I understand the arguments being made about vertical slices, and misrepresenting what the final product will be like, but ultimately should we not respect From Sotfware's artistic integrity to ship the game in the state they believe is best? Things change during development, and we as a collective group can't enforce our views of what the game should be. The lighting system looked interesting, it definitely looked to add a layer of difficulty having to manage torch life, battle one handed, and traverse dark environments. From Software seemingly has cut that idea, and still managed to deliver an incredible game in the process.
Why not celebrate that a new Dark Souls has been shipped and that all of the pre-launch fears of difficulty being curbed, or ruined by a new director were incorrect? Does anyone remember what RE4 looked like before it launched? It was a completely different game, yet what it ended up being was amazing. Or what about the Halo 2 reveal from Bungie that never made it into the game? You may say that this nothing like that, because the preview version of Dark Souls 2 is the same, just missing a lighting system. But this is inherent to game development, what you see is not always what you get, and there are usually perfectly legitimate reasons for that change that is outside of what we the fans can demand on a collective level.
Should From Sotfware address the lighting differences? Sure. Do the lighting difference bother me? Yeah, in a way, the tutorial had all of these torches to be lit, and seemingly for no reason because initially it was supposed to be dark. The fact that they haven't done away with the whole torch system entirely points to a quick setting swap to get the old system out but ship the game with minimal changes. However, this is the game we got. To ignore all the good, great and amazing content that is in the game, and to fixate on an issue such as how the environment is lit on the console version of the game is just unfortunate, in my humble opinion.
