Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Patch 8 - Colors Became Too Vibrant And Washed Out Darker Shades

Wrong thread?

Don't you people like fun fun fun fun fun?

Eh. Have I missed something in the thread or what? This is the second post in a row where I can't see the connection to the topic.

GM4Him definitely meant to post in another thread, but the second one... yeah, I'm as confused as you are

Lol. Yeah. Just copied and pasted to the one I meant it for.

If I had to guess it probably refers to brighter colors being associated with Larian's particular "whimsical", how its often called here, style of games that was prevalent in DOS1...

Although I'm always surprised when people have a problem with it. I've played Larian games since Divine Divinity and I've also played BG1 and they always seemed the same to me in terms of darkness/humor ratio, not to mention the color scheme in the nature/city locations. *shrug*

OK. Orange 5 is definitely different looking in the game than it is on the character creation screen.

Still, here's Patch 8:



Here's Pre-Patch 8:

Same, though I only played DOS1 and DOS2. I found DOS2's lighting really immersive and the overall tone of the game quite fitting ,with a perfect ratio of both serious and humorous tones.

Baldur's Gate 3 I thought had perfect lighting and color contrast prior to Patch 8, it felt really fitting and immersive. But Patch 8 made it really inconsistent, because some parts are incredibly vivid while others completely washed out. I wouldn't mind BG3's lighting change as long as there is consistency in lighting and color. Unfortunately the game has neither for now.


Yeah the colors are inconsistent all over the place. Here's what my character's hair color is supposed to look like and what it actually looks like. It should be even darker than this, practically black with subtle hints of dark purple, but this is as dark as I can make it as of Patch 8 and it turns into gray washed out mess in-game that looks nothing like it should. Her outfit's colors also look bad. I'm sure they'll fix it though, no way they'll leave it like this. I'd be surprised if they did.

I do a good bit of painting as a hobby, so maybe it’s just, literally, having a ‘different set of eyes’, but the second image makes me tune out, as though having to listen to a particular boring person. It blandly leaves nothing to the imagination, and looks fake and comical, as though the two characters aren’t even standing on the ground – they look photoshopped in, almost like 2D sprites.

The first photo is loaded with atmosphere – the characters have depth, thanks to the shading of their adornments. The tentacles look brilliantly sinister and realistic, and the flames have a grim, hellish menace to them. Even the comparatively low-effort flesh-asset looks more 3D with the darker shading.

And yeah, I absolutely 100% agree about the clouds. Why would you remove them?

Can’t be the same art director. The dude/dudette who ‘envisioned’ the first version couldn’t possibly ‘okay’ the second version – number 2 is like something a disinterested secondary school intern would come up with during their transition year. And after the internship finished, they’d politely be told they have no talent and should consider a career in accounting instead. Because let’s be honest, there are ten year olds who could do better than photo 2.

I still can’t get my head around what has happened. Remember The Witcher 3 VGX trailer versus the final product?

Here's a comparison video.

It’s the exact same disaster… The VGX trailer had shadow and atmosphere and grit – then the ‘real thing’ is the new BG3: flat, insipid lighting.

Shouldn’t go off topic, but about the BG1/BG3 humour similarity – I don’t agree, honestly. BG2 was obviously the ‘masterpiece’, or as much as it could be in the gaming world, but the big difference is BG1/BG2 humour was more ‘off-the-cuff’ – you could really tell it was just the writers randomly taking the piss. Whereas BG3 writers probably take a whole 2 weeks off just to painstakingly manufacture the ‘jokes’ in their workmanlike, ‘let’s-justify-our-easy-jobs’ way. Kind of like the massive list of lacklustre bard insults they came up with – lots of lines, little wit.

‘More and more again’ is Larian’s new motto – pile on the plot, pile on the jokes, cut back the smoke and the black and pile on the visual detail.

Unfortunately, less is always more – in all aspects of life.

I'm quite glad you mentioned the Nautiloid flesh. I intentionally did not say anything about it because I wanted to see if anyone will catch how terrible it looks after the patch, like something that came out of a 1990s game

It's a simple proof yet quite amazing how lighting & contrast can make a model look either terrible or really good. I mean, the model itself is nothing impressive on its own, but with proper lighting and contrast, it wonderfully blends with the environment and doesn't stick out in a negative way. Its only purpose is to simply enrich the scene and it does it really well when all elements are complementing each-other.


Yup, the early previews looked just like I'd imagine medieval Slavic folklore culture, the gritty and immersive atmosphere was through the roof. It's one of my favorite games of all time, incredibly beautiful and immersive still, but the atmosphere would have been so much better had they kept it the way it was previewed.

Similar thing happened to Diablo 3. Went from a gritty and dark diabolical ARPG in early previews to a colorful wonderland with happy colors and brightness ^^

The nautiloid flesh is what my son was saying hurt his eyes.

Yes! I agree haha – and they did upgrade TW3 ‘afterwards’ and I love that game’s story-writing and art – as much as I love the controversial Cyperpunk! IMO, they are gifted – Cyperpunk had some extremely good story telling. I loved it personally!

Art was amazing as well. I know people love to hate on it, but I think they poured their hearts out into it – and it was really, really good, if you could look past the ‘rough edges’.

They just over-stretched. But man, they have good writers. TW3 Faustus DLC was simply ingenious – and everything they’ve done since, I love it. Gunter Grimm versus our very obvious whats-his-name in BG3.

Cyberpunk was brazen af. Very much anti-Marvel, anti-PC. But beautiful. The characters were written with heart – all of them, basically. Especially Judy. We won’t get this with BG3 – but sure, not the end of the world.

D4, btw, is absolutely beautiful… I’ve never seen a game look so good. From Blizzard? Amazing, honestly. They are really putting the effort in.

I have a feeling we will progressively start seeing these <downgrades> due to performance issues with various systems. Or maybe something to do with performance of the game?
They need a common point for all the versions of the game, and the version we all liked, patch 7, isn't on their radar any more.
Frack that. Hopefully I am wrong. I loved the way it sorta paved a way to a more realistic darker look. Now we are back to the Disney land faded and colorful look.

The ‘downgrade’ as a result of performance was at the back of my mind – I was going to mention it with the TW3 comment, but I figured it might be be a non-point, given today’s graphics cards. And the fact that there were no noticeable performance issues with Patch 7, at least for myself.

But yeah, you have to factor in the bigger picture – when they start adding in the rest of the game, it makes sense that there could be issues (I seem to recall reading an article on Cyberpunk downgrades being the result of the global codebase). Why remove the clouds, for example? I assume it costs more resources to ‘compute’ something like that – but man does it look nasty now.

Pity it’s too late to switch over to Unreal 5 and its ‘unlimited polygons’: I guess the product is not just at the mercy of Larian’s writerly limitations, but also the underlying tech stack.

At least CDprojeckt Red don’t piss around with this stuff, and just ditched their old engine and have moved to U5 for all future projects. Common sense does be a great old asset with this stuff…

I don’t think it was due to performance. Optimization is usually done at the end of development, but even so… colors, contrast and brightness do not affect performance. If anything you would dial down on nonessential objects, especially lighting sources to reduce the amount of shadows, but instead they added even more.

The game graphically certainly improved in some aspects, but the extensive changes caused this ugly side-effect. The more I am playing Patch 8, the more obvious it becomes that so many things are not working as they should so the lighting & colors are highly likely just a result of this. In other words, either unfinished or bugged.

Although they did do some questionable artistic decisions, such as changing the goblin camp lighting. Or reducing the amount of songs in Character Creation. Now there are only two for each, the custom character and the dreamer. We will most likely find out in Patch 9 where all of this goes. But Patch 8 definitely could have used more time in the oven.

Also just got to Alfira today. Sheesh…. she was so colorful and bright, practically a whole spectrum of colors. May as well have been a talking rainbow

QUESTION: Have any of you tryed to adjust your gama?

I just thought that maybe Larian took it lazy route and simply incerased it ... so lowered it a bit and the game looks 100% better!
Its not pefect tho, collors are still quite pastel ... but it helps.

The problem with that is: Adjusting gamma doesn't just affect the in-game lighting but also text, inventory, etc. If I adjust gamma to the point where I actually need a lightsource in dungeons, I can barely make out the characters in the inventory screen or read the text on tooltips.
So yes, adjusting gamma was the first thing I tried.

Thats why i said, its not suppose to fix this problem ... just make it a little more bareable.

So I managed to grab some interesting screenshots which show the inconsistency of the lighting and colors, as inconsistency was merely talked about before, but now can clearly be shown.

In this scene when the player enters the Blighted Village and is ambushed, all 3 angles belong to the exact same sunny scene yet all 3 are inconsistent in terms of lighting and color. First shot is almost as the colors should be, then the 2nd is incredibly bright and washed out, and the third is something in-between. Looks awfully inconsistent and not like something that they intended.


In this scene with Gale, lighting is so bright it blinded my character but then turned pitch black when it goes to Gale


And here the lighting is coming from below my character in the first shot and then comes properly from the sky in the next.


Not really sure what they were trying to achieve with the lighting in this update, because it's so inconsistent and for the most part a huge quality drop in visuals, which is strange because the patch notes mentioned it was supposed to make things look better... but so far it accomplished the exact opposite across the majority of the game. Whether it is a bug or a re-design that they will address eventually, we probably won't see any changes or improvements made to this until Patch 9.

Last patch people were complaining it was to dark now it's the other way around, kinda funny! But they added sliders for a reason.