Crispy™ AAAfraid of darkness.

[octavius]

Ultima Underworld is set entirely in a sewer, and that game is pretty good.

It was set in The Abyss where some naive monk tried to establish a multi-cultural utopia. Naturally the multi-cultural experiment failed, and I guess you could call the result a sewer.

 

[dnf]

Shadow of chernobyl and Clear Sky unmodded have a good design for not producing sleep mechanics. Man up and go stalk at night.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

What do you think are the reasons for this? ? I dunno, i think even casuals would have liked a more dark approach.

no, it's simply that you can up your monitor's gamma value if you things are too dark and circumvent any design in that manner.

From what I've seen, changing gamma won't help with "real" darkness (the kind you need torches for). For example, the TES mods that remove invisibru light sources that felipepe mentioned - there is actually no light in some places, so changing the gamma will just give you a more grey tone of pitch black.

 

[AlexOfSpades]

Reminds me of Desu Ex: Human Revolution's completely lit air vents. What the fuck? They didnt even have a few lamps here and there, no, they were completely lit, bright as day.

 

[Gerrard]

One thing in that regard that really annoys me is the unexplainable ambient light everywhere, so stuff is never really dark. Skyrim is the biggest offender in that regard, the difference from a "dark area" of a cave and right next to a torch is almost none:

VANILLA:

Modded for only actual light sources:

The problem with that is simplistic modelling of light in games (i.e. complete lack of light bounce). The second shot is not realistic either.

See

Compared to

 

[dnf]

Reminds me of Desu Ex: Human Revolution's completely lit air vents. What the fuck? They didnt even have a few lamps here and there, no, they were completely lit, bright as day.

The excuse: his vision was augmented.

 

[dnf]

Gerrard is that stalker? the cigarretes on the ground is a giveaway.

 

[Luzur]

it is STALKER.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well if you're going to have magical cyber shades, they should let you see in the dark, no?

 

[Gerrard]

Gerrard is that stalker? the cigarretes on the ground is a giveaway.

Yes, with global illumination off and on.

 

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

Interestingly enough, Payday 2 actually does use complete darkness as a gameplay mechanic. In one mission, the police will keep turning off the power, which turns off the lights in a basement lab in which you need to look at various things to figure out what you're supposed to steal. Turning off the lights actually does result in pretty much pitch blackness, meaning that if you didn't take a tactical light on your gun, you'll have to leave the safety of the easily defensible basement and fight hordes of police to turn the power back on. Unfortunately, it's pretty much only used once (there's another mission where the cops keep turning off the lights, but there's plenty of ambient light so it doesn't matter.

 

[Silva]

Stalker CoP pitch black night spooked me the most. I remember thinking that Ive never saw a night like that in videogames.

(but I was using Misery mod, so I aint sure if vanilla is like that too)

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Miasmata literally has pitch black nights, and makeshift torches provide only the barest minimum of vision. Couple that with no GPS, a landscape that has lots of small-scale changes in elevation (so you can't navigate just by going up or down the slope you're on), the ability to hurt yourself by falling from heights (even relatively small ones), and a hostile wild animal roaming the land, and you have some pretty fucking scary nights. I still don't know how I made my way back to camp after picking up the luminous fungus, having completely lost my orientation before that.

 

[Gurkog]

Stalker CoP pitch black night spooked me the most. I remember thinking that Ive never saw a night like that in videogames.

(but I was using Misery mod, so I aint sure if vanilla is like that too)

Vanilla is like that. That is where I hear growls and howls nearby and shit my pants.

 

[Turjan]

In most games, day/night cycles are nothing but gimmicks. Given that a day cycle is most of the time very short, I prefer nights not to be too dark, as there's often not enough time to plan a stay at some safe place where you can sleep. There's only so much you can do in let's say 20 minutes, and I don't want to spend that time with organizational busywork.

Darkness in caves is a different thing. There I don't have problems with bringing light sources etc. However, I have the feeling that modern games use caves mostly because they are an easy way to confine the player to doing things the developer wants him to do, and the darkness is just an unwanted side effect of this.

 

[Metro]

Exactly. Without a gameplay reason behind it there isn't much point. It might be streamlining to obviate the need for a torch for something like Skyrim but it's not as if forcing someone to use a torch makes the game any better. It isn't the same as something like Amnesia where you have to manage your oil/tinder.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I think the first game where it's actually struck me that "this is not fucking night time, it's a goddamn cloudy day" was Arcania, and it also opened my perception to other stuff like this in different games.

It also pissed me off in Faggout: New Faggot (or at least during the two or so hours i played it), and many others that I can't be arsed to remember and list right now, but there's also some older stuff in it too. Funny that it was actually Arcania that turned that switch in my brian on, I suspect it was the jarring dissonance between its "nights", and the ones you'd find in the original Gothics - where everything was literally pitch black and suddenly the whole world would take on a lot more sinister mantle altogether. Going through the friggin forest between the old camp and the old mine in G1 was a completely different experience depending on the time of day.

 

[Metro]

I'm impressed you were able to play Arcania long enough to get to night time.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Gotta keep up the journalistic integrity (tm).

 

[ghostdog]

... though sound is actually more creepy than darkness in this game.

 

[Quilty]

Playing DayZ back when it was just gathering steam and logging in at night was a really scary experience. Now that was truly dark.

 

[Gord]

Although "pitch black" isn't exactly realistic either, most of the times.
It makes sense in inside areas, a forest at night or moonless, overcast nights, but nights with moonlight can get relatively bright in reality (of course even during full moon they are usually still darker than what we get in the average AAA).

If a game has (gameplay-affecting) dark nights, I expect it to give me tools to deal with them, integration into the game and a good lighting system on top. This made nights in Stalker so cool. Dynamic lighting and a somewhat useful flashlight not only help a lot with atmosphere, it also makes for more interesting gameplay.

On the other hand the big problem with darker night mods in e.g. Bethesda games is the bad lighting system used by those games - many times making nights darker also means making your lightsources darker, putting you into darkness with only a 0.5 meter dim glow acting as your light source*. Of course that's not fun, that's just tedium - nights don't become something dangerous, but which you can deal with given the right tools, but something you want to avoid simply because gameplay becomes shit (in before "And where is that different from broad daylight?" ).
That's why I prefer darkness in such games to be darker than vanilla levels, but not so dark to become pitch-black.
It was never meant to be more than cosmetics, so I would rather keep it that way (only better looking) than trying to transform it into something it can't be.

* of course you can e.g. mod it further to provide for better lightsources or other ways of dealing with the darkness.

 

[octavius]

On the other hand the big problem with darker night mods in e.g. Bethesda games is the bad lighting system used by those games

I hated the fact that light is not stopped by walls, but "bleeds" right through.

 

[Ebonsword]

There are many reasons for this but one that's not often mentioned is that modern LED TVs don't display solid blacks very well at all.

???

LED backlit displays usually have better black levels than non-LED displays.