Graphics option: turn off flashy visual effects

[xordevoreaux]

Contrarian here, I like the graphical effects.

[LD_Little_Dragon]

Contrarian here, I like the graphical effects.

 

Yes, that's why the OP was asking for a toggle option. If you like the effects leave them on. But let other people turn the things off. Unless you have a problem with other people doing something that does not affect your game at all.

 

This is a good topic to bump - all the flashy effects contribute to lag and visibility issues for me. I would love a way to turn them off. Maybe then I would like Merc healers more, since as it is that kolto bomb is just a horrible, blinding, laggy annoyance.

 

/signed

[mokusasnake]

This game could use some optimization. But I am the minority being someone who has a low-end computer. It isn't fair to make the game less enjoyable for someone who can afford it. My 20ish year old self would be slapping me right now for saying such a thing. Anyways~ I do find that my operative has much better FPS than any force user that I use. Mainly because of the obvious - light sabers cost a lost of FPS. I have everything lowered. From an efficient resolution to a capped FPS rate.

 

Never mind that he's funner anyways. More payload with less effort. It's almost like they got really lucky with this ability combination on this. Oh yeah~ no aoe and open-ended distance mitigation. Who cares? I can stealth.

[LD_Little_Dragon]

Does no one read more than the thread titles anymore? It's not turn off effects for everone that's being asked for, it's give players an OPTION to turn it of for themselves.

 

It isn't fair to make the game less enjoyable for someone who can afford it.

 

How would my having an option to turn off the ability effects make the game less enjoyable for others who play with the effects on? I play with subtitles on, but it doesn't ruin the game for people who like the cinematic feel because they have the OPTION to turn subtitles off.

[NightWolf_Killa]

Okay so my original bump post sounded a bit intense, but I'm just trying to get some attention brought to this very real issue that the developers seemed to have overlooked.

 

What I propose is an option to toggle visual queue effects; on, off, or set to the action bars. On and Off are self explanatory but giving us an option to set queues to the action bars (flashing, strobing, or other indicators on the active abilities) settles as a common ground, you still get visual queues for ability activation, but your character doesn't look like a Life Day tree on fire.

[spectreclees]

With the engine in the state it's in. I doubt this is even possible for them to do. Turning off a visual effect might cause the entire game to blow up. Until they dedicate time to fixing up the engine and fixing the desync issues with this game. I'm gonna have to say they ignore this issue.

[Majspuffen]

To all those defending the flashy effects for PVP:

 

Thanks to all the flashy effects today I find it much harder to see actual important stuff. It was much better in vanilla when the graphics were much cleaner. You could tell by sound effects and animations what an enemy was doing, without having to take a glance at their buff/debuff tray. This game suffers from the same problem WoW suffers from: spell clutter. At launch I had no problem seeing when an Assassin used Force Shroud, but today? I have to narrow my eyes or try to find the icon of the ability in the buff tray.

 

As for the option of hiding them: it's a bandaid but not a fix to the actual problem. I'm personally fine with animation bubbles for abilities such as Deflection and Saber Ward, seeing as they have a rather short duration but a long CD. However, abilities like the Kinetic Ward on Jedi Shadows, those are jarring to me because they are permanent. And today, a lot of animations are simply too exaggerated.

[SteveTheCynic]

Okay so my original bump post sounded a bit intense, but I'm just trying to get some attention brought to this very real issue that the developers seemed to have overlooked.

 

What I propose is an option to toggle visual queue effects; on, off, or set to the action bars. On and Off are self explanatory but giving us an option to set queues to the action bars (flashing, strobing, or other indicators on the active abilities) settles as a common ground, you still get visual queues for ability activation, but your character doesn't look like a Life Day tree on fire.

Cues. They are cues, not queues.

 

How do you resolve the already mentioned question of *which* effects are turned off? Not the on/off toggle itself, that's clear, as is the view affected by the toggle (mine and only mine if I change the toggle, yours and only yours if *you* change it), but the list of effects that it affects (sorry). It's more or less inevitable that if you draw the line | there, there will be someone who thinks that you should draw the | line there, and someone else who thinks you should draw the line there |. (That is, does the "toggled effect list" include "the line" but not "there", or does it include all three, or is "line" excluded as well as "there"?)

 

How do you draw up that list, and how do you resolve the complaints?

[NightWolf_Killa]

Cues. They are cues, not queues.

 

How do you resolve the already mentioned question of *which* effects are turned off? Not the on/off toggle itself, that's clear, as is the view affected by the toggle (mine and only mine if I change the toggle, yours and only yours if *you* change it), but the list of effects that it affects (sorry). It's more or less inevitable that if you draw the line | there, there will be someone who thinks that you should draw the | line there, and someone else who thinks you should draw the line there |. (That is, does the "toggled effect list" include "the line" but not "there", or does it include all three, or is "line" excluded as well as "there"?)

 

How do you draw up that list, and how do you resolve the complaints?

 

First of all, thank you, I actually had no idea about the queues / cues things, it's not a word I use frequently enough.

 

To answer your question of which effects this would affect, there could be multiple settings to satisfy a wider group of people, though it will never be a perfect fix I agree, someone somewhere will still have a grievance with this solution, I suggest having some options.

 

- On (all visual cues on / as it is now)

- Off (no visual cues)

- Cues Only (no cosmetic character effects, i.e. snowballs during Life Day)

- Cosmetic Only (no ability cue effects, but character effects are active)

- Bound to Action Bars (effects will only be visible on action bars, as background to the given / activated ability)

 

What about environmental cues? Make them optional as well.

 

- On (the environmental danger is clearly visible, and it interacts with the character visually, i.e. a character running through fire will be set on fire)

- Off (the environmental danger is visible, but it does not visually affect the character, [fire example from above] your character will take damage, and receive the "burned" damage de-buff, but will not go up in flames)

 

As far as where to draw the line, you have to set a limit on how many elements you can toggle, however if / when the developers actually make an effort in this area, they could reach out to players and simply ask which effects need to be optional. A live-stream or AMA thread could stand as a platform for outreach, you could even have a dedicated forum category under suggestions.

 

These are just my ideas though, if you or anyone for that matter have better ideas I would gladly work with you to support change in player base - developer interaction.

[SaveTheMonkeys]

Signed!

[Kraysk]

/signed

I want to be able to turn off ALL that glowing nonsense.

[Pscyon]

I still want this too. Especially since the various "stances" have been removed and you're stuck in one based on your specialization anyway, there's no need to drown our weapons and characters in glows to showcase them. Client-side toggle to remove this nonsense please.

[Koshka_RU]

I turned off all graphics shaders but keep seeing stacks of bufs... For what i need machine gun big and rotating if it look like a red ****? How to play jedi if he looks like some parrot? MUST be option for some RP.

[MikeCobalt]

+1 Signed , This is also a good idea I think. Main effects like Lasers, Muzzle flash, The lasers splash, Force lightning, Immediate force powers and explosions are all good its what we do but many of the "Flashy, Gamey, Cliche" effects are....dumb actually.

Main effects > Good

Secondary effects > toggle for those

Edited July 23, 2019 by MikeCobalt

[pwned_at]

Hey Guys

I started Swtor again last time I played all 55 was endgame and I did a lot of that stuff back in the days.

Was playing the last year's all kind of mmorpg and got everywhere a little look inside the endgame. Games like Gw2, Tera, Black Desert, Wow, Classis Wow, Rift and even Teso. Most of the Time was Wow but not 1 of the games I listed ****ed me up so hard with effects. Today I got in my first Operation and I am not a Raiding Noob even 40 man WoW Raids didn't trigger me like that. In my Group 2 Kommandos and the first try on The boss with the 2 Striders gave me reason to Google for an solution. I NEED A SETTING TO LOWER DOWN PARTY SPELL EFFECTS! Most of the time I was staring on the ground and tryed to filter all that flashy stuff and the green cloud for the important red rings -.-. If that is supposed to be the hardest mechanic for some encounters Jesus... Apart of the massiv fps los and lagy performance and I got a pretty good system. Even battlefield 5 I play on high in WQHD and 144 fps fixed. Games like that need that option guild wars 2 and wow would be unplayable in some situations without any option to reduce the cluster ****

 

Pump this thread

[Xargas]

I turned off bloom for this reason, because when in PvP all the players firing up their pretty flashy abilities, it is almost blinding and you cannot see properly, which impacts my PvP obviously, so yes, make that happen.

[KWONRYU]

Since SW takes place in an entirely fictional universe, there is no such thing as an "authentic" SW experience. What that means to you does not mean the same thing to others.

 

An option in Preferences, not standard for all.

 

Standard preset will still have the MMO-effects.

 

Just like you can turn on/off Bloom.

 

Could be settings like, show only Detrimental effects (for Operations) as well.

Edited December 12, 2019 by KWONRYU

[heroldjedi]

/signed

 

Especially with the new healing animations from comps .. man that lightshow is annoying

[Isharel]

The swirly effects around my Jedi Shadow actually give me eye strain. I hate it.

[Soljin]

This is a worthy revival of a thread... I cant stand the hand glow effect on my Shadow when the Breaching Shadows buff triggers.... I literally stopped playing Infiltration for awhile because I hate that visual effect so much. Give us the ability to disable the buff/debuff effects Please!

 

Oh and lets not forget the floating "Dirt Clod" shield AKA Kinetic Ward...love that one... Please let me turn these off!

Edited May 28, 2020 by Soljin

[jedimasterjac]

I would love to be able to watch my Guardian fight without them glowing blue and having glowy eyes to the point I can't even make out more than their silhouette.

 

I don't mind these effects exist, but let us turn them off as an option. They don't do their job of communicating what is going on.

[Eriamea]

Some effects have become way over the top... can’t even see the boss sometimes, especially on 16m content. Although my computer can handle ultra settings I now set the graphics to low whenever I run an operation because it is just visually too tiring/annoying.

[Soljin]

Some effects have become way over the top... can’t even see the boss sometimes, especially on 16m content. Although my computer can handle ultra settings I now set the graphics to low whenever I run an operation because it is just visually too tiring/annoying.

 

I have a pretty high end PC and SWToR boosts the heat levels with a fluid cooling system... If anything allow us to disable particle effects for buffs/debuffs as a performance measure. This game runs terrible.

[Tofu_Shark]

This has bugged me for a long time, but I just wrote it off as "it's a game." However, it wasn't like this when I started playing, and I do think it's unfair to players that value immersion. So I'm going to comment on this now.

 

The immersion players are always forced to make sacrifices for the sake of the other types of players. This is not right. Many of the things that add to the game's immersion that have been changed or cut were not harming the other players' ability to play the game, but those things when changed or removed directly impacted immersion. I've got a laundry list of immersive aspects that have been changed or outright removed since I started playing...and I'll bet there are even more that were removed before I started.

 

Did players have problems understanding what was going on before all these flashy and many times, superfluous effects were introduced? And none of this stuff was in the patch notes. I noticed at some point an interrupt had an impact explosion bubble effect added, not unlike a comic book. This was entirely unnecessary. It's not unlike how the icons identifying vendors were added (although that was on the PTS and there was negative feedback on the PTS forum concerning it). Now I'm starting to wonder how much these needless effects degrade hardware performance, particularly in warzones and ops.

 

These effects are really a dumbing down of the game and another example of how players that value immersion are forced to take a backseat to everyone else. It's time this stops. Immersion players are just as important to the game as every other type of player, and they deserve to be treated better than this by having options and not just having the will of other players' preferences imposed upon them.

Edited January 22, 2021 by Tofu_Shark

[MicholashKage]

Bump /signed