What about taking that glare and doing something cool with it, like put several thousands of Neinzul ships coming from around that planet? It would block out the glare somewhat, mediating the retina issues, and sort of give it an artistic reason to exist. You could motion blur the ships a little as well. I understand, however, if that is a bit too much work. You could also use that space for a shadowy logo, though there are enough logos in play on the right side of the screen already.
Those ideas, as well as working pieces of it into a random sort of thing, would all be worth pursuing if we had the raw materials to do so. But what I was trying to communicate earlier is that we don't
have the bits and pieces of the image. We just have the image, as you see it. The glare can't just be neatly removed from that without messing up the rest of the image, etc.
Basically, we're still learning how to work with art contractors in our new approach, and we didn't realize that this one wasn't working really large and scaling down to the target (like the artists we used to work with would). And it didn't occur to us how important it would be to have the intermediate formats that we're used to submitted along with the final. That latter is generally more expensive, so even realizing it we wouldn't want to automatically request it, etc.
All that said, the image will be useful for various marketing purposes which was Chris's main goal for it. As for the title screen... well, we'll leave the option there, but off by default. For the rest, well, it was a learning experience
I should add that I really do appreciate your frank feedback as it was obvious to me that you were specifically trying to not be mean/offensive/etc, and we do need to know when something isn't up to snuff. Doesn't mean we'll always agree, and generally we look for more than one source of a particular complaint, but anyway.
