Gamers claim Elite: Dangerous graphics have been watered down

[ahhming]

Some user reported that the dust/fog effects have been radically reduced, the Galaxy Map has changed, textures look worse, and the Ring LOD and Station Letterbox Draw Distance have both been reduced. Frontier has hit back, saying that some of those things have indeed happened, addressing concerns on whether the PC version of Elite: Dangerous has been downgraded because of the upcoming release of the game on the Xbox One.
 

As Greg Ryder, Frontier’s Head of Rendering, said, the team is inclined to downgrade the appearance of anything in the game, and that the Dust/Fog system was optimised due to a pathological case of overdraw, thus some systems may look a bit worse than before.
 

“Please thank Granite for putting together a thread like this. The team is always striving to make things better, and we’ve found a number of things using the profiling tools on the Mac and Xbox One that have improved the PC build (thus the opposite to the fear they might lower the quality of the PC build). Elite: Dangerous is built to scale on PC (including 16k screenshot ability and hopefully one day 16k game when the monitors & graphics cards exist!). We are certainly not inclined to downgrade the appearance of anything in the game. Exposing more tweakables for an enhanced Ultra is clearly something you guys are passionate about and we’ll see where it can fit in the current roadmap.

On the ships / galaxy map front, I’m not aware of any changes that went in for 1.3.

Dust / Fog: This was optimised due to a pathological case of overdraw (which looked very broken in a number of cases). There’s definitely no downgrade due to our Mac and Xbox One versions, but there have been some changes. Performance and visual consistency should be improved in the general case, however it does seem that some systems are not looking as good as they did. As ever there is no perfect solution. For a fair comparison, the exact same position and lighting conditions are needed (some viewing angles will always looks more awesome!), but we could have entire threads dedicated to discussions on how to light rings (and we’ve had many long discussions internally). I have a number of open issues in our system on the look of the rings, though currently no ETA for when we’ll be addressing them.”

texture reduction

 

Some graphical downgrade include

• shorter draw distance

 

• reduce in planet surface detail

IMO surface detail in early betas was much more interesting than what we have now. Although craters for example looked a little cartoonish, overall planets had more memorable detail, variation and character to them. Some even simulating Voronoi-like erosion features.
Now the surface variation is quite lacking, everything looks bland and blurry even with custom ini tweaks.

Source:
http://www.dsogaming.com/news/elite-dangerous-gamers-claim-downgrade-ation-in-latest-build-frontier-responds/
 
 
Check out  original post for comparison 
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=162195

[Entropy]

But... Why?

[Ertman]

Man, space sims have come along way.

I guess the changes aren't too severe? I geuss we'll just have to see how 'downgraded' it gets.

So were those asteroid fields? They seem unnaturally dense.

[BiG StroOnZ]

But... Why?

 

Because consoles.

[Sparviero]

E:D just doesn't seem like the ideal couch potato game. I hope it works out for Frontier. However I sadly remember the train wreck of trying to appeal to the instant action crowd in wwiionline. Maybe the rift will work on the Xbox and this will be a gateway drug.

[Shakaza]

Welp. Here we are again...anyone up for 50-page threads again?

[Beskamir]

Hopefully CIG never tries to get Star Citizen to work on consoles.

[qwertywarrior]

is it possible to mod the game ?

[Humbug]

Hmm the game was already well optimized. Performance was already very good.

[Jerakl]

Hopefully CIG never tries to get Star Citizen to work on consoles.

 

They straight up said a while ago that consoles "couldn't handle it".

[Sharkyx1]

They straight up said a while ago that consoles "couldn't handle it".

Because they were shilling to mustards, I guarantee you people with worse hardware than consoles will play it

I beat Arkham Knight and have been playing witcher 3 on a 560ti, as long as the feature set is there, it can handle it in since capacity

[Agent181]

F*&^ THAT S#$T NO NO NO 

 

Haven't played elite in 2 months cause im away from my pc and now i hear this F*&^ YOU CONSOLES

[2FA]

Hopefully CIG never tries to get Star Citizen to work on consoles.

 

They straight up said a while ago that consoles "couldn't handle it".

 

They also said, including Chris, that SC is A PC ONLY GAME.

[Beskamir]

They also said, including Chris, that SC is A PC ONLY GAME.

 

 

They straight up said a while ago that consoles "couldn't handle it".

I know, I know. But how many devs have blatantly lied before? I hope CIG never goes back on it's word like that but it's not completely impossible.

[2FA]

I know, I know. But how many devs have blatantly lied before? I hope CIG never goes back on it's word like that but it's not completely impossible.

 

Well, SC is quite a bit different from other games as well. Ultimately, it's Chris that makes these decisions, not CIG and he has always been a PC enthusiast.

[TheProfosist]

Changes are definitely noticeable. I'm surprised they would do things like this in the wake of everything else that has happened...

[Razarza]

Because they were shilling to mustards, I guarantee you people with worse hardware than consoles will play it

I beat Arkham Knight and have been playing witcher 3 on a 560ti, as long as the feature set is there, it can handle it in since capacity

Sure people with shit-tier PCs will try to play the game and will have shit performance. But just people some people will try to play the game with hardware worse than the consoles shouldn't mean the CIG should spent time and money trying to develop for two other platforms that will give a subpar experience. It costs them nothing to let people with low end hardware play the game.

[Jasmin]

If you have a 'bad case of overdraw in some cases' then create option to disable/lower the quality of dust in Settings, don't just turn it off for the entire playerbase...

 

Whatever they did to the graphics, it won't change the fact that there's currently nothing to do in this game apart from grinding cash to buy better ships to grind faster.

[Humbug]

Sure people with shit-tier PCs will try to play the game and will have shit performance. But just people some people will try to play the game with hardware worse than the consoles shouldn't mean the CIG should spent time and money trying to develop for two other platforms that will give a subpar experience. It costs them nothing to let people with low end hardware play the game.

Star Citizen would work nicely on consoles considering the other games which the consoles run. Remember people with console grade GPUs like the 750ti are playing star citizen comfortably. It not being on consoles is mostly a marketing thing. The initial premise of the kickstarter campaign was that this game is PC first in order to appeal to our community. Also the kind of development process they are following with beta modules released incrementally and heavy community involvement can only work on PC.

Once the game is out don't be surprised to see a console port. At 900p 30fps with graphics not turned up it will be fine. We know it's not a resource issue because they keep adding more staff and more features at the drop of a hat.

[Trik'Stari]

Hopefully CIG never tries to get Star Citizen to work on consoles.

If I remember correctly, they've always said "star citizen will never be on console". It's designed for PC alone.

[Norman_the_Owl]

but...why?

 

This game ran at 60fps1080p on a 650m...why would they do this?

[Misanthrope]

Nice to see those Microsoft dollars hard at work. Fuck this guys with a 2 feet wide cactus.

[Ktwo]

My brother ran the game on a 670GTX maxed out at 1080p at around 80-100FPS, why on earth would they have to optimize more?

[christianled59]

Star Citizen would work nicely on consoles considering the other games which the consoles run. Remember people with console grade GPUs like the 750ti are playing star citizen comfortably. It not being on consoles is mostly a marketing thing. The initial premise of the kickstarter campaign was that this game is PC first in order to appeal to our community. Also the kind of development process they are following with beta modules released incrementally and heavy community involvement can only work on PC.

Once the game is out don't be surprised to see a console port. At 900p 30fps with graphics not turned up it will be fine. We know it's not a resource issue because they keep adding more staff and more features at the drop of a hat.

Well console also has a severe lack of controls. I couldn't imagine playing Star Citizen with just a controller. Too many keybindings for important tasks.

[Doobeedoo]

Really?!
What, are they afraid people won't be able to drive a game, would be a bad thing to make a certain game look great on max and people could play it with more powerful PCs or later in future.

Why do visuals in games have to be so much reduced...