Buried in the patch notes of yesterday’s Guild Wars 2 Wintersday patch were notes about post-processing settings that seemed innocuous but turned out to have been supremely controversial and unpleasant for many players – enough to force ArenaNet to revert the changes.
“In preparation for that transition [to DX11] and as part of our overall graphics upgrade initiative, today’s change enabled color grading by default, which allows our environment artists to leverage color look-up tables to create distinct moods for different environments,” ArenaNet Game Director Josh Davis explained last night. “This will ensure that art quality across different graphics settings profiles is more consistent with our standards.”
“However, 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. 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. 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.”
Not long after, the studio released a quick patch to fix the shadow crash and revert the post-processing settings, so there you go.
