Crushed blacks in ME 2. Patch coming?

[IwannaGoToMars]

Just finished up ME1 and the HDR settings worked very well for me. I booted up ME2 and the blacks are crushed so badly that all and I do mean all definition is pretty much gone in dark scenes (miranda's hair, any dark levels, details on all characters uniforms...etc..)

Playing on an Oled at 4k 120hz. As previously stated, ME1 was excellent but ME2 weather HDR is turned off or not, looks like its performing terribly in this regard. Thus far, I've adjusted in the calibration settings in the game, I've changed Nvidia color settings and slightly changed gamma output, I tried the brightness and contrast settings, I've turned off HDR on my display and tried adjusting from there and I've been at it for a few hours.

Perhaps the last update porked a few things? Any fixes that actually work that anyone has found would help. I've tried several " try this " suggestions for ppl who have also had the same issue online but I haven't found a definite satisfactory fix yet.

Rather than playing the game with bland washed out settings, I'm looking for an HDR solution. Hoping they patch this soon.

[.]

Same problem here but it is just the me2 pre rendered videos so I just put up with it

[alexander_dougherty]

Darkness in games is usually overdone anyway, but yes the graphics for ME2 haven't been tweeked to the same standard as ME1.....

Now if they had just given you a flashlight for ME1, because several stages were far too dark.....

[Krowten]

You have to add a setting to a configuration to turn depth of field off. Im on phone now but if you do some googling you'll find it.

[IwannaGoToMars]

Originally posted by Krowten:

You have to add a setting to a configuration to turn depth of field off. Im on phone now but if you do some googling you'll find it.

Thanks. Just found a few posts about it online. Based on what I've read, when you disable it, it kills most of the color and gives everything a muted look and even after changing gamma settings in Nvidia settings, it won't help. Looks like we have to wait for a patch (if it ever happens). Thx for posting that.

[Sergeant Decker]

LG CX OLED user here: ME2 and ME3 HDR is definitely working. However in ME2 there are some places that are just straight up dark. Such as the Citadel. The two games don't look like they were designed which such large contrast ratios in mind. Were ME1's lighting got tweaked. You can tell because some ME2 levels in out door locations look great. But indoor sections with low lighting are quite dark on purpose. All the Cutscences with black areas are all quite borked. If you disable HDR the cutscenes are fixed. For ME2 and ME3 I found that setting contrast to -4 and luminescence to 850 is the best compromise. Make sure you tv's black level is set to auto or High. if you use low it will crush black levels. Changing gamma won't help because the black areas are actually black, and no level of tweaking can raise them back. Its on the developers end to fix that. If you can deal with the borked cutscenes then its pretty good experience.

[IwannaGoToMars]

Originally posted by Sergeant Decker:

LG CX OLED user here: ME2 and ME3 HDR is definitely working. However in ME2 there are some places that are just straight up dark. Such as the Citadel. The two games don't look like they were designed which such large contrast ratios in mind. Were ME1's lighting got tweaked. You can tell because some ME2 levels in out door locations look great. But indoor sections with low lighting are quite dark on purpose. All the Cutscences with black areas are all quite borked. If you disable HDR the cutscenes are fixed. For ME2 and ME3 I found that setting contrast to -4 and luminescence to 850 is the best compromise. Make sure you tv's black level is set to auto or High. if you use low it will crush black levels. Changing gamma won't help because the black areas are actually black, and no level of tweaking can raise them back. Its on the developers end to fix that. If you can deal with the borked cutscenes then its pretty good experience.

I'm on a 55 LG C9 myself. The 4k 120 is amazing and ME1 was beautiful. ME2 was an issue for me with HDR on or off. I also have my black level set to auto in order to get the full 0-255 range. Nvidia settings are also set to full. TV is set to Deep color and game mode engaged. I also saw the cut scenes were messed up. I tried shutting off HDR and then making similar adjustments in terms of calibration through the game but black levels and colors were still a ways away from ME1 so I kept tweaking things. I tried what @Krowten above had mentioned. I changed the .ini file to shut off field of view in game and it worked but cut scenes are still trash. Nexus mods has a fix but its not worth 16gb of extra space to me. I'll deal with cut scenes until its hopefully fixed.

Aside from having no Anti aliasing when turning off FOV in the .ini file, I'm good with the compromise though. For those playing under 4k res though, having no AA will likely bother some players. Happy to have black levels fixed and color is still great. Having AA would be nice but this was definitely better than having to wait to play part 2 and 3 until a fix arrived (if ever) so I'm happy. :)