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

[Shinji]

In Dragon's Dogma if you turn off your lantern during the night, you can actually see the night sky better. That's a pretty nice detail if you ask me.
They were really aiming to make nighttime at least feel different in this game.

 

[Maggot]

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

It would have been better with more hell segments which also just happens to be the areas with the coolest use of lighting.

 

[skyst]

The last time that I played F:NV, I had a ton of mods, one of which altered the lighting similarly to the images shown on the first page. I also used the mod (Project Nevada? I could be mistaken) that implemented various vision modes for ranger helmets, power armor, etc, one of the options being night vision. I think some weapons had night vision scopes too, which is true to Fallout "lore" as well - F2 had an FN FAL w/night vision scope. The vision restriction made the exploration of the World of Pain (the best F:NV content mod) content much more fun, fuck the haters.

 

[deuxhero]

Dragon's Dogma and STALKER have already been mentioned in this thread.

Arma 3 had fun nights. In the original campaign traveling around at night with NVGs and a thermal scope while stealthly picking off enemy patrols and taking their shit to arm my resistance fighters was fun. The ability to drive a car just by NVG so you avoid making yourself a blatant target by running the lights (at the cost of limited view distance and FoV) is something more games need.

In a fan-made ARMA 3 mission after a mission to kill some dudes at an airport (itself an interesting fight) a random APC patrol (not scripted, just random enemy patrol) parked out front and cut me off from my car. Lacking heavy weaponry and determining there was no way to lure in into some mines the dead enemies were carrying, I had to ditch my car and run into the jungle, then hike my way back to base. The tedium soon turned into an interesting experience when night fell shortly into my journey. This left me with two options: Travel on the to road (which is somewhat vaguely visible due to being in the open, but not enough to see any real distance. Also being spoted by an enemy at 4x speed mode is certain death) and be easy pickings for patrolling enemies, or feel my way around around the jungle and risk falling off a cliff I can't see.

Would be better you could actually hold activated chemlights (which I had) instead of just throwing them and had varying grades of NVG (there are only 3 NVGs in the unmoded game. Two are functionally the same and the third, added by the expansion pack, has heat vision as well. Also despite being the 2030s NVG is all greenscale even though we've had greyscale NVG, addable to even cheap Gen 1 stuff, since 2010 and color, albeit strangely saturated, NVG has working prototypes now).

Just play Skyrim with some immurshun mods:

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

I'm not impressed, find yourself some rags.

 

[Severian Silk]

In JA2 I think caves were 100% black if you didn't have infrared goggles.

 

[Gentle Player]

I liked how in Ultima VII it wasn't just the environment that was darkened at night but also the inventory bag and map. The flaming sword could also be used as a torch. Nice little touches that really added to the feel of things.