I think I understood ur, CDPR, mistake with Gwent's graphical design.
I just remembered that I, as all gwenters I knew, liked the Homecoming Preview very much. U can see it below:
But what had we got in reality? Why did our opinions change after release? Here u can see seeming small, but in reality a big difference between Preview and Release.
1. Battlefield
Preview looked cool with bleak cards, animations, heroes and bleak dusty gamefield. Card's elements looked better and stylish. In Release we see too saturated picture, not what we saw and liked in Preview.
Even Thronebreaker had this low-saturated design:
So if Gwent is a Thronebreaker's child, why does it have another style?
2. Mulligan
Here u can see better a difference between cards' looks. In a Preview there was a bleak designed cards with much bleaker animations and borders. Ragged borders are ok with bleak overall style, but they are not ok with bright saturated style of Release cards. That's why my soul is suffering looking at this design mistake. Also Preview's borders was much thinner, what I mentioned before in
this theme as a normal's card view.
If u are making bleak game, than make it bleak in all cases. Don't make cards saturated, while the world around is dirty and even card's borders are ragged and dirty. It's not ok.
Look at this:
This design is looking wonderful: no oversaturation, realistic colors of realistic world. This what I like.
3. Card look
Even this is much better in Preview. Card's frame is much more realistic, not so bright, plastic, thick and rounded like in the Release's one. Card's description is written on much better-looking scroll, while Released one is written on some piece of vague and bright plate. Sorry, but Preview is looking much better and logical. Scrolls are more definite and common to real world then this vague thick plate made of don't-know-what.
As u can see, everything has become oversaturated in Release, while in Preview we see
bleak realistic colors. That's why everyone loved the Preview. Bleak colors are perfectly combined with mud and real world, while this oversaturated colors are ok only for HS-like game. But that bright and saturated type of game must be played in a tavern, on a gameBOARD, not on the REAL battlefield, cause real world is bleak, but current Gwent is not. So, u mixed two styles in one: bleak real world with mud and dust and the synthetic saturated funny picture of HS-like games. They are not compatible. Style must be definite. Or it is realistic and bleak, or it is bright and made for closed places like tavern or public house lightened with bright candles. Make game bleak or make it a board-like game like inside of W3. Cause this bright saturated style is ok here:
I think, the easiest, fastest and cheapest fixing of this design mistake is just making overall style bleaker (animations, card's frames, interface) and changing description caption to that beautiful Preview scrolls. With this game look I even agree to smash my bleak (and thin) cards into the mud.