I asked for one thing: rain and snow, at any strength, with drops and flakes that stick. What came out is the first weather Sky Peck has ever had, and the detail my son noticed first wasn't the rain falling. It was the rain landing on him.
The lens is the eye. The chase camera is where a kid lives, so that's where the weather lands. Drops hit the glass, grow as they swallow their neighbours, and slide down. Fly fast and they stop sliding down and start streaking backwards across the screen, the way rain does on a car window. Snowflakes land, sit for a few seconds, then melt into a wet spot that fades. When the rain stops, nothing new lands and the last drops run their course, so the glass is clean about eight seconds later. The HUD sits above all of it and stays dry.
Each island keeps its own sky. Frostmoor gets flurries and Palewind real snow. Fern Deep drizzles under mist and Cloudrest rains under cloud. The rest stay dry. Cross the water toward the snow islands and the flakes thicken as the shore comes up, instead of switching on at an invisible line. And rain never turns into snow mid-air; it stops, then the snow starts.
Heavy weather closes the sky. A downpour or a blizzard darkens the clouds, dims the sun, kills the hard shadows and thickens the fog. Storm Run on Palewind now runs under a real blizzard, and the wind that was already there has grown gusts. A gust hits fast, knocks your heading and banks the bird, and the camera jolts. It was going to whoosh too, but the whoosh sounded like someone blowing into a microphone, so the gusts are silent and the wind just swells a little. It reads better. You feel it before you hear it.
Two decisions that aren't really about weather. Ninety kilometres an hour is now the top speed a player will ever see; the three-hundred setting I'd been testing at is a developer toy. And there's a new Graphic details setting with three fixed steps and no auto mode. It drops the resolution and softens the effects on a slower machine, but it never touches how far you can see. What you can see is gameplay. A "low" on a desktop still sees as far as a desktop.
One confession. The first blizzard looked thin, and a count showed why: nearly all the flakes were being born above the top of the screen. The sky was full. The screen was not. The box the snow spawns in now hangs mostly below your eye level, which is where you're looking anyway.
Go stand in the rain. It's warm on this planet.