Originally Posted by Seagoon
Ok, so if I have missed all these vital points you have been making, why dont you enlighten me?
Post them for all to see and discuss (that is what this thread is for right?).
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How can I resist an opportunity to rewrite everything I've already said in a thread before? Why, I just can't, I'll tell ya plainly.
Okay, so first, some terminology. Just off the cuff, let's define the two kinds of night time/otherwise dark areas that you typically see in vidja games.
First one, let's call it "real darkness". Real darkness attempts to simulate the kind of darkness we simple folk experience on moonless nights with no snow cover, where you can't see more than a handful of metres ahead of you with any real clarity, and distances of a hundred metres or more are indiscernible.
Real darkness is used in games in order to create very tense atmospheres, and/or to simulate realistic circumstances. The former instance is best portrayed by games like Amnesia, the "and" by games like Metro, the "or" by games like ArmA or Ghost Recon, where it's dark but you can use night vision and stuff to essentially negate it in most cases.
The second kind of dark I'll call "soft darkness". Soft darkness is used for mood/ambiance/atmosphere but has very limited gameplay effects. This is the kind of darkness we see most often in games. There's really a laundry list to choose from, but good examples are Diablo 3, Teamfortress 2, Hal-Life 2, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, and Skyrim.
Soft darkness is used when you want night time, and the "feel" of night time, but you're not making one of the aforementioned games in which real darkness is appropriate. So you're not making a scary game, you're not making a scary/realistic game, or you're not making a realistic game. Games with soft darkness tend to be more accessible to players overall, and being out at night is not meant to in itself be a serious impediment to gameplay.
With that said, which is appropriate for Planetside 2? Are they making a game about scary, dark places? Maybe they're making a really tense shooter that's all about gritty realism? Or maybe the game will be about accurately portraying warfare in the year something-something?
No! No to all of it. Planetside 2 is a quasi-realistic shooter, just like Planetside 1 was. Real darkness in this case has no place. For the kind of game that Planetside games are, having darkness be a real impediment to gameplay is totally inappropriate.
Oh, and I guess I'll also say: One time I played a game and it was dark and I didn't like it. Or whatever you claim I've been saying this whole time. Even though I actually really like dark games and always get the "darker nights" mods for Fallout 3/NV/Skyrim/Stalker/etc. It's just that it isn't right for the kind of game Planetside 2 is going to be.
Final thought. I'm not saying that night should be the exact same brightness as day. It can even be dark enough that people could benefit from having night vision, flash lights, etc. Dark enough that a cloaker could move more easily without being seen. But if it's so dark that people can't effectively engage at long range even without some kind of illumination attachment, where people would
have to rely on some kind of illuminating equipment to see what the hell is going on like in real darkness,
that is what I'm saying is inappropriate. Again, dig the examples I've provided. There are times in Skyrim where having a torch helps, in HL2 where using your flash light is useful. But you're never blind without these tools, and you can always see fairly well. That's what this game needs to do.
2012-02-03, 07:13 PM
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