Screenshots: Beautiful Scenery [no spoilers]

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Here's a thread for spoiler-free screenshots of beautiful scenery from the world of PoE. Enjoy!

To start off, six screenshots from six different wilderness areas in the game (and at different times-of-day, which affects lightness and color tones). Exploring these wilderness areas is really reminiscent of the original Baldur's Gate game. Which is something Obsidian promised during the kickstarter, and they delivered.

Note: I originally took these screenshots at the normal zoom level of the game and cropped them how I liked them, but in order to get them under the image size limit of this forum I then had to scale them down to 65% and apply a fair amount of JPEG compression. By playing the game yourself you'll be able to see those places with less graininess and much higher resolution...











(the black spots in the water surface are a Linux-only rendering bug of the current version of the game)

 

Ineth, one thing that these screen shots don't show is how close you can zoom in on the party, and get a very good look at what the characters look like in all their armor, capes, helms, weapons, and shields. It's quite amazing.

 

Feel free to upload such screenshots CrucisNH!
I'm not in a good position to do so, since I'm running the Linux version of the game which has some bugs affecting the rendering of characters, e.g. lack of anti-aliasing and capes not being rendered at all. So while I hope those bugs will be fixed, for now close-up screenshots should be done by someone running the Windows or Mac version...
PS: With the SetZoomRange console command, you can zoom in even further!

For now, some more wilderness scenerey:





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And outdoors wilderness areas aren't the only pretty surroundings in this game. "Dungeon" areas can be quite beautiful too, in their own way. I'm really glad that Obsidian went with BG1 style wilderness areas, but IWD1/IWD2/BG2 style dungeons. Because let's face it, the dungeons in BG1 consisted of boring rectangular corridors with brick-wall textures that looked like they were made with tilesets. In PoE, the insides of dungeons/ruins/sewers/caves tend to be lovingly hand-crafted...

Note: I cropped these screenshots much tighter than the wilderness ones, so I didn't have to down-scale them. The fact that characters look a little pixely rather than smooth is a bug of the current Linux release of the game.

 

Love the pink Swashbuckler looking female (I think) character with the Duelist's Hat! What is she wearing for "clothes"/armor? is that one of those robes of berath? Whatever it is, it looks good!

Who says that adventurers can't dress in style!!!

 

That's my Cipher

The clothes are called "Dyrwoodan Clothing", but there are also boring/drab looking clothes by the same name, so try each one on separately and don't just go by the name:



I don't remember where I found it, but it was relatively early in the game.

The hat is called "Duelist's Hat"; I've found multiple copies of that one over the course of the game.

PS: Here's how she looks close up, in the level-up screen:


(As mentioned above, lack of visible cape is due to a bug in the Linux version.)

Indeed!

 

Kind of looks like a knee length coat.

 

Does the game have settings to reduce visual quality for low-end systems like mine?

If so what settings did you use for the screenshots and how would they look on the lowest settings?

 

Looks GREAT! I don't have to ask which portrait you used.

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Yes, it does.

 

When equipped on a female character, yes. When equipped on the equivalent male character, the same outfit looks kinda boring:



Not sure why they let clothes change so radically based on the sex of the character wearing them.
I mean sure, they have to adapt to body shape etc., and there will be culture-based differences, but why can't a coat stay a coat?

The "graphics settings" menu with the options that I made those screenshots with, looks like this.

The "graphics quality" slider has three different positions, though I don't know what exactly they do (the description doesn't say).

The backgrounds should look the same on all systems anyway, since they're pre-rendered. The only dynamic ("3D") things are character models, water surfaces, animated objects (which are rare), and special effects.

As for lower-end machines, ideally a game like this shouldn't have a problem with them, but unfortunately the performance of the curent release leaves much to be desired. That is: it will look good, but might have some lags on big maps, and saving/loading is unusually slow too.

For example, on my Linux PC with SSD drive, it takes several seconds to make a quicksave in this game, and even longer to load one. In contrast, in Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition (which was released last year and is another pre-rendered isometric RPG), saving and loading is instant on the same computer - so it's definitely technically possible.
Not sure why Obsidian didn't optimize PoE better (yet). Some people blame the Unity engine which it is based on, though I don't think that's an excuse. Maybe patches will improve things.

 

I'm not sure what all the stuff featured in the Graphics Settings mean, but if your machine/graphic card is a bit slow (like mine, apparently) you can disable the MultiSample Anti-Aliasing. You can do that while playing the game, including character creation.
Here's what you do:

Press ` (tilde)
Then press enter (for me, only the enter button near the middle of my keyboard works for this)
Then type "msaa 0", without the quote marks, in the command line.
Press enter again.

Runs smoothly now?

 

I have a few observations relating to load times.

If you save games (not quick saves, but regular saves) regularly, you can pile up quite a lot of save game files. And loading these onto the screen when you want to load a game can slow things down a LOT. On top of that, if you bought the game through Steam and have Steam doing a sync of save game files, it makes this problem a good deal worse. The best things you can do is turn off save file synchronization, and cut the number of save files you keep hanging around down. Don't keep dozens upon dozens of save files and you'll speed the save game and load game processes up considerably.

It would be nice if the devs could look into this. I don't remember the old Infinity Engine having this issue at all.

It would also help if the devs could look into speeding up map loading. Personally, I'm a fairly patient person, so if it takes 10 seconds to load a map, I'm not blowing a gasket. But still, that seems like a rather long time to take to load maps, particularly when you get into a city and are entering a building, or going from the first floor to the second floor. It all adds up, timewise, and seems to create unnecessarily long interruptions in a smooth game play experience.