Search the Community

Many of us have requested this many times. We would like to be able to turn off Bloom and Light Shafts from within the main options.

The Save Our Eyes Suggestion I am going to keep it simple and easy to understand. First off this suggestion is in regards to Ark on PS4, although it could extend to other console platforms. My knowledge and experience only pertains to the ps4. The Issue? The ridiculous bloom and light intensity. Specifically on Aberration where navigating the Element Zone is unbearable. There are days where my eyes are literally suffering physical symptoms such as popped blood vessels and obvious irritation due to this games bloom settings. Not to mention the fact that the ability to change this setting is a feature that has been lacking on PS4. Terminology: What is bloom for those of you who do not know? It is the extreme glowing effect seen when you look at bright lights in Ark survival evolved. It renders practically all of your screen unable to be seen as if a bright light is in your eyes. A real life example of this would be trying to look directly at the sun(which might I add is not a healthy thing to do for fun). History: The start of the problem I hope I am not the only one who remembers the early days of Ark ps4. Where there was a screen tear and blinding light so bright, and so horrifying, that everyone playing Ark survival evolved on ps4 would have a popped blood vessel in the same eye. It was almost like a badge of honor for a true survivor. The Working Solution that was found There was a solution found by players on console where you could type in commands in single player utilizing admin commands, and once successfully done you would be able to log back into any server and the settings would be maintained. This came at the inconvenience of having to re-enter the commands every time you closed the application and returned for another play session. Lets just say this solution gets a 0/10 on aberration where blue screens are a common occurrence. How did we get where we are now? At some point it was confirmed that the ability to use those commands had been altered, thus the previous solution was made ineffective at solving the problem. Now we are currently trudging through extremely saturated glow effects, blinding light shafts, and other effects that I may not even know of due to my lack of expertise in how these game effects are taking place. Current Solution? As far as I am aware, there is no slider for these effects, and there is no working solution to the problem from the player's perspective. However, there are a few things worth mentioning here: Gamma Correction Many of you may have thought changing your gamma would suffice. Unfortunately all this does is reduce the brightness of the glow and lights. This is helpful at making the experience of Ark easier on your eyes and comes with it the benefits of reducing eye irritation. Unfortunately it also makes it even harder to see where you are going by reducing the amount of "light" entering your characters "eyes" , so to speak, as well as doing nothing to change the area in your vision being obstructed by glow or light shaft mechanics. .ini settings There is a way to add .ini settings into a server and disable or reduce the quality of these settings. However, through personal experience with this issue I have found it unreliable at best. Typically this requires server restarts while characters are on the server being restarted. Sometimes the changes will take effect and the game will be completely playable. Other times nothing changes. The times when the changes occur may not even be affected by changing the .ini settings and restarted but some other mystery altogether. This solution seems fine until you consider that only a server admin could implement such a thing. A player would not have such a solution to utilize without hosting their own server or having a server admin figure out how to introduce .ini settings. THE SUGGESTION? @StudioWildcardPlease either disable the bloom quality and light shafts across the entire ps4 platform or finally make the addition of a player control option to permanently change these features. This problem is a matter of both lower quality gaming experience as well as real world health implications. Obviously there are many other solutions to reach the desired outcome of being able to see in the direction of light objects without causing physical harm to our eyes or being unable to navigate within the game. As far as utilizing glow in pvp and pve balance, which is the only argument I can see as to why the feature shouldn't be disabled or controlled by individuals, as cool as using the sun at your back during a huge battle charge sounds, I think there should come a point when the realism within the game has gone too far. Bloom and light intensity has gone too far. Special Thanks! Thanks go out to all the people out there who helped spread information on this subject! All information gathered for this suggestion was found on various Forum searches and YouTube Videos on the subject, or otherwise through personal experience playing Ark Survival Evolved since December 2016. One Final Note While the major issue that destroys our gaming experience is the blinding lights from the glow effect and the light shafts, another major concern of mine and many others is just simple ability to alter graphic settings. These, as well as many others, are some of the major graphic settings that could easily reduce massive lag spikes, blue screens, and various other issues that plague survivors on the console Arks: -Ground clutter quality -Shadow Quality -Reflection Quality -texture quality -view distance quality -Effects Quality AND MANY MORE!