My fault or does this game look really bad?

[1nvictoz]

Hey guy, let me start with clarifying that this is not meant to bash the game.

I just got started and actually have a really good time. My goal is to check if there may be a problem with my settings, or if there is something that I have not switched on because - the game looks really bad to me. Fallout 4 looks much better, how can this be? There must be something I am doing wrong. Even the most recent IGN review (2024) described the game as gorgeous.

My problem is that it looks really blurry and muddy. The textures are very low quality and the overall picture quality looks like I would have set DLSS to performance. I have everything cranked to max and play on 4k but nothing seems to help.

Can someone please let me know if that's just the way it looks or if there is a way to sharpen it up at least?

[Lord Odin]

I don't know if it's just me but sometimes i also load into the game and it looks misty and other times it looks fantastic. I have my settings on Ultra and have pretty good fps. My PC is AMD plus AMD Graphics Card and i have found i have less issues since changing from Intel and Nvidea though i might have just been lucky.

[pRaX]

Make a Fallout76Custom.ini file in x:\Users\xxx\Documents\My Games\Fallout 76
and try out some stuff.

Here is mine. I got some sharpen in it and also toning down some of that bloomy and overly glossy from metal objects.
The other things are disabling motion blur, mouse acceleration, fixing x/y axis sensitivity (although for 1440p).
Sped up loading times. Skipping intro video.

[General]
sIntroSequence = 0

[Display]
iPresentInterval = 0
fDefault1stPersonFOV = 106
fDefaultWorldFOV = 106
fTAAPostSharpen = 0.4
fTAAPostOverlay = 0.2

[EnlightenDebug]
fEnlightenSkyCubemapScale = 0.800500
fSkyCubemapMaxVisibility = 1.000000
fSkyCubemapMinVisibility = 0.000001 

[Interface]
fFadeToBlackFadeSeconds = 0.2000
fMinSecondsForLoadFadeIn = 0.3000

[Controls]
bMouseAcceleration = 0
fMouseHeadingXScale = .021
fMouseHeadingYScale = .03738

[ImageSpace]
bMBEnable = 0

[Dlanor]

It shouldn't look unplayable-level bad, but it will look worse than Fallout 4 because instead of a single player experience this is an online MMO-ish experience, they had to prioritize getting the game to run better. If it truly looks awful to you then I would suggest going to youtube and checking out gameplay videos from other players, if your game looks worse than theirs then yes it's on your end somewhere.

[insert food here]

Turning off all motion blur and depth of field effects in the ini and then using some sharpening and colour saturation from the Nvidia overlay made the game look so much better and clearer.

Before i did these things the game looked liked a washed out blurry watercolour painting. No clue why they went for that look as the default settings.

[pRaX]

Originally posted by insert food here:

Turning off all motion blur and depth of field effects in the ini and then using some sharpening and colour saturation from the Nvidia overlay made the game look so much better and clearer.

Before i did these things the game looked liked a washed out blurry watercolour painting. No clue why they went for that look as the default settings.

Yup.
I forgot to add that I put some more sharpening ontop of the .ini changes via driver. Sorry.

[IceMan PJN]

Originally posted by OneWhoKnox:

It shouldn't look unplayable-level bad, but it will look worse than Fallout 4 because instead of a single player experience this is an online MMO-ish experience, they had to prioritize getting the game to run better. If it truly looks awful to you then I would suggest going to youtube and checking out gameplay videos from other players, if your game looks worse than theirs then yes it's on your end somewhere.

Bingo.

I feel like this comes up frequently and I've personally responded several times to these graphics questions. As I've frequently pointed out, I can't recall any MMOs that were stunning to look at. It seems to be a necessity to sacrifice visuals a bit for the sake of performance. 76 doesn't look bad for a MMO.

[Andrius227]

Originally posted by IceMan PJN:

Originally posted by OneWhoKnox:

It shouldn't look unplayable-level bad, but it will look worse than Fallout 4 because instead of a single player experience this is an online MMO-ish experience, they had to prioritize getting the game to run better. If it truly looks awful to you then I would suggest going to youtube and checking out gameplay videos from other players, if your game looks worse than theirs then yes it's on your end somewhere.

Bingo.

I feel like this comes up frequently and I've personally responded several times to these graphics questions. As I've frequently pointed out, I can't recall any MMOs that were stunning to look at. It seems to be a necessity to sacrifice visuals a bit for the sake of performance. 76 doesn't look bad for a MMO.

Mmo? Lol. This game can have like ~20 players… not really an mmo

[PotatoBasket]

76 is a Casual Online Sandbox; it is also a PVE loot and shoot, not an MMO, not an RPG, not a survival game.

The graphic quality doesn't work out for multiplayer as well as 4 did on sp. However if you get a modern monitor you'll see a pretty drastic change; I used wide screen monitors for the first few years and only recently made the change to a smaller current monitor. I thought perhaps new graphics had somehow been implemented to the game as a whole, the difference was pretty apparent. I had to manually turn em back down

[hawkeye]

It can look good. But the textures might be low res 512 so on 4k that might not look great. There are mods on nexus which you might consider e.g. a reshade. Enabling fxaa in the control panel (*nvidia) might help.

[Sax]

The textures got downscaled to 256x256 from 1024x1024 with the wastelanders update years ago thanks to consoles and 'optimization'