Dawntrail Graphics Update - Eye Strain

[Wind-Krysvein]

The only thing I’ve noticed is the game is just brighter, which will cause eye strain. If messing with the gamma doesn’t help I would mess with your monitor brightness settings. Also maybe look into something like Gunnar glasses to reduce your monitor’s effect on your eyes. I have a well calibrated monitor but keep the brightness pretty low because most games bother my eyes when it’s cranked to max.

As a person who already has Gunnar gaming glasses and all of the TV settings played out in a way that reduces eye strain as much as possible, I can tell you straight off that it's almost certainly not going to be this easy.

I've said this before, but a game should most definitely not be causing this much eye strain for anyone, regardless of screen brightness. Something is definitely not right here, and it needs to be fixed and soon.

[Luca_]

As a person who already has Gunnar gaming glasses and all of the TV settings played out in a way that reduces eye strain as much as possible, I can tell you straight off that it's almost certainly not going to be this easy.

I've said this before, but a game should most definitely not be causing this much eye strain for anyone, regardless of screen brightness. Something is definitely not right here, and it needs to be fixed and soon.

I agree. I always run a pretty heavy blue light filter on my PC and used customized shaders ingame to adjust the colors/brightness a bit for optimal comfort, but it's NOT normal for a game to require external accessibility aids and tweaks to make it playable for so many people. I appreciate all the folks chiming in with helpful suggestions, but I want to emphasize how insane it is that SE didn't even consider ingame accessibility options whatsoever in an update that was meant to bring the game closer to modern standards. This would be unacceptable in a modern game from any developer.

[Luca_]

The environmental blurriness while running is super disorienting, I dunno that I'd say it causes eye strain for me personally but I really don't like it.

On the other hand, I did Prae a couple nights ago while leveling VPR and it's like a nuclear reactor in there. My eyes actually hurt after the magitek armor bit.

[gllt]

I messed with gamma, brightness, and tried different displays.
I have to wear prescription glasses in order to see.

The only solution, for me at least, is to have the option to turn off glare added back to the game. Why was it removed anyways? Makes zero sense to me. I can't understand why you would force a graphical option on by default. I turn off motion blur and bloom in every game I own. Screen shake as well. It's just the kind of stuff that's supposed to be optional. It's already sad that I have to get my eyes blown out by Holy or see no effects. But at least that was a singular move.

I can't imagine a change to the engine that would remove the ability to toggle bloom/glare. And if that did happen, who let it happen? That's absurd. It has to be an oversight or some other kind of poorly thought out decision.

Accessibility has always seemed like an afterthought in 14 but watching it slide into the gutter is painful.

[MayMelon]

The saturation of the color became so high.
My eyes are tired and I can't play for long. I'm relieved I'm not the only one.

[Wind-Krysvein]

The saturation of the color became so high.
My eyes are tired and I can't play for long. I'm relieved I'm not the only one.

I made a forum account just to be able to comment in this thread.

Trust me, you're definitely not the only one. Each and every time I see someone new post here about their symptoms, I get a bit more hopeful about the future. We can do this!

[zipkin]

(snipped)

I started on the lowest settings, since my laptop is getting towards the older side I wanted to be sure my machine would handle the update well. I actually thought the graphics being low and jagged/weird might have been what was bothering me at first, but it was not :c

I do play a lot of other games, and this updated FFXIV is the ONLY one giving me this problem. I haven't gone through and checked what engines everything else uses, but, for me, it feels more efficient to point to "This is the singular problem" vs "Here's a list of all possible other options"? To be honest though, if the devs aren't interested in addressing the eye strain issues, I really don't feel they'd accept a push to use different drivers. Might be worth looking into for my personal laptop I guess, but that does nothing for anyone else struggling and doesn't feel like an optimal solution. I don't love the idea of changing my machine, which works fine, because one game of many had a bad graphics update. I was already a bit cranky to be adjusting my laptop settings knowing full well I'd need to adjust it all back for everything else. I appreciate the suggestion of what I could try next though, thank you for taking the time.

(snipped)

RIP our vision but at least there's grass~

(snipped)

Wanted to reply directly so you don't feel ignored <3 I've changed every setting I can find to try making the game bearable to look at. Console players have even fewer options. Changing the settings available to us in the game, and making additional adjustments to my laptop display, did not fix my eye strain issue. That includes the antialising options unfortunately :c

Alright, we have our first official response from the Square Enix Support Center: (snipped the rest)

Thank you for sharing the update, I'm glad to know there was at least an acknowledgement of receipt.

-
I initially thought the brightness was the issue, and it DOES seem to be part of what's bothering me. It feels like there's "brighter brights and darker darks" in a way that is difficult for me to look at. Considering I played (and watched) a substantial amount of Neon Sundown a few months ago, I'm not sure how this is happening o.o

Adjusting to reduce blur DID seem to help a little, but, as the options stand, I can only tweak settings enough to get a few more minutes before my eyes hurt, rather than getting to a point where I can play without pain. Makes me think the blur might be my biggest culprit, but it's all new to me so I'm not sure.

I think there's something going on with the text/font too. I can't seem to adjust it to be easy to read. It either looks small/thin or seems blurry? I can close/hide the text elements (mostly) and still get the eye strain issues, but I think the font changes might not be great for my eyes either.

[Payadopa]

I noticed that in the first two zones I've been to, when you look at a hill it looks glossy and it has that shiny wave going on. I've never seen that before. I'm in PS5.

[gllt]

I thought I noticed there were more glossy textures or things that looked like they had some kind of specular lighting going on.
The screen feels busy/noisy with small spatterings of contrast differences. I hope that makes sense, I don't know how to really express it.

[HauntedLasagna]

I'm glad to see we got something from the support center. I never got a response from the report I sent in. I wont be content until I see an official news post about it being an issue. I know its a bit pessimistic but the response from the SC feels like it is just a blanket response they give to everything. I've been playing XIV for however long ago the ps3 beta was and before that I played XI for 8 or so years. You get used to seeing stuff like that from SE.

Still crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. Keep on fighting the good fight.