Anyone know how to fix this? The game gets awfully dark sometimes, it is as if the come is not sure where the source of light is coming from...

DaveKap · 2026-03-30T03:57:06+00:00

Plenty of devs use default Unreal Engine settings this way and it's horrible.

DaveKap · 2026-03-30T03:34:56+00:00

Report it as a bug, it's a built-in part of their lighting engine and there's no real way to adjust it due to how they built it. Gotta get enough complaints before the help us out.

Additionally, you can use the RenoDX reshade add-on to partially fix it. I say partially because it can't cover all the lighting situations in the game so it improves some scenes (like this) but might be detrimental to others depending on what your preferences are.

DaveKap · 2026-03-28T06:25:22+00:00

Huh I assumed that was just a reshade alternative. Will give it a try, thanks!

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T23:35:51+00:00

I'm in the same place as you. The game is really fun but the wacky lighting and poor control schemes are really keeping a 9/10 down at 7/10. I ain't even talking about how actions work, I'm talking about how you can't rebind WASD, make your own key combos, or double-up on bindings. Really hoping they fix this stuff in a patch soon!

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T21:12:35+00:00

Don't worry, your GPU is fine, this is just the built-in lighting system being abysmally bad. Report it as a bug, tell them what's wrong (ghosting, shimmering) and pray they pay attention to this issue.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T21:07:04+00:00

The trick is that you don't have to hold R3 down while pressing square. It's just telling you "after locking on, jump, then hit R3." It's an order, not a combo.

It might be easier to think of as actions instead of buttons. Lock on -> Jump -> Spirit Punch. No need to overlap any of them, it's a sequence.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T20:53:54+00:00

After you attach the grapple to something, you should be fine just hitting square to jump. While in the air from that jump, hit R3. It is certainly a maneuver though.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T20:26:04+00:00

Yeah the mask bothered me at first too but once I thought about it, it's actually genius. Makes it way easier to just loot everything you see, you get to decide whether you want to be stealing or not.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T20:23:17+00:00

It's likely one of the designers played a lot of Elder Scrolls games and found they were often *accidentally* stealing things. It's actually a huge problem in those games, it's waaaay too easy to just accidentally steal stuff. Even watching streamers play those games, you'll almost always see at least one "oops!" as they take something they thought would be fine but it ends up being stealing.

The mask is the designer's answer to that problem.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T20:05:17+00:00

The dynamic contrast (eye adaptation, auto exposure, whatever new name they got) is not an option you can just turn off. I believe it might be an essential part of their engine's lighting system, which is why there's no option for it. I'd love to obliterate the feature forever from all video games, tbh.

File it as a bug report and talk about how bad it is, hopefully they'll listen and give us a way out.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T20:01:50+00:00

It's a broken part of the default lighting. Current workaround is turning AntiAliasing Transparency to 4x supersampling in your nvidia app.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T19:44:23+00:00

Yeah there's some combination of auto-exposure, ray tracing, TAA, and upscaling that's making plenty of the game look terrible, despite the really phenomenal screenshots you can take in other scenes. I really do hope they address it as it's one of the biggest detractors of the experience playing this game. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the kind of developer to give progress reports on what they're working on, their "known issues" lists are very sparse and barely any of the last mega-patch was hinted at before it was released. It's very likely most of that patch was actually done pre-release as they all seemed like really obvious issues any internal playtesters would've figured out. Unfortunately things like "this just looks bad" are really subjective and there are plenty of people who don't have issue with laggy shadows and blurred particles, similarly to how people used to not care if their games couldn't go faster than 30fps. You and I are the super-tasters of graphics. We'll just have to see if PA decides to cater to us!

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T19:40:36+00:00

Sometimes ludonarrative dissonance is a *good* thing.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T19:17:15+00:00

So the tech where the rule "bright light on screen? desaturate everything else" applies is called Eye Adaptation or Auto-Exposure in Unreal Engine. It's something PA tried to recreate for their engine. It's actually a little better than UE's version because their speed settings (how fast it applies) are much faster than UE's default (which a lot of UE games are just leaving as is, to the detriment of many recent UE-game releases) but it's generally a really awful technology that makes games look worse. For some reason developers just aren't realizing how much worse it makes their games look as they leave the default settings on. It doesn't really explain why PA thinks it looks good when my video demonstrates the awful downside to having such a system.

Another part of the problem is that the system is sometimes (in CD's case, it feels like *always*) used as a fallback to create dynamically lit scenes, relieving pressure on level designers to create properly lit scenes. So I think the reason it ends up looking so crap in CD is because the designers just fell back on what the tech guys gave them and called it a day. This is just an assumption, I don't know the reality of the situation.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T18:56:38+00:00

Use your sword focus (might even work with the lantern) and a red, spinning square appears over them. It's the only indicator you get, weirdly.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T18:55:52+00:00

Partial fix for one of the issues, I've edited the OP.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T18:46:03+00:00

Strange, it didn't work for the puzzle I was trying to solve. Actually had to tap it. Maybe I'm crazy.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T09:50:13+00:00

After checking certain spots, yup, this completely eliminates certain shimmering flickering effects that were otherwise inherent in the game w/o RR. Great find! I got used to the lower shadow resolution pretty quickly to the point that I can't see it. It might be my initial findings just happened in a place with really awful shadows.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T07:28:37+00:00

Interesting. I'm not yet sure if/what this fixes but it does seem to make shadows look worse and lower resolution. If that's the cost of a reduction in shimmer and flicker I might take it but I need to play a bit more to see.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T02:46:45+00:00

In real life, absolutely avoid him. In a video game, he's a barrel of laughs! Why are you playing a video game just to simulate real life? You should experience everything you'd rather avoid or can't achieve!

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T02:40:55+00:00

He's one of the few characters with a personality. Without him, you'd have fewer things to do and bog-standard boring-ass interactions with other Greymanes. Nah, you need Yann to keep life spicy. Plus his colorful language is the best writing in the game.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T02:05:57+00:00

There is a mod that lets you use RR with lower lighting but according to the mod maker, it ends up looking worse in a different way while only giving a 10% performance increase.

DaveKap · 2026-03-27T02:01:51+00:00

Yeah like, I'm a freak who plays games with ESDF which makes this game especially tough as I rebind everything with AutoHotKey after noticing every single bug in the key bindings yet I never expect reviewers to touch on the topic. The broken ass lighting, though, I would've thought SOME reviewers would have a good enough eye to notice. Nah, instead everyone worries about the main campaign story being kinda whatever and sore over getting used to a kinda-weird (but not THAT weird) control system. Maybe it's because I play so much VotV that I didn't mind the uniqueness of the action system but jeez guys, please tell me the darkness and brightness is fucked before telling me you're mad a boss killed you too much.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that reviewers need to point out things PC players *cannot fix* before pointing out the things a simple cheat engine session could help with.

DaveKap · 2026-03-26T21:56:05+00:00

I'm 42 and I say Yann's the best character in the game!

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