No. Colours don't get washed out in real life, they get brighter. You may get blinded by sunlight and bright conditions, but the colours are still there. Combined with autoexposure with no center weighing, weird gamma curves, a strange mix of natural and realistic lighting values and simpler reflectivity values, no native HDR support means lighting is a real mess. It'll go from stunning and realistic to pitch black or almost pure white.... With the patchwork of routes and materials we have in the game now they have dug themselves a real pit that it will take a herculean effort to get out of. The mix of materials means it's almost impossible to get settings that fit all situations, and we're left with the current mess. It's sad to see, but as long as we keep buying new routes at AAA retail prices Dovetail will keep doing what they are doing.
As an XBox user I decided to grab the humble bundle with TSW3 for PC, and after a bit of fiddling with values found the perfect sweet spot for my monitor. Game looks positively sublime, next up is to try enabling HDR. [SystemSettings] r.EyeAdaptation.LensAttenuation=0.1 r.TonemapperGamma=2 Literally not bothered in the slightest by the changes at night. It's not really noticeably harder to see beyond where the light dropped off already. this is an improvement with no drawbacks and the console version NEEDS these two as sliders.
