Original NightSong Cinematic

Description:

This mod restores the original lighting to the NightSong Cinematic.

If you freed the Nightsong before Patch 6, then you probably remember the cutscene being characterized by the bright heavenly light that burst forth as she transformed. With Patch 6 Larian adjusted the cinematic to no longer feature this heavenly glow and I was shocked to stumble upon this change during my third playthrough shortly after Patch 6. The cinematic just didn't hit quite the same anymore and I never did finish that play through. Since then, I've kept an eye out for any mods that restored the cinematic to its original glory, but none were forthcoming, so I decided to do it myself and I figured I'd share it in case there were others that also wanted it restored.

This mod ONLY restores the lighting. Larian made some other changes that I thought were fine, such as removing the plastic-y white glow that played over body as she started to transform. That same glow also plays over her arm as she punches the ground and used to go over her shirt sleeve in the original, but they altered it to only affect her skin which looks better. I think they may have also tweaked her eye glow some? This mod doesn't change any of that.

The mod comes in two versions. The first version "NightSong Original Cinematic" exactly restores the original lighting (as far as I can tell). The second version "Original Nightsong Cinematic with Tweaks" is in the spirit of the original but with a couple of adjustments that I think are good.

First in the original cinematic when it pans up to see her sword descending, the light is so blinding you can't actually see the sword (the original version of the mod keeps this intact). When Larian first adjusted the cutscene they completely remove the light entirely (it looked awful). I was pleased to see though, that as of Patch 8, they brought the light back but toned it down enough so that you could actually see the sword as it descended. I thought this was good, so my tweaked version keeps this change.

Second, after the camera cuts to view the Nightsong in all her glory, the light is blinding from behind her and as the camera holds on her, the lighting suddenly increases even brighter about 1 sec after the shot is established. The original version of the mod keeps this intact. But as I was editing, I realized there was no need for this and it felt a bit awkward and the lighting was already plenty bright to silhouette her, so the tweaked version removes this unneeded increase.

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Installation:

Download the version you want and install using your Mod Manager of choice.

Alternatively, download the version you want, unzip it and drop the .pak file into C://users/<username>/AppData/Local/Larian Studios/Baldur's Gate 3