The soft edges of the cast shadows make the graphic so blurry

[Kuoting]

The cast shadows in AoE2DE

Comparing with the cast shadows in AoE2HD

Let’s check how the artists in the other RTS titles deal with the cast shadows:
Starcraft Remaster

Starcraft 2

Company of Heroes 2

Warcraft 3 Reforged

I also hope the dev team check other popular strategy and city-builder titles to see how the other teams handle the cast shadows to make the graphics look clear.

The gradient is overused in AoEDE making the graphics look so blurry, unfortunatelly this mistake is made again…

[Yorok0]

I personally prefer DE shadows to HD shadows by a very large margin. Really beatiful for my

[SvenSvensonn]

You might think it’s pretty (which is strange since these gradients are unnatural).

It is adding to the faded look of the game, which is bad for RTS.

They went out of their way to change something fine into something worse.

[PeakHornet46539]

Is this how the units are meant to look when zoomed in? Blurry edges/textures?

[alexthelol]

Is this with UHD Pack disabled? Because that’s how it looked to me before I installed it.

[PeakHornet46539]

Its with the UHD enabled. Do you have a picture of yours with UHD installed? Zoomed up close.

[alexthelol]

Ah just checking, ill try to get some in, i might be wrong, maybe it looks like this for me as well

Also I do have the suspicion, that sharpen doesn’t work when zoomed in this close, but I wanted to make another thread about that. ^^

[PeakHornet46539]

This is the max zoom in AOE1:DE… Look at the crispness of the graphics (units and plants).

Look at the AOE2:DE equivalent below. What’s going on ?? (My game is set to max graphic settings with UHD DLC enabled)

[Kuoting]

UHD option is to increase the resolution of the objects. What I was talking about has nothing to do with the UHD.

The soft edge cast shadows, along with the special effects like vigette, atmosphere lighting, bloom, lower depth of field… can make games more immersive when we play ACT or RPG like Octopath Traveller. But in a RTS like Age of Empires, the people may want to recognize objects easier. Adding special effects slighty is good. But if they are overused to make graphics blurry, people might feel uncomfotable when they are recogizing objects.

We already have these amazing details of the new models and gorgerous collapsing animation so I am not sure we need more effects to decorate them. I am not saying these effects are bad. But maybe we should find a better balance. We can disable most of the special effects in the option menu. So I guess the main problem is the cast shadows.