My puny monkey brain enjoys not being able to process this.
My monkey brain used to process it, it became as angry as a chimpanzee at those times then it decided it would stop with it
My monkey brain used to process it, but then it got old and it seems some of the wrinkles have ironed out.
When it looks like a WOW raid of 40 people but it's just normal gameplay.
Classic 40 man raids look like less of a visual clusterfuck than modern 5 man groups.
So true... I'm a big addon fan. At a certain point I made my own UI with "only" 25 addons and did everything I could to make it as minimal as possible but even that was a little bit busier than I would have liked.
depends on your weakaura config and what class you play
that’s basically poe for u
If you played BTD6 it would be.
BTD6 in the beginning of the round is okay but towards the end of a challenge round is a straight up cluster F*ck!
At least in BTD6 you can make the spells transparent so you can see what's going on underneath the chaos. Doesn't help lag though if you're playing on your phone.
What part of hunting/gathering is this?
My ADHD brain IS designed to process this.
Right I love zoning out and processing this 😂
You know you play too much when you know exactly what part of the visual barf does what
I can see exactly whats going on in the Overwatch screenshots and I haven't touched that game in literal years, it's worrying how much I played
Overwatch is not even in the same league as the others, LoL and WOW and POE are a clutterfest even when nothing is happening.
League is fine when you put a lot of hours in but mmos really are something else
Guild wars 2 wvw when 50-100 players stacked on one another are pressing every keyboard key at once is actually seizure inducing
Played both extensively, and PoE can get so much worse than gw2, even when during a big wvw clash.
Only time league turns into a cluster like that is 5v5 team fights. Or maybe I just play too much
This is why WoW has mods. You can minimalise the fuck out of the interface if your want.
But the interface isn't even an issue. Default UI is pretty darn lean.
There's a lot of spell effects which definitely can cause some visibility issues, but they can be tuned down with a single knob in the settings.
(Even at max spell density, the game plays fine in my opinion - but it's basically the same as everyone else, I have a ton of experience on WoW)
Damn even the mauga cage? It's only a few months old so og players shouldn't really know about it
looks like orisa bongos in the one on the right
only the middle screenshot is of ow2 so it probably is
Mauga cage is just a circular barrier, basically same aesthetics as Symmetra ult, so the visual means the same thing
There’s like 4 abilities in the league of legends ones and the middle one is from 10 years ago
Also in League you're typically reacting to the animations more so than the color splashes. The colorful parts tend to illustrate the effective range, while the animations indicate which move is happening. Source- 3000+ hours of league.
However I've been clean for 16 months. If you or anyone you know is suffering from severe league addiction, feel free to reach out to me as a member of LOLAnon. I can be your sponsor and walk you through all 12 steps to a successful LOL free life.
I looked at the Overwatch ones and thought “that’s not that bad.” Hell, they aren’t even from Overwatch 2 (bongo doesn’t exist anymore).
Throw 2 Mauga cages, a grav, and a dragon on there with the Zens saving everybody and now we’re talking.
Honorable mention has gotta go to btd6
My wife watching me play btd6 and saying it looks like something designed to entertain cats. 😭
Well well well, cats and i aren't so different after all.
I was gonna say. how tf is BTD6 not in this
My phone screaming in agony at my pile o towers, 4 sun temples and several dozen free dart monkeys I didn't need to place.
Yeah overwatch and valorant are tame comoared to that
the difference is, with BTD6, the goal is visual clutter. You know you've trulywon when you can't see a single thing on your screen
The winning screen is your phone crashing
Vampire Survivors on endless is just insanity
How is WoW with a million add-ons not part of this?
Getting negative amount of fps
If played well, it's the true late game of poe.
Honestly I don't even know what these games are lol
Path of Exile is Diablo II but with Final Fantasy VII's Materia system (turned up to 11, you can have up to six "materia" in a single link and there's hundreds to choose from) and Final Fantasy X's Sphere Grid skill tree (leading to vast build diversity and experimentation). It's incredibly complex and incredibly fun to delve into. Game's also free, and funded almost entirely by cosmetic microtransactions; the closest it gets to pay-to-win is the ability to purchase more space in your stash inventory that you store stuff in in town/your hideout.
I have no idea what any of that means
That's perfect. While learning Path of Exile you will have many moments where you will say this to yourself
"More" is more than "increased", and "nearby" is actually very close, except when it's not.
Don't forget there is "added" aswell
Spells are not intrinsically attached to the character you are playing. They are instead attached to items called "skill gems" that you can hot swap in and out of slots on your weapons and armour. You can then augment the effects of those spells with "support gems", that do stuff like increase aoe, add extra projectiles etc. etc. With up to 6 gem slots on 1 item, the amount of ways you can personalise the spells you are using is pretty incredible.
The skill tree is vast, there's over 1300 nodes to choose from, and only a bit over 100 or so skill points to put into it. A lot of the nodes are very minor buffs too so you have to route your way through it carefully to maximise what it gives you.
Then on top of that, all of your equipment's stats are completely customizable. You can spend high value consumable items to remove stat lines, add new ones, and reroll the numbers.
It's a lot when you start, but not that bad once you get into it though, all it means is there is just a lot of combinatorics at work and a lot of the draw of the game is the individual build expression and trying to theorycraft out what is good.
Overwatch is gigaoptimized. It's one of the few modern games where you can actually run into a CPU cap without setting it to 1080 low. It runs on a literal potato as long as it supports the right version of DirectX.
I thought the only game that limits the cpu was returnal
Plenty of games are CPU-bound, they just need to have a lot of stuff going in the background (think Factorio).
There are basically 2 categories of CPU-bound games
- Heavy on simulation, so the CPU has to work hard
- Easy on graphics, so the CPU becomes the limiting factor
Thats not necessarily true.
All of these games are pretty well optimized, and a few particle effects or fancy shaders wont tank fps in these games. Its just that these effects are very colorful and so many that it looks chaotic, but conceptually they arent very different from stuff we already had 10-15 years ago, you could probably replicate most of this stuff in the source engine if you cut some corners.
Risk of Rain 2
Came here to say that! Shit can get absolutely mental lol
40 minutes into a run means I just click left and pray, lol
Me when HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA is around the corner
From the sub
And 100 others roguelites. Roboquest, Death must die.. The only here with proper screen bard is PoE.
The only game where the true ending is crashing itself…
I shall not stand for this herecy!
I'll have you know, Path of Exile has orders of magnitude less visual clarity than the rest. It has no place here!
Who needs visual clarity when you have Wardloop?
Overlay map is all the visual we need. And divines on the ground.
Brain still hate that you said divines instead of exalts. It's like the day they swapped 10 dollar bills for 100 dollar bills and I will never get over it.
Yeah divines never feel as good as exalts imo. The name, the art and the effect, exalt is better in all three counts.
Disagree on the effect. Being able to exalt slam liberally while crafting feels so good.
It also makes sense - rerolling the mods within their own tier should be the last step of the crafting process, and thus the most expensive.
Although, I do wish divine shards were a thing.
I absolutely agree. People were, and are, still crying about the swap but my god does it make crafting infinitely more approachable for many people with Exalts not being as obscenely valuable anymore, and the changing of divines absolutely did increase the price of some of the uniques with wider roll ranges just like they wanted, cause whats the point of having a wide roll range if its so cheap to fix it.
You don't need to see divines on the ground though - just hear that Shhhink.
who needs visual clarity when you have coc dd no mtx
Who needs a GPU when you have Wardloop?
path of exile literally has the worse out of all this, league probably the least since it's a top view with only 10 champs. Then val and OW just at the middle but not as much since you could easily micromanage them with cooldowns and limited skill
Val is less cluttered but just uglier imo.
The colors in OW are more muted and less flashy, compared to valorant pastels and half of the site being covered in something
OW is the easiest to understand imo because of good sound design, every skill having a distinct voice line and sound effect that helps distinguish it’s position and wether it’s friendly or enemy was a nice inclusion in this game
good noise seems like an odd fix for visual clutter.
I think OW is not terrible visual clutter when you are a player but it's messy as a spectator. The recent games in the pro scene that had two maaugas, two echo clone maugas all using cages plus sums with walls and lucio beats. It was like looking at colours with absolutely no context. But that's kinda that game. And when too much is going on usually it is all over pretty quickly since most upts only last up to 10 seconds.
Endgame PoE has the most visual clarity, because there's only three graphical states in which the game can be:
Screen completely covered by your damage skill.
Screen completely covered in loot.
Failure.
Look if the screen is visable you're not playing PoE imho.
And if your FPS is above 30, you did not juice your maps enough.
My rig wasn't built for cyberpunk, it was built for the juice
How's it do in the Rogue Harbor?
12fps but only if I overclock the GPU.
When I started to get into PoE while trying to get my Diablo 2 fix, I played a week or two. Then I watched a couple endgame build videos.
what in the goddamn fuck lol
I ended up just buying D2 Resurrected lol
PoE is like D2 on crack. I recommend you give it another shot. It owns my soul.
nah it's definitely cool as hell, but it was "the friends we made along the way" I was nostalgic for, not so much the game :(
Just play it the campaigns more like D2 its only once your in the end end game wear we just busting out the spread sheets for the character and also the maps lol.
its faster than D2 campaign but it scales father at end game than D2 ever did legitametly
PoE has a D2-like mode called 'Ruthless'.
I have over 5k hours in PoE，and I can confidently say that I know nothing about the game and I never know what's going on on my screen.
Pretty funny that the main thing in all three of the overwatch images that makes them look hectic is just one particular ultimate ability (Symmetra’s)
Fr tbh overwatch is the least offensive here. Valorant has a lot of visual blockers as part of the game while overwatch mostly has see through shields. It no like every shield look the same one u play and learn each character u know who should is who. The particle effects do get crazy tho. Only visual blockers is mei wall. One out of 25 heros. Audio clutters too.
Valorant's middle picture is literally just 1 ability, someone threw a rocket and it exploded in front of you, it only takes up the whole screen cuz you're right in front of the explosion lol
Feels kinda stupid, it's the same as someone standing inside a hanzo ult with no other abilities around "oh wow a dragon is taking up the whole screen there is no visual clarity"
I’m always impressed by the Overwatch esports commentary. They are going 1000 WPM like the micro machines guy from the 90s.
Iv died in poe and not known why way to many times
The beauty of PoE.
No, the neurotic dogma of Chris Wilson.
I tried the "zoo build" once and what a mistake... tbh I never had this problem in Diablo 2 even when playing on the more difficult levels, it was confusing but it was possible to understand what was happening.
DD
Me when Ultrakill
Warframe?
Warframe can be a visual eye sore if you let it, but there are settings in the options menu to reduce the visual clutter, which I don't personally use but have recommended to people who feel like there's too much noise.
I enjoy it personally. Warframe is at its peak when the whole squad is using their 4ths and all you can see is colors and numbers
make it 1 booben spamming vortex with bright colour
Nah if the hallway isn't composed of bullets and damage numbers it ain't full enough.
Even if you use them, an Oberon with the 4th augment can still completely cover everyone's screen in their horrible color palette of choice.
Also, you can accidentally blind yourself with your own damage numbers if you have enough firerate.
Teammate energy intensity setting be like:
The true Warframe endgame is mastering Titania's 4 so you can subsume Fire Walk on her and draw perfet dicks in neon pink
Only if you use bright energy colours. Or using Vauban drop several 4 in exactly same place and then hold 4 to change mode
or youre playing public and there are team mates with all this aoe shit like kuva bramma and whatnot
Was looking for a Warframe mention before commenting. I personally love it.
That but for sounds when that music frame (Octavia?) is in the squad. Big ass disco floor and the craziest sounds, i don't know whats happening but i have like 3 more buffs and everything is dying, you go girl!
OP has never played an MMORPG I see.
In MMORPGs, dozens of players are responsible for the visual fuckery.
In PoE, 6 man parties will make your fps drop to <10 from 200+ fps.
And sometimes your single player build does that as well
while not recently i have crashed my own game by myself with coc firestorm. it was a thing of beauty
yeah SWTOR at least is chill on that
GW2 on the other hand sometimes is a big mess with 50+ cluttered in the same single spot and no one sees the aoe dropping under everyone cuz you cant see shit sometimes
I played countless MMORPGs and they are nothing to the absolute PC melting clusterfuck that is PoE. It got so bad they added "effect culling" that cuts or tones down effects if the FPS drop to hard.
people thinking that mmorpgs are worse than poe, have never played poe.
its not even close
yeah, gw2's open world boss events makes this look tame in comparison.
And here I thought Guild Wars 2 was the worst offender. That Path of Exile looks atrocious.
There are meta builds in PoE that literally cannot be played with certain levels of hardware due to spell effects, and builds that have large bold letter disclaimers that you will NOT be able to see the ground through spell effects while clearing content.
https://youtu.be/kesAIAYH7Mg?si=m2ViKs_ffHWABcCn
Make sure to watch in 1080p 60 frames.
GW2 is still a far worse offender than everybody else on this list, especially in WvW with 2 50-player squads meeting.
Normally it's hard to understand what is going on from an outside perspective, but if you ask the people who are playing, they could tell you exactly what is going on.
I've played games with extremely simple visuals like Starcraft 2 and Counter-Strike and have people ask me how I understand what is going on screen.
Games like Diablo and Path of Exile straight up have crash your frame rate because players got so good at min/maxing builds the only way to create a challenge is to make playing impossible.
For example, the middle Path of Exile screenshot is someone running Pyroclast Mines in a 4-man squad in a blighted map where someone has popped Vaal Breach for some reason.
where someone has popped Vaal Breach for some reason.
I do it to keep killstreaks/leech active
Counter Strike? It's just dudes with guns, and the utilities are based on real world special forces items no? I watched some pro matches on the TV and my mom legit understood the game loop after a few rounds and didn't need to ask what the "terrorists" want to do with the "bomb". Mostly she was puzzled why the terrorists were waiting around peeking small angles and not just going to the site, a real "rush b" moment irl.
Your mother would be a natural. Get her signed up for an in house league
I think a major limitation of esports is that it's impossible to understand what's going on unless you play the game yourself. Compared to real sports, where you don't necessarily have to be a soccer or basketball player to understand what's happening.
Yeah sure. Let someone watch American Football and let them figure out on their own whats going on. They will have a hard time.
I could say the same of baseball though. The thing is, baseball is a time honored tradition going back many many decades.
Games change every 5 years...
Path of exile makes the other 3 look very tame.
Vampire survivors is knocking at the door.
I do feel like that's a deliberate artistic choice to convey your increasing power level.
In OP's post, the games have such a poor grasp of information hierarchy that you can't tell which big shiny effect is important.
With vampire survivors, I always feel like the information that I need is clearly available, because as the UI becomes increasingly chaotic the minor elements that it covers up become irrelevant. Eg. Massive damage numbers covering up low tier minions is acceptable because, since I'm dealing massive damage, I don't need to worry about individual low tier minions.
people playing PoE zoomin around doing maps in 2 minutes or less, fire shit everywhere.
I'm just right clicking some pudgy skill like cyclone(reg phys, not CoC) until i see a 5 stack of wisdom scrolls. I am not a good player.
Honestly Warframe should be here as well. What is going on on my screen ... and what the fuck is going on in general?
Be Warframe player
Have 800+ hours in game
See 8+ blue buff symbols in top right screen
No idea why they are but brain release happy chemicals
Random join squad with flash bang build
HereComesTheSun.mp4
Screen is now brighter than your future
Happy chemicals gone
Be warframe player
800+ hours in the game
8+ blue buff symbols
"time to press 4."
MomsCallingUsHome.mp3
simplified
I feel Eve online should get an honorable mention
Mans missing Guildwars 2.
Yep! It's pretty bad. During open world content with 50+ players I wouldn't be able to see the boss without enemy outline enabled. There are so many flashy effects that it just blends into a blinding white light. I hope they're focusing on optimization for Guild Wars 3.
One of the many reasons why guild wars 1 was better.
bold to include LoL instead of DotA lmao
Also dota spells sound and look much better. I can close my eyes and still be able to tell almost all the spells cast in a 5v5 clash. Hell i would even be able to discern pre fight prep like smoke wards etc.
Yuh. Dota only become true visual chaos when 1/It's pro lvl tournament play, 2/It has Rubik or Morphling involved, and 3/Too many arcana visual all at once.
I dont think it becomes chaos in pro dota but the other 2 I kinda agree with. Pro dota has such clean spell casting. They chain their mini disables effortlessly and have a goal in mind for team fights. I find pro game fights easiwr to follow and watching my low 4k mmr replays show more chaos lmao
More like (too) fast pacing for my 3K brain to fully comprehend what just happened. Had to rewatch several times for certain highlight to see where the spell or hero came from.
But that's just my skill issue.
Dota can get ridiculous at times and is not perfect but it's good. But I will say the new venge arcana looks so much like skywrath mage. Something something glance value. Anyway the sounds are so good that you don't even need visuals to know what's going on
Most Dota spells don't have those weird range indicators while they're active like those screenshots in League.
Most spells in League don't either. Like it's literally just persistent circles where it's useful to know exactly where it is so you can walk around it
I would add that Valorant rarely looks like this, especially in non pro games. The left screenshot is famous but it was a extreme case where like all player threw every spells they had at the same time
Isn't it literally just one character's firewalls and a brimstone ult? Also, in-game, it would never look that cluttered from a first-person angle.
yeah it's just two Neon walls and one Breach ult, i think later on in the round it gets even worse, like with Harbor walls and ult and stuff, both teams were contesting that site super hard and throwing the whole kitchen sink at it
World of Warcraft raid healing UI. Leave just enough screen to make sure you're not standing in fire.
Those were the days. Spending 4 hours setting up the ui after downloading all the mods… freaking cursefire.
You forgot btd6
Laughs in WoW kek
As a titled m+ healer and a mythic raider, as well as someone with 2k hours in PoE, WoW doesn't even come close to the clusterfuck of visuals that path of exile has, since for 90%> of builds you will die in literally .1 to 2s to some ground effect/spell like DD
And it isn't uncommon to drop like 70 to 80 FPS in your chosen mechanic if you juice to the max. WoW can have a fugly UI, but that is up to the player.
I've not played WoW for a very long time, but my brother saw me raiding during TBC as a healer and, with all the addons I had running, he thought it looked like I was playing a videogame version of what stockbrokers at wallstreet would be doing all day with all the numbers and bars moving around and me hammering my keyboard and yelling into a microphone at people.
As a former Pally healer in WotLK, yup. Click the small red bars before big green bars, make sure blue bar doesn't disappear, use WASD to make sure your green bar doesn't disappear. Question marks and win.
All the while clicking on the many boxes that highlighted curses and whatnot to dispel while threat meters, healing meters and DPS meters were placing everchanging bar graphs and pie charts all over the screen.
I had a small area to see my character between all this just so I could play the most important game of all in this: There is now fire at your feet, DON'T STAND IN THE FIRE!
Yes its ahead
coc
This is the viewing experience for esport games I've watched:
League: No idea what's going on but it's still somehow hype
Valorant: Fun when watching casual streamers, but site executes become unintelligible in pro-play
Overwatch: wtf is happening
CS: Very nice (unless it's a smoke spam map)
PUBG: Too many teams/players camping for points
PUBGmobile: Goofiest shit I've ever seen
Apex legends: Still not entirely sure if the heros have individual abilities
Osu: Good
Any RTS: no idea what's going on
FIFA/NBA2K: Easy to follow, but it looks exactly the same whether my friend Greg or some world champion plays it
You never played Vampire Survivors.
I came here for this. These other games you can still see whats happening on the screen. When you are unable to see anything but a rainbow sea of numbers and vomit you know these other games dont even dry heave the amount of crayons needed to compare.
Suicide squad is even worse
no one is playing to know that
Yeah it looks as if its made for adhd children who need their eyes abused by colours and flashes every second or else they get bored.
Best guess: Something is being damaged and/or killed ... no clue what though.
poe is deff a winner here. usually i run games like apex legends at 280 fps. Poe runs at like 40fps in juiced t16
You can add Borderlands 3 to this.
PoE screen melting is 80% the user's fault for always wearing a fuckton of mtx while playing endgame spark/coc lightning warp or something, let's be real.
Eve Online: "peasants"
There's a saying in valorant when it gets like this
"I'm playing overwatch"
I mean regarding Path of exile, Jousis made a video specifically targeting the YouTube compression algorithm.
Good shit. It looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.
I tried to play Maple Story and while it's not as much of a light show the damn damage numbers are so large they take up 60% of the screen and I don't know how to turn them off!
have you seen an mmo? tracking 10 different buffs, doing boss mechanics, listening to shotcalling watching everybodys healthbars but it gets easier when you memorise everything
RISK OF RAIN 2?!
Oh yeah, sometimes in Dota I have moments where I am like, Jesus take the controls because I don't know where my hero is.
You forgot ffxiv ultimates lol
Diarrhea Christmas lights.
Those other games combined: "you think you're better than me [at screen clutter]."
PoE: "that's because I am."
You forgot Diablo!
Hyper demon
Dont forget the average Hyperbloom team in Genshin Impact
My dude, you're missing guild wars 2. The born distribution in the game is an aoe. So, in wvw when you have 3 squads of 50 players from different teams fighting for the central point in EB you have a literal tornado of blurry colors on the screen. Bonus points if you're the melee support (me) and have to figure out where tf you are so you can position your cone shaped heals
POE is the fucking worst with this. And every monster dies before you can even see what it is.
I can't WAIT for POE 2 which looks 100x more grounded.
Diarrhea Christmas lights
Just started playing risk of rain 2 and it's just the same
My puny monkey brain is not designed to process this.