Okay, so first of all I want to say that I understand this is the way the whole industry is going and Blizzard is just following the leader here, so I’m not saying this just to hate on Blizzard or be negative toward the game, but I am so annoyed by all of this! I also understand that I am clearly one of a very small group of people who care about this, and most normies will literally never notice what I am complaining about, but I want new games to fix these issues so that games can be visually appealing again, because for me this is just straight up ugly and I can’t focus on the game because these are way too distracting.
Now, the first and biggest issue before I list my complaints. A lot of the things below are great for increasing performance of a game, but they all have visual side effects that I find to be incredibly distracting. The solution? Keep these in the game, but add additional settings so that we can control them! Some of these things, they really just need an off switch so I can have visual quality at the expense of lower performance. Others, you could just give us the option to turn the quality up. Right now though, the only way to negate the problems is to enable upscaling technologies, because these effectively hide the problems through clever AI and higher frame rates, however I don’t like the upscaling because it always softens the image and just drains the detail away (a common theme in my complaints).
Now, the problems I am noticing.
- Temporal Anti-Aliasing, which can’t be disabled or turned up to an adequate quality
- The hair rendering “checkerboard”, which renders half of all pixels regardless of quality settings, so it always looks both fuzzy and pixelated
- Some monster animations and particle effects appear to be capped at 10 or so FPS, so even when the game is at 100+ it looks like stop motion
- Environments and characters, although detailed, are very bland (I’ll explain better below)
Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA)
This one is easily my biggest visual complaint with all modern games. Anti-aliasing has always been one of those areas where AAA games kind of just take whatever technique is most popular at the time and then force that on their players, but at least they used to let you turn it off. In this game and many others, you are forcing a temporal effect on your players. Sure, most won’t care that much, but for some of us it’s a deal breaker. Here’s why:
Your game has lots of incredibly detailed textures and fast moving objects. What temporal effects do, is they take a very resource intensive task and spread it across multiple frames. In static scenes, they make things look shockingly good, but the second an object or the camera moves, everything kind of smears across the screen. Those sharp textures lose all of their detail and become a multicolored smear across the screen. Those fast moving objects look like a long blurry mess. Standard TAA allows you to reduce this problem by taking more samples with every frame, and then a post-render sharpening effect is supposed to recapture some of that lost detail.
Diablo 4, and many other games, do not allow you to increase the number of samples to an adequate level, nor do they let you turn anti-aliasing off. So no matter what you do, you have to DRAMATICALLY increase your framerate to get the detail back. This is completely stupid. The whole reason you use a temporal effect is to boost frame rates while your game is working on very resource intensive effects, so when you need to boost the frame rates further, you only have one option: lower the quality of the game to push more frames. You basically have to use DLSS to make the frame rate high enough, but guess what? That introduces even more temporal effects, even more blurring, and new temporal artifacts that require even higher frame rates to conceal. I often find myself still being annoyed by the amount of smearing even when my framerate exceeds my monitor’s 165 Hz refresh rate. So I actually just can’t improve it any further, and it’s still a mess.
Please, just let me turn this off! I’ll take the aliasing if I have to. If you don’t want to add other modern techniques, then just let me turn yours off.
Hair Renderer
This one is pretty self-explanatory. If you load up the Druid in the character creator, just look at his hair or the fur on his armor. About half of all pixels are just simply not rendered. The reason for this is simple: hair is not easy to render realistically. It either looks fake and cartoonish because the transparency is extremely hard to do right, or it looks thin and wiry. Regardless of which of those two you go with, it’s also very resource intensive because there are lots of layers to work with. So instead, what most modern games do is just skip every second pixel when they are rendering, to reduce the performance impact, and then go with that first technique. That way they get plenty of transparency with half of the performance cost, but then they still get the more full look.
The problem is, this looks like absolute garbage. The edges of all hair, no matter how far you zoom out, fades in a really ugly way. The high contrast between the hair and the background creates enough contrast that you can see the individual pixels even on high density displays. That high contrast means that it always looks aliased, but they are also so consistently aliased that TAA and other anti-aliasing techniques have a hard time making them look good. This is ONLY solved by using upscaling techniques, because the AI will fill in the hair. Any DLSS setting will eliminate this whole problem. So what that means for me is, I get punished for wanting to render at my native resolution instead of upscaling. I am basically forced to use DLSS, which I personally hate just as much as this problem. So either way, I get bad visuals, even when I have my settings maxed out.
Now look, the whole point of this technique is to save performance. My settings are maxed. I want better visuals, not more performance. If I wanted to sacrifice visual quality like this to get more performance, I would lower my settings. Please just add a new setting to control the hair rendering. Low quality enables this effect, high quality turns it off. Simple as that.
Monster Animations and Particle Effects
This one is really basic, I’ll spare you all from the lengthy explanation and just give examples. So far it has been most obvious on skeletons. They literally look like they’re from a stop motion film. I was getting over 100 FPS and they still looked like that… It has to be deliberate, right? Like somebody must have decided that there was a purpose to this other than performance. The snow has the same problem, smoke has the same problem, the first boss has the same problem with all animations and his landing indicator. Maybe they wanted this for some reason? I really can’t stand it though.
Environments and Characters
This one is harder for me to explain. I’ll probably fail and confuse a lot of people, but that’s okay because it’s not as big of an issue and it’s too late for Blizzard to change it. I just want to voice my opinion.
I know that a lot of people complained that Diablo 3 was too bright and cartoonish, and I agree with that. I know that Blizzard were trying to make the world much darker and more realistic and that has some side effects, but I think they went too far. Everything just looks so bland and soulless. Now yeah, I know. It’s supposed to look soulless and dark. It’s supposed to feel like a world that is beset by evil and corruption, and the environment art should subtly influence this feeling. The problem is, it doesn’t feel like a world that has lost its soul. It feels like it never had any in the first place, and I think that’s too much.
It feels to me like the Unreal Engine 5 video with that girl walking around in the caves and that desert environment. It looks visually stunning and so detailed that you just can’t help but be impressed, but there’s really just that one color. The lighting adds depth and excitement, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re lighting a beige colored rock. Diablo 4, to me, feels like it’s doing the same thing. This are just too similar. There’s not enough variation in the rocks and shrubs outside, or the clothes the NPCs wear, or the interior of the buildings. Somehow everything just feels like it’s more of the same no matter where you go. There’s no variety.
On a technical level, they did a great job and it feels the right way; it conveys that bleak feeling you get on a miserable, rainy, cold day. Unfortunately though, just like those days, it kind of just makes me want to go do something else. If anything really can be done at this point, I think they should find some ways to inject just a little more color into the world, but then just keep it all ruined and in tatters. Make the world look like it used to be more alive, and then keep the dark feeling by keeping things weathered and not well maintained. Maybe increase the intensity or vibrancy of lights in the game just very slightly, but then reduce their range so it still looks dark and foreboding in the darkness.