Guild Wars 2 Reverts Post-Processing Changes Following Player Complaints
Guild Wars 2 rolled out its Wintersday patch earlier this week which came with post-processing updates that looked harmless at first but ended up being a source of frustration for players. The updates in question enabled color grading by default to pave the way for the ten-year-old MMORPG’s upcoming transition to DirectX 11.
According to ArenaNet, color grading would allow environment artists to use color look-up tables to easily create distinct moods for different environments. “This will ensure that art quality across different graphics settings profiles is more consistent with our standards,” said Game Director Josh Davis. The changes, however, forced players to always have light bloom and other visual effects toggled on which didn’t sit well with the community.
ArenaNet promptly acknowledged the problem and have now recalled the post-processing changes to be redeployed at a later date. “Color grading isn’t the main culprit behind the issues that have been raised today—it’s because of graphics features and effects like light bloom that are being forced on for all players in the revised postprocessing settings,” the studio explained. “When we set out to make these changes, we recognized that we’d need to give players control over settings like light bloom by separating it out from postprocessing. That change didn’t make it into today’s build, so we’re reverting the color grading and postprocessing changes and will ship them all together once that is ready.”
“We recognize that our players have a wide variety of hardware configurations and graphics preferences,” added the studio. “As we continue to work on improving the game’s graphical fidelity, we want to give players as much control as we can over their graphics settings, whether it’s for aesthetic, performance, or accessibility reasons.”
Meanwhile, Wintersday is now in full swing in the popular fantasy MMORPG with various seasonal rewards up for grabs until January 4th.
