Dark Souls 2 Noir - GeDoSaTo

So I've seen some people on /r/DarkSouls2/ talking about playing Dark Souls 2 on their TV with the saturation at 0, documenting the look of the game with some pictures.

I actually thought it looked interesting and thought it should be achievable quite easily using GeDoSaTo, since its postprocessing part is based on SweetFX and SweetFX does have a monochrome conversion module.

So I ported (well, that sounds way more difficult than it really was, it was really just a trivial change of few strings ;) ) the monochrome module to GeDoSaTo on top of Asmodean's settings I'm using in my normal playthrough, and did a few basic tweaks to the processing settings to adjust contrast and stuff like that closer to what I considered usable with such monochrome look.

See the mod in motion here. Please note, though, that the purple-ish tint, visible in some parts of the footage and in the video thumbnail, is NOT supposed to be there and only appeared after uploading the video to YouTube. The original image is perfectly neutral black and white, the only color in the image is the occasional glow on fires, torches and other bright light sources, and of course the game UI.

The interesting (but mostly unintended by me, though I was thinking about how to achieve the "Sin City" effect of red being the only colour in the game people on Reddit were talking about) side effect of using the monochrome module together with the new Bloom effect, introduced by Durante in the latest GeDoSaTo 0. 5 alpha, is that while the original image gets desaturated, the bloom itself stays in color. Which makes bright lights and shiny things glow in that given color, giving the whole game an interestingly stylized look.

As always with GeDoSaTo, the game UI is not affected by the desaturation - I kinda like it, combined with the monochrome world, but YMMV. Anyway, that's really part of GeDoSaTo, I'm not able to do anything about that.

The overall preset is fairly basic, I don't have time to tweak it, as I'm currently rather busy. You can easily tweak it yourself, though - play around with the settings in post.fx itself. You're probably mostly interested in the "Monochrome_conversion_values" (changing them is akin to using colored filters in b&w photography, you can create different "looks" or "moods" this way) and in the tonemapping section settings, where you define the overall brightness, contrast and stuff like that.

When you download the post.fx.zip file, unpack the post.fx file and place it into your GeDoSaTo "assets" directory, replacing the previous post.fx file (make a backup first, of course). Keep GeDoSaTo set to "durante" postprocessing (or set GeDoSaTo to "asmodean" postprocessing, rename my file to "post_asmodean.fx" and replace the original "post_asmodean.fx" file).