Hey all, apologies for the delay in responding.
First and foremost our intentions with the Director’s Cut is only to make improvements. That includes fixes to stability, performance, tweaks to combat and balance, and new features and quality of life improvements—as well as the new content. We’re happy to see that we’ve already received more than a few comments and reviews that it’s a positive change for the game.
However, there are some legitimate questions and concerns here, as well as some changes we should explain. The first of which is that we made some stylistic changes in the Director’s Cut to certain areas of the game to change the coloration, lighting, atmospheric effects, etc. to address some complaints from the original release and create a more consistent stylized look. Skara Brae above/below are prime examples of that, and we’ve made stylistic choices to the time of day, number of lights, coloring, etc. to create a new feel. Additional light sources and changes to global illumination can have pretty drastic impacts to the appearance of a scene, which don’t necessarily mean we’ve removed graphical options or fidelity, but may reduce their visual impact. For example adding more lights to brighten a scene may reduce how sharp the shadows and specular highlights appear.
Second, we moved from full dynamic shadows to a mix of baked level shadows and dynamic character shadows. This was primarily for performance reasons, because (as most who played the original release can attest to) framerate issues were a pretty widespread complaint we wanted to address. This is definitely a visual trade-off, although one we think leads to an overall improved experience, and in some cases more accurate shadows.
Outside of those changes (some like global illumination and colored lighting which can greatly impact the overall look of an area) the graphical options are overall unchanged, or even improved.
Before / After
But there are some issues. For example we’re attempting to track down the loss of dynamic shadows for characters and why they appear on our internal release builds but not the actual live product. We believe it should be fairly simple fix, but it is a legitimate bug. We’ll keep you updated as our work progresses to correct it.
