A bunch of bugs or concerns just from starting the game:
- HDR calibration seems broken: its first screen is ok where you choose the white point, but the second screen (paperwhite + contrast) doesn't have a reference symbol, therefore making further calibration impossible. See the screenshot - the background is always a solid colour no matter what, but a contrast symbol is expected:
https://imgur.com/a/uwCxZxN- Possibly because HDR calibration is broken, the rest of the game looks too washed out and bad in general in terms of colours and contrast.
- Running the game in Vulkan mode makes seamless alt-tabbing impossible, which is a serious annoyance in any game, which is why DirectX is always preferred.
- Running the game in Vulkan mode removes HDR support from the game, which is a huge visual limitation.
- While I'm personally not affected by the lack of DirectX 12 support because I've got an extremely beefy PC, I'm sure it's a bummer for a lot of people on weaker hardware: DX12 allows much more efficient resource utilisation, and not supporting DX12 in 2023 is weird, it's been out for 8 years.
- Running a fresh BG3 install on DirectX 11 leads to wrongly detected display resolution: the game picks 4096x2160 (256:135), whereas the native resolution is 3840x2160 (16:9). Because of that mismatch, fonts looks blurry and in general everything looks bad. Manually choosing the correct resolution fixes the problem.
- Scrollbars on the left side of the content is a very counter intuitive design decision, as everything on Earth places them on the right. Moreover, the scroll wheel doesn't work to the right side of the content. For example, in Settings -> Video, if you try to scroll in between the settings UI elements and the border to their right, the scrolling doesn't work, even though visually it looks like you're still in the content panel. By the way, same problem trying to scroll on the left - the scrolling becomes inactive when you get close enough to the scrollbar, which is again, completely counter-intuitive to how UIs work.
- The speaker configuration isn't detected properly (the game chose Stereo on a 7.1 output).
Additionally:
- Using UBB.threads in 2023 is outdated, as its UI sucks and it doesn't support Markdown
- UBB.threads sends my password in cleartext back to me in email, which is extremely insecure and goes against security engineering best practices
I would've went past the main menu and tried the game proper, but with broken HDR it just looks too off putting. Guess I'm gonna wait until the full release.
