Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

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

pippin

Guest
Pitch dark night? I'd wish they'd start with dungeons. Ever been in a cave, mine or cellar without lightsource? Yeah, it's black. In games however most dungeons are anything but. And some of the AAA games do it worst. Skyrim dungeons actually have torches burning everywhere. Even when the place is supposed to be utterly deserted for ages. Screw that.

Well, you had to use Light magic to see inside dungeons in Might and Magic games. Otherwise it was complete darkness. Like in the first one for instance.
 

Maggot

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 31, 2016
Messages
1,243
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire
Might and Magic 6 had pretty dark nights.
Doom 3 gameplay was designed around pitch black darkness, flashlight and jump scares, wasn't it? That's the little I remember from playing it eons ago.
Doom 3 really isn't that dark after replaying it. It's pretty dim but any area where you're fighting enemies has light sources scattered around aside from one or two areas in the entire game and in those areas enemies give off light with attacks and have glowing eyes in the dark. The dark spots usually just had secrets in them.
 
Joined
Jan 12, 2012
Messages
4,065
As shitty as Ubisoft is, Far Cry Primal has decent nights (at least in the higher difficulty, survivor mode or whatever). If you are in foggy wooded areas there isn't much light, and seeing the eyes of the predators glowing is kind of nice.

STALKER: Clear Sky with some mods gave some serious enjoyment in the early swamp, trying to hunt down a group of bandits in total dark with a shitty pistol (and a Bloodsucker somewhere in the area). The dumbfuck bandits had flashlights in their heads.
 

RatTower

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Apr 24, 2017
Messages
468
I think one of the main reasons is art direction.
If you spend years making all these fancy assets you want players to see them.
And night scenes give the artists lots of freedom to actually try out different lighting styles, giving all those assets a new look.
FF14 actually did that pretty well.

FFXIV_Gridania_Night-3.jpg


eb7eed1b69dee7a0b0da7e7bd30ec693267f89d5.jpg


The same goes for a lot of underground/dungeon areas.
Technically lots of those should be pitch-black (and some are, like old Ultima Online dungeons, or the Tomb of Giants in Dark Souls).
And in some games the players could basically "light" them up themself by carrying a torch or something.

But it just doesn't look as nicely as having various light sources.
 

the_shadow

Arcane
Joined
Dec 30, 2011
Messages
1,179
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.

I live in a country town and just peeked out my window (11.00pm). The lighting in the images you posted is similar to what is looks like outside (real dark), even though there's the occasional street/house light. While having a full moon with no cloud cover can provide quite a bit of lighting at night, I think Fallout: New Vegas or Dragon's Dogma has more realistic night-times.
 

Delterius

Arcane
Joined
Dec 12, 2012
Messages
15,956
Location
Entre a serra e o mar.
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.

I live in a country town and just peeked out my window (11.00pm). The lighting in the images you posted is similar to what is looks like outside (real dark), even though there's the occasional street/house light. While having a full moon with no cloud cover can provide quite a bit of lighting at night, I think Fallout: New Vegas or Dragon's Dogma has more realistic night-times.
This is also my experience living in the country, but I've never been in the middle of the woods during night time. Couldn't it be that this level of darkness is a byproduct of being close to limited light sources? This is likely to be the case in every game you play, but I'm genuinely curious.
 
Last edited:

Johannes

Arcane
Joined
Nov 20, 2010
Messages
10,487
Location
casting coach
Spiderweb's older games had dark caves. So you had to use a lamp or Light spell. I also recall a dungeon where those explicitly didn't work and you had to wander around blind (you could see 1 tile in front of you when without light source).

That's been removed in his new shit though, along with the Day/Night cycle...
 

Fargus

Arcane
Joined
Apr 2, 2012
Messages
2,350
Location
Moscow
Its good to have realism, really dark nights are atmospheric and all, but my eyes get tired real quick when its too dark in game, and i personally dislike the hustle of carrying and using torches\flashlights.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
Can't remember where I read this but supposedly consoles have a lot to do with this. TVs are often poorly calibrated and having the TV further from the eyes than a monitor makes it much harder to recognize stuff in the dark. So some publishers force devs to make things bright, and from there it becomes the "ideal" that people are used to and everyone else copies it.
 

Carrion

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jun 30, 2011
Messages
3,648
Location
Lost in Necropolis
Can't remember where I read this but supposedly consoles have a lot to do with this. TVs are often poorly calibrated and having the TV further from the eyes than a monitor makes it much harder to recognize stuff in the dark. So some publishers force devs to make things bright, and from there it becomes the "ideal" that people are used to and everyone else copies it.
I think that was one of the reasons behind Thiaf having that dumb blue filter instead of proper shadows.
 

Robespierre

Madame Guillotine
Patron
Joined
Mar 28, 2017
Messages
424
Location
It's Kitten Time at the GreatCrystalShrine
Make the Codex Great Again!
Spiderweb's older games had dark caves. So you had to use a lamp or Light spell. I also recall a dungeon where those explicitly didn't work and you had to wander around blind (you could see 1 tile in front of you when without light source).

That's been removed in his new shit though, along with the Day/Night cycle...

To be fair there is at least one dark dungeon - located near the Tower of Magi or so - where light sources don't work in Avernum : Escape from the pit.
 
Joined
Jan 4, 2014
Messages
795
Outdoors is rarely pitch black or even significantly dark at night assuming the moon is out and you're in an area where most of the stars in the sky are visible.
Yeah, but a forest in autumn during a new moon when there's no snow yet can be pretty damn dark.

Darkness can have a huge influence on gameplay, especially in RPGs. It can provide an environmental challenge that can be combated with torches, spells and magic items. It affects how easily you spot your enemies and how easily they can spot you, which should be critical for especially thieves and rogues. It can affect your perception of the battlefield and add a level of uncertainty to combat encounters. It can force you to adapt and change the setup of your character(s), for example switching to a single-handed weapon in order to be able to carry a torch, or equipping a melee weapon instead of a ranged one (or vice versa, if you have the means to see in darkness but your enemies don't). Darkness is good and should be used more in cRPGs. It's always a shame when a game gives you torches, infravision spells, night-vision goggles etc. and never actually makes you use them.

Why some of you want more hassle in your games I've no idea. It's the same as encumbrance & ammo. It's a game, it should be fun. If you want hassle and work-like aspects put a few more hours in at work and have kids.
Please jump off a cliff.
If the game is playable at night, sure. I thoguht I liked night in games, especially in early Everquest, until I played Wurm Online and found msyelf cranking up gamma. But then I asked msyelf WHY? Because it's hard to play the game at night as a noob and at that stage in the game I didn't have a good home yet. Once you have a good home, you can rely on it and light up where needed with noob-craftable stuff. The point is if a game gives you ways to play it in the dark it can work very well and indeed add to the atmosphere. It feels GREAT to stand around a campfire with your friends crafting in the firelight with a dark foreboding world surrounding. The dark amplifies the companionship and homeliness. This feeling can't be reproduced without a dark dangerous world surrounding. It makes you appreciate the security because you know it's not pretend.

I live in the country and we've never had light pollution here. I can say on moonlit nights it's far from ptich black, but it's still not nearly as easy to see as in Two Worlds nighttime. Those comparing RL daytime to RL moonlit nightime should stop. On starlit nights without the moon, it's still fairly dark, but not pitch black yet. The only time it's pitch black is in the forest. Forests.... those are so dark it's eery. Cloudy nights are paradoxically brighter than you'd expect if there's a full moon behind them. Lets not make excuses, we all know why RPGs typically have brighter nights than RL. It's because designers usually aren't creative enough to make a nighttime playable AND dark.

EDIT: Wurm Online might be brighter now, but it was/is one of the few MMO's with actual nights AND danger. With corpse runs and limited speed and damage from slopes and no real-time GPS maps, travel at night IS dangerous. Of course, if you had to play that way persistently you'll end up turning up gamma like I did. But in all truth I played for several months without it. I also eventually turned it back to normal when I came back the next year. And did I say the caves are DARK too? You need lanterns or light sources in them. Typically you spend your time in lived-in places though, so you know where to go and there's almost no danger from creatures--meaning even if it's dark it's not a obstacle.

Oh and even with gamm turned up it was still hard to see... not like the bright screenshots I see in this thread.
 
Last edited:

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
Location
Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
Even though I love realistic lighting or day/night depiction in games, I ALWAYS end up skipping the night if the game gives me option to. Not cause I'm scared, but it's just annoying as fuck to play at night in-game, while in real life, your eyes adjust to the darkness. Not to mention, there usually is no point in going at night other than being a retard who likes to run around in artificial darkness.
There may be all sorts of gameplay considerations involved.

In STALKER:SoC certain artifacts only appeared at night, NPCs may (should!) have reduced visual perception in the darkness which may be conductive to stealthy approaches, NPC schedules and in-game events may also have gameplay significance.

A little pet peeve. Most games don't even get the moon right. If that is reflected sunlight, then where is the sun supposed to be in that scene?
Not that anybody cares.
Skyrim is even more special in this regard than most other games:
tumblr_lxdwroO0Ln1qe86h3.jpg

:prosper:

Interestingly, I don't think Morrowind had this kind of problems.

Can't say I enjoy burning torches and fires in supposedly uninhabited dungeons either - if you have a tomb full of undead, then it should either be dark as fucking grave or feature some other sources of illumination - either unnatural or wholly natural (light seeping in from outside through damaged portions, glowy fungi, etc.).
 

eXalted

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
1,213
Just play Skyrim with some immurshun mods:

7JIEUL0.png


(actually the pixels still have information in them and are not burned completely black)
 
Last edited:

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,164
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.

Most mods of that type i've seen will add the needed mechanics themselves.
 

*-*/\--/\~

Cipher
Joined
Jul 10, 2014
Messages
909
Funny how people complain that they are 'skipping' the night anyway... it's called fucking sleeping, a pretty natural thing to do you know. Instead of bitching that the stores are closed and you can't see.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,164
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

Doom 3 would have been great, shadows and everything, if only it had been an actual horror game.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,164
I confess i'm a faggot and i love realistic nights and the immershun that comes from that. I used a realistic night mod in both Morrowind and Stalker and i'd would install that shit in most games if it fit as well as it did in those two. Bite me.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom