@Illanya This is what my opinion on the system has been from the start. They couldn't be assed to make actual weapon switching smooth and responsive (load all 6 weapon models, remove network delay, add proper binds for controller, remove the extra artificial bit of delay they seem to have added themselves, remove lingering attack vanishing like they did with Hero Talis) and simply decided that people should grind to work around deliberately terrible controls.

Now, if there was an actual distinction in animations between switching weapon and a multiweapon setup that tied into the flow of combat properly, that'd be a different deal. Like, regual weapon switching could have our characters visibly take their time hiding the current weapon into the hammerspace and summoning out the new one, while multiweapon setup would have one weapon morf into another with a cool transformation animation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gesn3a6wPHo) instantly as you use different attacks. With proper presentation it'd look like a deliberate combat balancing choice and the requirement for needing both weapons to be the same series would actually make sense. As it is now, with weapons just casually appearing and disappearing in both cases, it makes the entire system reek laziness.

Those aren't shaders, those are presets. Shaders are ones with checkboxes near them. Just type in "brightness", "tonemap" or other things I mentioned earlier into the "Search" bar and it'll bring them up. When you check them, the image will change and sliders below the shader list will appear. As for the issue on the picture, no clue

After you install it in the game's directory, you'll see a menu appear ingame with a long list of shaders. For finetuning gamma, brightness, contrast etc search for shaders like ContrastBrightnessSaturation, Tonemap, Curves, Levels, Vibrance, HDR and simply play around with the sliders until you get a result you like. It's fairly straightforward if you don't want to go into really advanced effects

The only thing I can recommend is trying Reshade/Gshade

The game looks overly bright because the new engine uses a more "photorealistic" rendering method. The old engine had innate shine on everything and external light sources (like the sky) only slightly changed the shade. The new engine now uses those same light sources for actually lighting everything, so they had to be supercharged, otherwise a lot of areas would be really dark. Most of the color the game had came from global illumination, which is straight up gone. None of the materials were adapted to the new lighting method either.

The old PSO2 is on the same servers and engine, so it's also laggy, dcing, crashing and all the other jazz

An old DX9 client option would be good (but they 100% won't do it). I can run the new client, but I hate the new visuals. Global illumination is a massive part of old PSO2's atmosphere and the update deletes it completely (while in NGS GI has almost no impact on the image while hogging lots of resources). Besides that, everything is covered in trademark Unreal Engine gloss, transparency effects are done through dithering instead of alpha blending (which is just peak laziness), antialiasing options are raw blur and you can still see jaggies and shimmering under the blur... I could go on, but screw it

@Hooonter said in Serious concerns about the future of NGS:

Using normal attacks between gaps isn't any less skillful than having assured 100% cancellable PA you can use there instead.

Basically, this. Having nothing to do other than normal attack spam between counters definitely sucks, but when the exact same counter move is a primary focal point of combat, other options outside of that move just blend in together and the concern becomes more of variety in button pushing rather than actually analyzing the situation and making real meaningful decisions.

The overly fast enemy thing should be addressed with something like stagger mechanics. Slower classes should be able to create openings via part breaks, status effects or simply getting large amount of damage out at the right time.

There also needs to be a variety of defensive PAs. Counter-based PAs that, say, require prior setup to get to the counter phase or have long downtime after it; PAs that take a long time to execute in general but have guard frames built in at very specific parts of the animation (TD Fighter-style); or, indeed, PAs that raise your defenses to allow some tanking (with some extra tradeoffs, like really high PP cost or something).

@Matt said in Serious concerns about the future of NGS:

The combat is also pretty bad, what kind of design decision is it to give everyone a step counter, but it's not possible to use it properly in your toolkit because every attack has huge commits and cannot be cancelled?

The right design decision. You just have to actually think about its proper use instead of it being a complete no-brainer where you spam it at every opportunity like it is in PSO2 right now.

Powerful tools should have drawbacks to using them, otherwise they're easily abused, leading to shallow and repetitive autopilot gameplay. It's balancing 101

If all you care about is reducing an arbitrary number to zero or emptying a bar instead of actually learning the game's mechanics and fighting, this game is not for you. There's enough braindead mainstream games on the market as is