Brofisted, but I should point out that we've been complaining about the focus on daytime (sunny daytime at that) since before the game was released last year, and following its release were quick to note that darkness in Cyberpunk 2077 lasts only about 6 hours despite this being a physical impossibility for Night City's location:
Yeah, I know it's an old complaint, it just frustrated me enough to want to exclude any geographic excuse. The more you play, the worse it gets. And yes, I know what the solution is...
Right now, the way it works is that night time proper, as in fully dark, starts towards 10pm and ends by 3am. So you've got roughly five hours, really. One in-game hour in Cyberpunk takes like 7 real-life minutes, which means that for every half hour of
Night City you get to enjoy, you've gotta put up with
two and a half hours of Hawaiian Shirt City.
Their aesthetics are very good IMO. But it certainly wouldn't hurt to have significant - and at the very least proportionate amount of night/rain.
Here's the problem, though - CDPR's artitic direction remains superlative, some of the best in the industry, it's just that Cyberpunk's vibe is...
off. At least relative to what I (and others, obviously) expected in the genre. It's why I keep going on about night time, weather, the Walled City of Kowloon, street width, alleyways and overhangs etc. A cyberpunk metropolis should be an oppressive character in and of itself, visually ominous, but Night City's imagery rarely
"looms" over you, it rarely gives you that impression of a gaping maw about to swallow you whole. It's got the consumerist thing down pat, but not the dread.
Incidentally, there are a couple of instances when the game does hit those notes. Here's one example with Johnny's flashback of when Alt gets kidnapped, you'll note this alley behind the bar, with its lighting and clutter, has a rather different mood than most of NC in 2077:
But for the most part - that dress looks great on you, babe, but it's out of season.
Has nobody modded a good flashlight into the game yet? Or a night vision mod for your artificial eyes? How could they forget to include this in the base game in the first place!
There's this
Simple Flashlight mod that seems to do the job. I haven't tried it, used to be an inventory item replacer, but it looks like it's been updated to work on a scripted hotkey, might be worth checking out. And yes, it
is dumb the devs didn't throw one in there. You've got working headlights on cars,
you can even toggle between dipped and high beams, but no personal flashlight.