Anime-style UE4 games and the awful sun glare effect

Fbh

Member
Do people actually like this effect?

Every time I play some Unreal Engine 4 game with stylized or "anime" look there's this awful effect where they have some sort of blue/white/orange glare taking up the top third (or half) of the screen. It's in games like SMTV, DBZ Kakarot, Khazan, etc.
It usually makes the image look way more washed out, it almost makes it look like you are playing on a really shitty LCD with awful edge light bleeding. And it doesn't even make sense half of the time because they keep it even when you are indoors, it's not some dynamic effect depending on the camera position in relation to the sun or some other light source, it's a permanent effect that's on at all times.

Like this:
hgdaCV9MERlS7NzG.jpg

I'm indoors, standing in a hallway with no lights, why is there white light blasting down from above?

This stuff looks worse than Chromatic Aberration and film grain IMO, except unlike those they basically never give you the option to disable it. It doesn't even fit the anime look, which is something I generally associate with a high contrast image and not washed out edges.
On PC some games have mods to disable it (first thing I did in DBZ Kakarot) and I think you can sometimes disable it by modifying the .ini file. But on console you are screwed .


Then again I looked it up online and only found a few random reddit threads talking about it, so maybe I'm in the minority here.
 
Do people actually like this effect?

Every time I play some Unreal Engine 4 game with stylized or "anime" look there's this awful effect where they have some sort of blue/white/orange glare taking up the top third (or half) of the screen. It's in games like SMTV, DBZ Kakarot, Khazan, etc.
It usually makes the image look way more washed out, it almost makes it look like you are playing on a really shitty LCD with awful edge light bleeding. And it doesn't even make sense half of the time because they keep it even when you are indoors, it's not some dynamic effect depending on the camera position in relation to the sun or some other light source, it's a permanent effect that's on at all times.

Like this:
hgdaCV9MERlS7NzG.jpg

I'm indoors, standing in a hallway with no lights, why is there white light blasting down from above?

This stuff looks worse than Chromatic Aberration and film grain IMO, except unlike those they basically never give you the option to disable it. It doesn't even fit the anime look, which is something I generally associate with a high contrast image and not washed out edges.
On PC some games have mods to disable it (first thing I did in DBZ Kakarot) and I think you can sometimes disable it by modifying the .ini file. But on console you are screwed .


Then again I looked it up online and only found a few random reddit threads talking about it, so maybe I'm in the minority here.
In your image it is hard to notice, but I think you are talking about the absolute black levels there. If you look at bottom right and bottom left of the screen, you can see pure blacks. If you look at the top right(especially) and top left of the screen you see it is grey or washed out. Not sure what causes it in this specific case, perhaps it is intentional? Usually my issues related to this are caused by poor HDR implementation but I've also seen this on many other games that don't have HDR. It seems to me that the devs just don't see a portion of the screen being washed out as a problem but it is my pet peeve.

It's like some of these games are designed to always have multiple layers or filters over them to make them look better, which just doesn't jive with a solid black dark background. Perhaps there is a character illumination setting that causes this issue. It seems like the main character's chest/face always being subtly highlighted could be a root cause. If you notice the legs/feet do not have this effect and appear in shadow.
 
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Unreal Engine is the problem. Before anime games looked like utter shit, but they could run on every piece of crap hardware.
Then developers moved on Unreal Engine. Now they still look like utter shit, but with dumb special effects on top, and they can't run on Switch anymore.
 
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