These particle effects are ridiculous. When you have an entire team whose every attack generates some sort of color, explosion, aura, energy, etc. on the screen, it becomes nearly impossible to see anything through the myriad of effects and animations. It’s just a multicolored wall in the player’s face. I can hardly see my reticle through it all, can hardly see my team mates or enemies, and can hardly see any of the environment or terrain. Everything in the game is essentially a flash bang. Can we PLEASE tone down all these effects so that one’s surroundings are at least SOMEWHAT perceptible when everyone decides to simultaneously mash Q?
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I swear I’ve struggled with this so much, I dunno if it’s my eyes, if there’s just some disconnect between what they’re seeing and what they tell my brain, but it feels like, and you’ll see other people come in here and say “what do you mean? I can distinguish everything that’s happening perfectly fine”, that it’s just me, that there’s just something wrong with my brain/eyes, because the visual clutter is almost impossible for me to see through and pick out targets or teammates or make the plays I’d normally be able to.
Yet others shrug it off like they barely notice that moira’s beam and spray and balls and orisa’s beams, and the three or four shields, and the giant doom target on the ground and the Zen trans are all mixing into this opaque mass of indistinguishable colours in the middle of the battlefield.
It’s such a huge issue for me. I’ve tried the colour blind settings, they don’t really help. I’ve tried making my reticle big and fat so it stands out amongst the rainbow vomit of colours, which does help a bit, but also blocks stuff in the distance. Tired of feeling like I’m staring and straining my eyes just to make out the important things happening in a fight to the point that I might miss other things that are happening and die. Or worse, let my teammates die.
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Did you already decreased particle effect to low in the settings?
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It gets much worse in the dark like on KR and Monkey drops his bubble over you and there is a fight going on in and around the bubble. I get completely lost as to what is happening as I can’t make anything out.
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It’s kind of a catch 22,cause I don’t want invisible Junkrat grenades.
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lol luckily i have every graphic on low so i’m good 
Hello, I agree with this. Would you be ok if I included this on my Quality of Life updates thread? I’ll link your OG post of course.
They already have...
Overwatch 2
5 v 5
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I MEAN YOU’RE RIGHT…
But it would be nice having a video setting to lower down effects too.
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Oh I see…
Like the opacity settings on the aiming reticle right?
“You gotta problem Junker?”
Kinda, yeah. Something to make effects less messy.
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For a game requiring aim, they sure go out of their way to interfere with your vision. I swear sometimes it’s like staring into a strobe light when the effects go crazy.
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Well, assuming you have turned the effects to minimal, not much else you can do. Supposedly OW 2 is reducing them a bit more as well.
It’s an odd balance where they have to factor in how flashy/polished a thing looks because it’s a video game and needs to look cool and/or impactful, verses an absolute ton of visual clutter that comes about from it.
One of the worst offenders of course being Hanzo’s dragons. It is just so freaking annoying whenever he hits Q, and it doesn’t even matter all that much even if it’s a Hanzo on your team. If that Dragons goes through you, you might as well be blindfolded for two or three seconds. Even if it just goes through the battle and you manage to get outside the effect before it reaches you, it basically blocks you from doing anything meaningful to someone on the other side of it so much that it might as well be a Sym’s barrier running between you.
Yes the particle effects in this game need a serious toning-down and also probably a rework of their own right. But I can almost guarantee you that such a thing isn’t happening until they launch OW2. The problem then becomes that the devs in their “infinite” wisdom think that tanks are the cause of the visual clutter, and are using that as part of the justification for removing one tank from OW2. Which just smacks of a poor excuse like a friend claiming he can’t attend a party you’re throwing in a few weeks because he’s pretty sure he’ll have a headache.
So that’s going to be their non-solution. They’re going to delete a tank and call it a day. That’s as much as they’re willing to pay attention to the problem.
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Yeah this, have you all tried lowering your graphical settings?
I know that might be a tough pill to swallow but it’ll at least give you a higher frame rate and more stable performance.
What do you mean you can’t tell what’s going on? It’s clear as day! Just watch…
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My big thing are the shields,
Its like a carnival maze trying to figure out where to go
…While also being punched in the face
i.imgur .com/x5M7m0k.jpg
theres an option called damage fx in the advanced settings, set it to low and there will be less effects.
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I still have ptsd from Moira launch particle effects. But yeah visual effects are a jungle and could definitely be toned down.
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Set the effect quality to low and the dynamic lighting will be gone.
It only removes the blood.
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