As many of you likely know, the character creator in the benchmark didn't actually feature the new lighting engine, so they're working on an updated version alongside dawntrail itself - pretty huge difference side by side here as seen in the live letter update!
Apparently an updated benchmark tool will be released at the end of the month/beginning of June for people to test out ahead of Dawntrail, with many fixes in tow (including the lala dolphin teeth, lol)
(Hope the attached images work!)
On one hand, in this specific example, I think I actually like the original image better. On the other hand, I look at how the new image is handling lighting and think back to how bad some of the cutscenes in Prae look today with the current lighting model and I have hope that this will fix it.
Definitely looking forward to the updated benchmark though. Just hope they unlock all the hairstyles so we don't have to manually bring our characters over from the main game (I know they likely won't, but I can dream).
Yeah, it feels like in the side by side the actual sun is maybe in a different spot, so it looks more jarringly different than it could. Mostly I just want better handling of low light/mood light - as it is right now, I feel like low light makes characters look unintentionally spooky unless you've manually turned character lighting way up