Anyone find them too busy and colorful?

I loved the more dull, more real and clean look of the Wticher 1, where everything was easy to see.

In Witcher 2 i find the visuals very hard to differentiate things, everything seems packed with detail and color, and i find it a bit of a mess.

Hopefully Witcher 3 cleans up a bit. ITs just hard for me to see stuff in the game properly.

I like them the same as Witcher's 1... Not very realistic but quite atmospheric and cinematic... You'll also notice that when it is raining, the saturation changes. And I prefer the graphics after you arrive in flotsam. For some reason I don't quite like them in the first chapter but anyway... :-)

For me its a visual overload. Very saturated.

Witcher 1 is much more easy on the eyes.

You can try to turn off the Bloom effect? Sounds like that's your problem.

Not just that. Its all the details and stuff everywhere. Maybe ill lower all details to minimum.

There are other modern games like that. I miss the old and clean look of the late 90s, early 2000s games.

I know I hate bloom and SSAO, and personally my least favorite area visually is Flotsam. The whole area just runs poorly (relatively) and looks kinda bad.

Like cartoons, you mean?...;)

Not me. I love the gritty realism of the games and the detail is compelling, especially in replays--like really great movies with lots of detail you notice something you hadn't seen before every time you fire the game up.

I've fired up both Witcher 1 and Witcher 2, recently, and while I'll reserve my W1 comments for the appropriate forum, I have to say that visually W2 knocks my socks off (fortunately my feet don't stink--usually)...;) I've found that by increasing the cube-map textures to 2048, Atlas map textures to 4096, max texture size to 2048, and setting texture ram to 1GB (I have a 2GB card and play at 1920x1200)--and setting ubersampling = 2, among other things, the game is spectacular and plays briskly since I increased the game's videocard texture-ram usage to 1GB!

The only thing that I saw that I thought was "busy" was the "rain" effect--I highly recommend turning that off (it still rains in the game, it's just that now everything doesn't appear "wriggly" on the ground--supposed to be "wet" but it doesn't work), turning off Sharpen, and turning off bloom. I also have turned off all DOF effects, but have everything else on, including SSAO and FSAA. Beautiful game, really.

(HD 7850 2GB @ 1.05GHz core, 5.2GHz ram; AMD FX-6300 @ 4.5GHz, 8GHz 1.6GHz DDR3, Win8.1x64)

But that's exactly what he was talking about. Witcher 1 DID have this "gritty realism", Witcher 2 doesn't. Witcher 2 is oversaturated and has tons of strong contrasts. Witcher 1 looked like a medieval game, Witcher 2 looks like a fantasy game.

I also don't like the visual style of Witcher 2 and am happy to see that W3 is going back to the "grey" thing Witcher 1 had going.

I understand the complaint. I'm not sure I agree that oversaturation is the problem, but I agree that there's something about the graphics in TW2 that just makes objects, characters, and monsters more difficult to see than they should be. It's like they blend into the background somehow. Personally I turned off SSAO, bloom, blur-effects, and some of the other detestable glitter.

I do appreciate the way character faces and things like that look though. Those are much more realistic IMO.

Not necessarily, the main reason I hate the oversaturation is what it does to the atmosphere. Too many too strong contrasts. Just look at this. The ground has like more detail and stronger contrasts than the characters. Subconsciously I'm counting rocks instead of scanning the screen for NPCs or enemies. Agreed, the visual quality is certainly fantastic in The Witcher 2. It's just that it doesn't serve the gameplay (or potentially the atmosphere) well.

The only problem is the bloom which you can easily turn off

Yeah, I see what you're saying. Especially in that shot your eye is drawn to the ground before anything else because of how bright and busy it is. It's strikingly orange. The walls and buildings are quite dark, however.

Graphically, my favorite part so far - and keep in mind I'm still only on Chapter 1 - is the bandit swamp, and that's got a much duller color scheme.

EDIT: I took a closer look last night, and here's my theory: the depth of field blur kicks in too close to the camera. That means your view of the game is somewhat near-sighted. When you combine that with all the ground detail and contrast, it makes objects at medium range blend into the blurry clutter.

Exactly my thoughts as well. Witcher 1 looks "right".