Hi,
I’m a huge fan of the game. I think it’s the best ARPG I’ve ever played, and that’s saying something seeing as it’s my favourite genre. Among all the things I love about the game (too many to list), I’ve recently started paying closer attention to the visuals, what with all the skill VFX updates that’ve been made recently. It’s amazing that after thousands of hours of play I can still discover interesting little artistic details, and the atmosphere of the environment has always been stellar.
One of the things I love the most about certain parts of the game is the lighting. Fires and torches out in the environment cast lights that don’t just impact the ground and static objects around them, but also light up enemies, who cast dynamic shadows (particularly lovely on the path to Burrwitch). Same with, say riftgates, that illuminate things around them depending on if they’re activated by the player not. However, I noticed that the same is not true for skills or items. Casting Devastation, or Flames of Ignaffar in a poorly lit area does not illuminate enemies or the player character, nor lights up the ground. Having a brightly glowing or burning offhand or weapon in hand does not light up the player character or the environment or the enemies I’m whacking with it. Yet it’s clear that the game is capable of dynamic lighting , i.e. the feature would not have to be built from the ground up to implement.
So my question is (question, not a request): Would it be possible to add dynamic lighting to spells and procs and some items or is there some sort of limitation other than time and development resources that would prevent that (say, the engine isn’t optimised for so many dynamic light sources, not all objects are mapped to have lit surfaces, etc)? I think the game would look positively breathtaking with it, and if it’s just a matter of assigning light intensities and colours and light source points to skills using the dynamic lighting that’s already in the game, it might not even be that humongous of an endeavour. Obviously, if the issue is that the process would require mapping every piece of gear the character can wear so that light can impact it properly because such a thing isn’t modelled in the game, it would be a massive project of unreasonable proportions (I don’t know enough about programming to tell).
Don’t take this as a “could you please add dynamic lighting, k thx” from me, but rather, I’m just genuinely curious if such a thing would even be possible and if so, if such a feature might be planned for the far future.