What is your experience with the new lighting system?

[Byrjun]

I played on Green beta for a few hours, and something really strange happened. I've played this game a million times over the past 20 years, but I got hit with a powerful sense of nostalgia that I hadn't felt before. I knew that EQ lost a bit of its atmosphere or "soul" without the classic lighting system, but I didn't realize the extent of that loss.

That said, I don't think the system is perfect and I wanted to share my experiences to see what people thought.

First character: Erudite

I logged into Toxxulia, it was night and raining and I couldn't see a damn thing, as expected. But I was also surprised by just how bright the game became during the day.

About the only weirdness that I experienced with the Erudite was how different the starter candle and a fire beetle eye were. The starter candle cast a very strong hard light in a short radius around my character, and outside of that radius was complete darkness.

The fire beetle eye on the other hand has a very different light. It's much softer, more like a dull orange light, as opposed to the bright white light of the candle. However, this dull orange light extended out further than the candle light. I tended to prefer the fire beetle eye because of this, but they were both pretty bad.

I don't really remember light sources looking so different, and actually switching between different types of light sources to use depending on my environment, but maybe that's accurate. I'm not sure.

I also noticed a big difference between the way that the lighting worked depending on whether I was in windowed mode or full screen mode. Unfortunately full screen didn't work very well for me, so I don't have much more to say about this.

Second character: Ogre

This is the one I'm really confused about. Ogres are supposed to start with infravision, but honestly I couldn't tell much difference between the Ogre and the Erudite. I definitely DID NOT feel like my vision problems were solved. In fact, I often felt more blind in The Feerrott and Innothule on my Ogre than I did on my Erudite in Toxxulia. A big part of this is the lack of a starter candle or fire beetle eyes. But I'm still a bit surprised by how blind Ogres are.

I was able to turn up my gamma, which helped a lot in the complete darkness (aka I cheated), but it's temporary as the gamma resets as soon as you alt tab the window. I've heard other people say that they can't adjust the gamma at all in-game, so not sure why I'm able to.

Questions

If you played an infravision race like Ogre, how did it compare to a blind/human race? Could you notice a big difference? Did your Ogre (or other character) have blindness problems?

Do you notice a big difference between different types of light sources? Do you remember this being a thing in classic EQ? (Because I don't.)