Is the lighting on this game bugged or what?

[Crash.9186]

I don't understand how the lighting on this game works, it seems like the shadow/light on your character is effected by the position of the camera? meaning the world and the player character has its own seperate light source? I don't think I would see it as such as issue if it didn't look like it was a bright day in the area I'm stood in, but yet my character looks like she's standing in a dark alley way with barely any light in sight.

The screenshot is also just showing how the light on the left pic is displaying just a tiny bit of light to the right of my character, and then again it's on the right when i rotate the camera and the light has somehow followed it to light the right of my character, you can see that the shadow on the right picture is on the right which means my character should be bright on the left instead of it being pitch black which makes no sense, I think at this point it's just mega annoying to look at, is there any "fix" that I can do or is this it? weird lighting forever?

[AgentMoore.9453]

Weird lighting forever, I'm afraid.

Lighting also varies dramatically from map to map, and a number of the more recent outfits look totally different in the hero panel than they do in the open world. There are 3rd party programs that exist and which a number of people have used over the years to try and solve these problems, but none of them are officially supported and may not be worth the risk/effort.

You can also try messing around with your game settings, screen brightness, and keeping up to date with your video card, but some of the issues are baked directly into GW2.

[maddoctor.2738]

This is a highlight that exists to give "Depth" to characters. It is a "feature" that many complained about in the past, because it does make characters look ugly with a weird light coming out from nowhere. Solutions: first, go into Shaders and set them to Medium instead of High and the ugly highlight will go away. And the second "solution" is to play on maps after Draconis Mons that use the new rendering features and this highlight is no longer used.

Good luck

[Naxos.2503]

There is also the question of different maps having different lighting and some dyes looking Completely different on some maps for a particular item, compared to another map. Thus a meticulously crafted outfit setup is ruined from changing map. A bit annoying.

[coso.9173]

Never noticed that backlight isn't present on newer maps personally.But yeah it was made basically to make characters stand out from the background.

[Solanum.6983]

I think that's an issue with the older maps. Some maps have very harsh lighting like bitter frost for example where shadows look very strange.To be honest I never really noticed the whole positioning but checking it in a PoF Map Shadows seem to be fine. They work like regular shadows against the main sun/moon light source matching the shadows of all the terrain and objects.