Weather and Immersion

I hope everyone is enjoying the Rift headstart and its been nice and smooth unlike many other mmo launches. I will wait till the 1st to play; I was able to get my sound card to work and have been trying to get my games to work on Steam. It all seems much smoother and more stable which is great.

I'm VERY disappointed though with the new game Dungeons: it just plain won't work. It constantly says there are critical errors when loading maps; I haven't been able to play one map/scenario yet. I'm currently re-downloading the game and hoping it works after that; otherwise i'll have to contact Steam to remove it and get a refund b/c I don't want to pay for games that are poorly designed.

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Anyways, lets talk about weather and it's role in immersion.
Not only weather effects, but having these effects take different forms.

Ie. Heavy Rain
Don't just decrease visibility in a circle around your character, but in a certain moving area. Make there times where you can literally see the rain ahead of you and able to walk in and out of the storm. Being in the storm will decrease visibility or possibly cause a debuff to you or the monsters in the area (or even give them buffs).

That was one thing that was interesting with Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii (that i wished was on the American 360); the game had weather effects of both cold and heat, needed potions to be resistant to it's effects and travel normally. In the dark, it was pitch black without a torch and even then, it wasn't very easy to navigate making it extra tense when monsters were waiting for you.