Graphical improvements

[Serenity]

Really looking forward to this. I love the game's graphical style. The water color style is unique and the lighting is some of the most beautiful in any survival game. At least as far as the sky, sun and fog are concerned. The cold really feels cold just with the why the colors are shifted. But the game is showing its age and the limitations of the Unity engine. I don't even think this is a "high end PC" thing. My machine is old and it runs newer, more demanding games fine.

For technical issues something that needs to be fixed is draw distance. This has actually gotten worse over time. At extreme distances there will always be some object pop-in (very flat maps like CH always had it). But right now you have camp fires, meat and carcasses popping into existence at very short ranges. This doesn't just look bad - it's really bad for gameplay when you're searching for things. It wasn't always like this.

Also despite loving the overall  great lighting some things could be improved. On the technical side I think there is a bit of an issue with open air caves where it's bright outside, but the cave is pitch black. Except for the items on the ground which have maximum brightness. Just looks bad and again I don't think this was always the case.

For general improvement with lighting I'd like an implementation of the Ambient Lights mod. This generally makes interiors brighter so it's no longer very dark at dawn. But it also does it depending on the time of day and sun position. And it changes the color slightly with the weather. This is also a nice way to connect the insides more out what happens outside despite usually being different maps.

It would also be nice to go over old maps and backport some of the later improvements. Ash Canyon for example has some gorgeous lighting in those narrow gorges.

 

The other thing I'd like to see updated a bit is objects and textures. Increase the vertices of round objects like pots or car tires for example. They are very polygonal. It doesn't have to be perfectly round, but just doubling the vertices would be an improvement without sacricifing the stylized art direction. It'll never be - and shouldn't be - realistic, but it could be a bit better.

The other issue here is textures. Most of the time it's fine, but when standing up close to walls it's really noticeable how low res some of them are. Improvements could be made here without going overboard with super high res textures, which might impact performance and could change the look of the game too much.

[UpUpAway95]

Judging from the trailer, I'd say they've put a tremendous amount of work into some of this already.

 

[Admin]

Thank you for the feedback. To confirm: we have a range of visual enhancements planned, many specifically for high-end systems (high-end PC, Xbox Series X|S, or PlayStation 5). We’ll outline which are part of the Paid stream and which will be released as Free updates as we get closer to their release.

[Karl Grylls]

Can we expect that the waterfalls will be part of this enhancement? Because they really hurt in the eyes, sry