethnicities of the original programs npcs were just wiped out. Ok, tangent over. Sorry, I veered into a pet peeve. Some of the npcs are ok, I guess.) The clothing is fine, if not remotely colorful, as would befit the desert setting of Act2, and honor the original game at the same time.

I’m just hoping that if some of the individual characters exposure and colors were adjusted it might not be too difficult to fix some of this, make them more visible, instead of them disappearing into the background, all that pretty artwork, invisible, wasted.

And also might help me see my stash instead of wandering all over town, tripping over logs, looking for it. The overay map being basically the same color as the muddy visuals doesn’t help.

I may be extra picky about this because I’m an abstract artist, and I know that if I mix too many paint colors, what I get is… mud. And then the painting is ruined. So when I see it happening in other art, I mourn what could have been. Because it has so much potential to be gorgeous. They almost did a really awesome job, and with a few tweaks, it could be really good.

18

honestly, the issue of colors is not such a big deal … but I would like a solution to the contrast problem.
many times there is no way to distinguish enemy from environment.
going to the old view is a very easy way to locate them.

19

I personally think the color scheme of Diablo 2 was too vibrant, too many bright colors in the landscape and creatures – It really was a drastic change from Diablo 1 and really killed the horror aesthetic of the franchise, and paved the way for the graphical style of D3.

That said, I think you are right on some levels, that things do tend to blend together. Playing on my PC, it was no problem. Playing on my Xbox on my 4k 85 inch tv, which sounds like it would be easy to see stuff, it was actually a pain to see what was going on from my couch. they need to make some adjustments, or hook up whatever ‘the problem’ is to controls that players can fiddle with on their own to get it right for them.

20

Yep they should also add the color code of items on the background when in inventory