A graphics mod for the videogame Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
Here is my review;
First of all - this dude did an INCREDIBLE job here.
I was super surprised when I saw this mod on top of the mod page, even more when I saw it was released on the same day.
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Positives:
+ New textures look very good, especially with parallax effect and high-
resolution.
+ Lighting is better than original in most of cases (something is in negatives,
too).
+ Great job with see-through windows.
+ Great usage of halos and billboards.
+ Great usage of particle effects, improvements with fog, too.
+ Reflective floor is amazing.
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Negatives:
- Game can be laggy on occasions, unless you have high-end gaming PC.
- Lighting is not always that great, especially spotlights - elevator lamps are
broken, due to those ugly shadows below.
- You broke the window rays, well, some of them unfortunately.
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That is pretty much it, and overall, I am rating this 9/10 - it would be 10 if there were no those lighting problems. Masterpiece, thanks for making this! :)
Definitely the best TDD remaster venture out there.
While the upgrades look great, the mod sometimes takes too much liberty in changing certain things.
Positives:
- Upscaling pretty much the entire game, of course. It is fantastic to play this and not see a blurry mess each time I get close to anything.
- As far as I know, no drastic changes to the game asides from visuals and some new details. Which is great because there have been multiple "remasterening" mods out there which put their crappy contributions in the main game.
- Good job with the outside scenes for the see-through windows; they could probably use some more detail, but are more than serviceable anyway
- I'm legit impressed that you went through the effort of making more cubemaps for reflections, as well as managing to make the glass reflections look good.
- Other very tasteful improvements and touch-ups, such as making the cockroaches not neon-orange, carpet wrinkles, making broken entities not dissolve and shader improvements
Negatives:
- The reworked lighting can miss the mark by a big margin. Some rooms are ridiculously brighter than in the original. Shadow casting from lamps is nice, but some of them look way worse now. For example, the hanging lantern - it has a ring of light with a huge, rough shadow in the middle, actively making some scenes worse (pic: Media.moddb.com). Asides from adding a SpotLight, I'd leave the PointLight underneath it for a more natural and less jarring look.
- Some new bugs (e.g. I had lamps pop through the floor in the first map, and I was playing on a clean Steam install - pic: Media.moddb.com), including ones I have never seen before (pic: Media.moddb.com). I also had some bizarre crashes when trying to turn down the settings.
Neutral:
- The performance takes a really heavy hit. This is not entirely your fault, because the engine is badly optimized in itself, so pushing it to its limits will end badly even on good computers, and I guess it is to be expected.
- The completely new textures which replace some old ones look very nice, but some of them can feel out of place. Also they can feel a bit too clean from time to time. E.g. the marble in castlebase has both of these issues. Most of them look great though (e.g. the floor tiles in castlebase).
- The upscaled fonts look fantastically crisp when large (pause menu, inventory, journal), but they look worse when used as tiny text (e.g. in the settings menu). Maybe use the small ones for the menus, although I don't remember if it's possible.
- The sheer size of this mod makes the install process a bit cumbersome (unpacking the archive almost froze my PC, lol)
To summarize, this is a really fantastic mod, you did some incredible job here. I low-key wish I was interested in replaying the main game now to see what else you did. Would be a 10 from me if not for some questionable lighting changes and a few technical inconveniences.
PS. I'd suggest moving the donation link a bit lower and making the description a bit less condescending, it's kinda off-putting and I almost didn't give this mod a fair chance because of that - and I can already see others having a similar (if not worse) reaction
Utterly fantastic mod. Very performance heavy, so don't play unless you have a beefy ******* computer.
There is nothing bad you could say about this. This is more than a texture upgrade. Must have mod.
Just one huge problem, The Choir fog is massively reduced, you can basically see half the area from the entrance. This is not a good change, the fog served as a gameplay mechanic that rendered the lantern useless and made it hard to see despite the player having oil or not. It also worked brilliantly to obscure monsters that could be 10 feet in front of you, and you really had to pay attention to the sound (This is also why the torches in this are are positioned above the player's position, so that you don't catch a glimpse of a monsters silhouette)
Also you can now see the top of the pillars, which cut out since there is no ceiling in the area, which doesn't look good.
This is a dealbreaker for me and I will have to stick to the standard game for the Choir part.
Anyway, The mod is fine, graphics look good, the occasional FPS drop in large areas is understandable. The Shadows are neat, although they do show the low poly models of lamps in certain areas (better to not have sharp shadows enabled) And the changed up enemy spawns that sometimes have no sound que are great.
A genuinely fantastic upgrade to the dated lighting and textures of the original, with some nice audio enhancements as well. I'm not sure how I feel about the small tweaks to certain elements of the gameplay/AI itself, but it's 99.9999% the same game, so I guess a few tweaks here and there isn't really robbing the game of anything for first-time players. It will definitely give veteran players some fresh scares.
The only downsides to the mod I can think of are the significantly-increased loading times (even on a fast SSD) and the noticeably-poorer performance, which I understand is more the fault of the engine rather than the modder. I'm playing on a pretty beefy rig, so if the performance was less than optimal for me, it will probably be quite severe for low-end machines. I'm sure reducing some of the graphics settings will help in any case.
10/10 for the effort and for the objectively-awesome results! Too many fan remasterings end up with textures that look out of place and weird, albeit highly detailed, but this mod retains the artistic vision/style/feel of the original while also looking gorgeous. I honestly wish I could have played it this way for my first time. I will most likely never play the vanilla version again except for nostalgic purposes, that's how good this remaster is.
Thank you, florian, for this epic mod!
Literally just asked myself what amnesia would look like if it got remastered, then instantly found this mod. ****** A.
very beautifull
Overall it is a big improvement. The textures look amazing with the upscaling and parallax. The lighting is generally better, especially with the improved lighting and reflectivity all the textures and objects have. There are a lot of small added details.
There are just a few things holding it back. Parallax being too extreme and obvious if you look at a texture from the wrong angle. Lighting can look kinda broken in a couple small places, such as the flashback when you touch the orb the rest of the room is supposed to be pitch black but in this mod you can kinda see the black texture the ceiling uses. My framerate kept dropping on my RTX 2080 Ryzen 5 3600 PC.
Colossal work, amazing result
