yea,while the lighting "looked good" in the initial version it also was waaay too dark, because the engine wasn't capable of accounting for light bounces/scattered light - with high quality global illumination and HDR that kind of lighting engine can be pulled off (and still be adequately playable without knowing every enemy/trap placement in advance), but it was much too early to use it for DS2

What year is this? xD

Incidentally, I'm currently replaying Dark Souls 2, so it was kinda surprising to see this thread come up. And the game's lightning took a big hit indeed. Supposedly the "torch lightning your path mechanic" was going to be far more prevalent than it ended up being on the final version (which you'll barely ever use the torch aside from the start and maybe the foggy forest area).

Also that "Dragon breaks the bridge" thing...yeah. I mean it's still in the final game but good luck triggering it (why would you, anyway). I always thought you have to kill every dragon before proceeding or they'll break the bridge, but nope.

I don't really have a problem with the final build at all, except for that washed-out colours. Still, it looks good, although I've always had the odd belief that Dark Souls 1 looked better in certain areas.

You're like 40 years late... In gamers time.

Somehow Dark Souls 2 managed to look worse than Dark Souls 1. Although this preview build has better lighting, they overdid it and texture quality got bumped up in the final version.

Still, Dark Souls 2 is easily the worst one; it's a good game, but not an amazing game like 1 and 3 are.

Gotta disagree there, Dark Souls 2 is easily better than Dark Souls 3. At least the former has working Poise stat.

Just adjust the brightness and contrast on your TV setting, and you'll get the early build. "Problem solved."

I agree they fucked up poise in DS3, but that's about the only think I dislike about it. DS2 has mediocre level design, horrible hit boxes, enemies disappearing after being killed 15 times, healthbar reducing when you die... there were just too much things that bothered me.

While I agree DS2 messed up in several areas (hit boxes the size of River Thames being the biggest offender), I pretty much think DS3 is incredibly weak in several areas. The most lineal, bonfire-riddled Souls game so far, with very few secret, optional areas, that overly reuses assets (from both DS3 itself and DS1), broken mechanics as the aforemented Poise mentioned (but let's just not talk about Miracles, which are the most utterly useless things you can ever hope to get into), and I dunno, a general pervasive feeling of been there, done that. Don't get me wrong, as I love Dark Souls 3; it's just I found it kinda disappointing all things considered.

Oh, also, those infuriatingly terrible Covenant rewards. Put all effort into maximizing one Covenant, and your reward is a Hawk Ring? Welcome to NG+, where you get a Hawk Ring +1 right at the start of the game.

I actually like/prefer both of those

the unimaginative level design of a lot of it's areas and the feeling of them just being glued together randomly is really the "major flaw" with DS2 from my perspective, still a great game

yeah the graphical style I love, I wasn't too fussed the fidelity of the game wasn't great