Guild Wars 2

I’m making this post in light of the recent lighting changes in GW2 (pun intended). As some of you might have noticed a recent patch changed the way your characters were illuminated and how certain dyes effected them. A short time later the change was “fixed” due to multiple complaints and all changes were reverted. I hope that this post can explain what happened (at least what I think happened) and can somehow lead to a better solution to this problem. I wanted to do this earlier but I didn’t have the time.

I would like to remark, that I doubt that the lighting change was a bug in the first place. Ever since launch the characters skins have had a slight illumination on them meaning that they are not properly effected by environmental lights. (this also goes for Sylvari racial armor) You can see this effect easily when you go into a dark area like the black room in the jumping puzzle in lions arch : the armor will be dark because the room is dark whilst the characters skin/fur/leafy-stuff will be glowing like radioactive shrooms.(example : http://i.imgur.com/Ac57uTPr.jpg ) Another problem that occurred was that the lighting on the character changed depending on the position of the camera (example: http://imgur.com/a/jUpNu notice how the lighting changes even though the character hasn’t moved). With the patch, these things were fixed. Characters and armor both were effected by environmental lights and your character would actually be dark whilst standing in the dark (unless you had any glowy stuff on or were a Sylvari). This however also meant that certain dyes were toned down, leading to a lot of unhappy players. It should also be noted that because people had never seen their characters in natural lighting a lot of people were suddenly shocked by the way the characters looked. (I personally believe that the illumination was just turned off but who knows). Anyway, long story short, now the “fix” has be reverted and the bug “fixed” -> meaning that all now looks as bad or as good as it did before.

I would personally have liked it to be a setting the player can play around with because I preferred the fixed lighting to the old version. In general I think we can all agree that it would be nice if both the character and the armor would have the same lighting and that both would be more representative of what the preview looks like. I would like both to be properly effected by environmental lighting (mostly for screenshots) but I think it would be best for everyone if you could turn it on and off. That way you could decide what you like best, ether clear shadows cast on the character or a slight illumination on the character (similar to flat-lighting but not as extreme) that lets you see the colours clearer (like the skin is now). Either way the lighting as it is now is not good and I think It would be nice if the devs could address the problem properly and then explain the change in the patch notes. ( you can find this post on reddit here : https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4c9qkb/character_lighting_in_gw2_please_read/ )

Ok cool, thanks for the info. So this isn’t going to be addressed anymore?

I would like to report a bug then. This isn’t to change it to the bugged status that it was because many players didn’t like it. I think these things can still be considered a bug though :

- The characters lighting is effected by the position of the camera (see linked pictures above)
- The character preview does not represent what the character/armor looks like ingame
- Characters skin and armor should be treated the same way (see attachment above)
- It would be nice if players could toggle realistic and other lighting.

personally i preferred the ‘bugged’ lighting.

when i first noticed the lighting was different i was in temple waiting for the match to start. i swung the camera round and saw my ele’s face. it was amazing! i could actually see her features, the freckles, all the little details! and the textures on my outfit, so intricate!

the normal lighting in the game just bleaches out everything, faces are just a big glowy blob with eyes.

I really liked it 2 ^^

Lighting bug persists when shader is LOW.

They could at least turn off the illumination of Character in very dark areas so you don’t glow like a radioactive shroom.

Some areas of the game still have extremely broken lighting. For example the underground areas such as the Quandry Snatch have glowing white areas on the walls with high shaders and a gamma of 1.0.