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Why are developers so afraid of making night actually *dark*?

Ebonsword

Arcane
Joined
Mar 7, 2008
Messages
2,326
I started playing Arcania recently, and, while it has quite a few other flaws, the one that triggered me the most is that midnight with a cloudy sky is more like twilight.

Seriously, look at this:

rev_nightcastle_1280.jpg


But it's not like this game is the only one guilty of this. Night time in Skyrim is not too dissimilar:

-1921622453.jpg


And then there's Kingdoms of Amalur, which was so bad I sometimes couldn't tell if it was supposed to be night or not:

Night.jpg



Contrast this with Dragon's Dogma which used darkness to *fantastic* effect:

Dragons-Dogma-1.jpg



So, what the hell is wrong with developers? Do they *not* want their games to actually have some atmosphere? Or are they just afraid that the casuals will complain about not being able to see?
 

FeelTheRads

Arcane
Joined
Apr 18, 2008
Messages
13,716
Because it's usually just a gimmick that barely affects the gameplay if at all and it's annoying to not see just because of "immershun". It's one thing I'm happy they don't do. Sure, might as well just remove the day/night cycle completely if it doesn't do anything but eh.
 

octavius

Arcane
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just afraid that the casuals will complain about not being able to see

But I agree; how much more atmospheric games would be with proper darkness, moonlight, pitch dark dungeons etc.
 

Quillon

Arcane
Joined
Dec 15, 2016
Messages
5,214
Its their choice but I hate when modders overcompensate it with "darker nights" mods where we can't see shit. There aren't mechanics for it in the game; NPCs can still see us even tho its pitch black for us.
 

pippin

Guest
just afraid that the casuals will complain about not being able to see

Casuals do love "dark night" mods for Bethesda games, though. Pitch black nights should be relevant for uncharted places. I do not know how bright could be a 100% natural starry night sky, on the other hand. And even if you could see them right now, it's going to be difficult to imagine how nights looked in medieval times, for instance.
 

Gerrard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,927
just afraid that the casuals will complain about not being able to see

Casuals do love "dark night" mods for Bethesda games, though. Pitch black nights should be relevant for uncharted places. I do not know how bright could be a 100% natural starry night sky, on the other hand. And even if you could see them right now, it's going to be difficult to imagine how nights looked in medieval times, for instance.
Are you implying that the stars shined less brightly in medieval times or something? City lights are only relevant if there are clouds, and if there are clouds then the starlight is blocked by them. Just go a good distance away from urban areas.

On the contrary, I am fucking annoyed by developers who make nights pitch black even though you can see the stars and are in a rural are somewhere because OOH SCARY. And don't even get me started on full moon.

E: oh and also lack of blue tint. Uneducated twats.
 

pippin

Guest
re you implying that the stars shined less brightly in medieval times or something?

It's not that, it's just that back then they did not had light pollution caused by massive urban centers. So you will never know how the skies looked back then because your experience is reduced to what you know.
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
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Messages
5,624
So, what the hell is wrong with developers? Do they *not* want their games to actually have some atmosphere? Or are they just afraid that the casuals will complain about not being able to see?

A bit of both. You can circumvent dark nights with proper mechanics. But if that's too much work for you, it's easy to make things extremely visible at night. I always install lighting mods whenever possible, as they make the most drastic difference as to how a game looks. More often than not, however, "dark nights" mods usually suck.
 

Luckmann

Arcane
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Scandinavia
In addition to casualization and a fear of added complexity or content restriction, I want to mention that making proper night and light effects is probably actually quite hard - or at the very least, I've never seen _any_ game actually do nighttime or "high-resolution" darkness/light effects justice. It's hard for many, maybe even most, people in the western world to imagine just how pitch-black a dark night can actually be, and due to light pollution, most people rarely if ever experience true nighttime or real darkness beyond the bedroom or a closed closet, in which they are often blinded by whatever little light they actually have.

In reality, light travels far. Inconceivably far, even, and an unprotected campfire in the dead of the woods on a cloudy night (i.e. pitch-black) can be seen from a mindboggling distance, even if it's just a speck of light far away, and the surrounding light actually lights up a lot more than we realize when we're close to the fire or light and more or less look straight at it, because we're completely blinded by it, resulting in a very odd sort of light that is common in shitty darkness mods for Skyrim and similar games.

Seeing it well done in a game would actually be very interesting, but given the demands to do it justice, I wouldn't hold my breath. That being said, we can certainly do better than the current age of "Let's throw a blue filter on it and call it nighttime".

Edit: Also, fucking night-skies. Most developers seem to never have been outside of a zone of massive immediate light-pollution. A cloudless night gives a surprising amount of light and it's no wonder our ancestors venerated that shit. I pity people that live their lives entirely in urban areas and have never seen the magnificence of the universe unveiled. Explains why urbanites are generally so pre-occupied with the navel-gazing of their petty little lives and obsessing over inane shit that only relates immediately to themselves.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Not an RPG, but say hello to Thief: The Dark Project.

Then you'll be grateful for playing (absolute shit-tier games like) Arcania.
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
1. You're playing bad games
2. People want to be able to see all the purty shit at night, just like em movies
3. Yep
 
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
People like to see and it's really fucking hard to mimic true eyesight in darkness. Fucking strange shit that is.
 

Correct_Carlo

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If you live in the country, though, you know that night is rarely pitch black. If there's a full moon and it's clear, night isn't terribly different than that screen shot in the OP. When I'm at my parent's in the summer, you can sometimes read by the light of the moon.

A better solution, which I guess might be expensive in terms of GPU and more complicated to code, would just be treating the moon like a dynamic light source and letting its light phase in and out depending on time of night, month, and cloud cover. That would be more realistic as there would be periods of extreme darkness, but not at all times.
 

shihonage

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Contrast this with Dragon's Dogma which used darkness to *fantastic* effect:

Dragons-Dogma-1.jpg



So, what the hell is wrong with developers? Do they *not* want their games to actually have some atmosphere? Or are they just afraid that the casuals will complain about not being able to see?

I found a fantastic game for you, it's fantastic. It's called "Doom 3". We got the best games don't we folks
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
Joined
Feb 6, 2016
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5,624
I have these from a previous New Vegas playthrough. They are much more realistic than the pic in the OP, but they are, on the other hand, too dark. The last one in particular, now that I think about it, is cartoonishly dark: it's like the light suddenly cuts off and goes from BRIGHT to BLACK. Then again, New Vegas just doesn't have good lighting "mechanics" compared to Skyrim.

6dd0_JGg.jpg


EI6zmlw.jpg


dk1JBHx.jpg


Bc0wO5j.jpg
 

FeelTheRads

Arcane
Joined
Apr 18, 2008
Messages
13,716
People like to see and it's really fucking hard to mimic true eyesight in darkness. Fucking strange shit that is.

Yep, and if it's not part of the gameplay, like say in Thief or supposed to be scary in some horror game, then what's the point? Let's make it impossible to see because of immershun or realism. Yeah, great idea. Let's also make it so you go blind if you look into the sun. Such realism, very useful.
How do darker nights improve... what... NV? Nothing changes except you feel more cool for playing something "realistic".
 

UglyBastard

Arcane
Joined
Jun 29, 2014
Messages
821
Gothic 2 had good nights.

Yup, this immediately came to my mind when I read the thread title.
When traveling at night without a torch you could easily go the wrong way and end up in some terrible situation (e.g. running into some Shadow Beast that is actually hunting at night and sleeping during the day).

When night falls in Gothic 2 I usually just try to find a bed and sleep until the morning (unless I'm burgling in the city), which is actually pretty cool when you think about it. It makes sense. Even the vendors are going to bed or having a drink at the inn instead of selling their stuff.

It's just the attention to detail that permeates throughout the game.
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
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Feb 6, 2016
Messages
5,624
How do darker nights improve... what... NV? Nothing changes except you feel more cool for playing something "realistic".

Atmosphere. Simple as that. The game feels much nicer when it looks more realistic. And lighting plays a huge part in building up moods.
 

FeelTheRads

Arcane
Joined
Apr 18, 2008
Messages
13,716
Yeah, well, I skipped the nights in NV as they were because there was really no much point to bother with the low light.
If they were really dark you bet I would've been even more happy to skip them.
Hell, I was skipping the nights in the original Fallout games too. Why would I even bother to play during the night? The visibility was shit, stores were closed etc. No benefit at all. K, maybe some stuff could happen only at night... big deal.

Making caves or dungeons or whatever dark and make that part of the gameplay (needing light sources etc), that's something else.
 

Helton

Arcane
Joined
Jan 29, 2007
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Starbase Delta
If darkness has a gameplay impact then you are encouraging player to crank gamma. Perverse incentive.
 

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