Awesome, thanks! I think for the most part, or fully, I enjoy DE’s water better 
Now that I know I can disable Map Lighting, I think I’ll probably start seeing truer blue waters but with some neat effects in it 
But I’ll definitely be try disabling the 3D water on occasion, if/when I want a more simplistic water
I still think it’d be neat for AoE2:DE to have a button you could press to toggle back and forth between old school AoE2:HD graphics and new AoE2:DE. However, I bet that wouldn’t be too easy… they’d probably have to artistically recreate every new DE asset in the old HD style
As for shadows, wow, didn’t know they were even sharper in AoK! I understand DE devs’ desire for ‘soft shadows’ since it’s all the rage these days, but I think they went a little overkill. Looks like a big blur/smudge tool was applied to them all, rather than it being distance-from-object-to-ground related
One example:
More examples:
I'd love to see the AoE2:HD type of shadow put in DE...
- Or at least something a lot closer. They’re much more intricate and detailed; you can see individual leaves, twigs, and branches. Here’s HD:
Instead of the blurry ones in DE...
- Which serve to make the maps look blurry or too soft and fuzzy/foggy.
- It’s often a bright, crisp, clear sunny day in the game with no particulates in the air, but you wouldn’t know it from the shadows
* - I’m aware the DE screenshots have Map Lighting filter enabled. If off, they’d be darker, which is good. But they would still have fuzzy/blurry edges