It is dark in here.

In the game, you have 2 senses (more if you take in account the fact that you can select a target in the dark), like when you are driving a car in the most cases.

 

It would be nice if your skill in the light spell, which a lot of people cap at 20, would have an effect on the brightness. Sure, maybe 20 should be darker than a torch, but if I've dumped enough points into light, there shouldn't be tradeoff on the brightness just because I am not holding a torch.

 

If this continues, it will likely be a dealbreaker for me. Not because it makes me incapable of playing the game, but because it makes me no longer enjoying my time in the game.

I don't mind darkness in a single player game, but ambient light is really important to me in an mmo. Being autistic, I'm already at a disadvantage from not being able to easily process both visual and verbal information at the same time. Increasing the level of visual challenge makes it that much harder for me to play and socialize at the same time, and if I can only do one or the other then there's no reason (for me) to be in an mmo at all versus other, better options more dedicated to either play or social experience. Here, what appeals to me is the blend, and the diminishment of light threatens that blend.

To be specific, it's not the level of illumination that bothers me - I can adjust to that - but the limited distance factor which ends up producing multiple areas of varying light and darkness levels on the screen at once, which my eyes aren't successfully adjusting to and is very limiting to my gameplay. Plus, as others have mentioned, one of my pleasures in gaming is enjoying the scenery, which is completely negated by not being able to see the scenery.

So I won't say what 'should' be done because these are personal enjoyment factors and others may have equally valid but opposite enjoyment fsctors that the darkness facilitates. But I can say this is so detrimental to my enjoyment that I don't have a compelling reason to keep playing under these circumstances unless something really great is coming up to compensate for it, like huge improvements to crafting or npc interactions that make staying in town more fun if you don't want to go out in the dark.

 

The night is dark and full of terrors.

 

Really it has a only a .4 more density than iron. It cannot and will not do more damage. (part of my engineering background is metallurgy). That is why when they found out you can turn iron mix iron with carbon. Which produces a far superior weapon, they stopped using copper for weapons.

 

My light also seems to go on the person in front of me or my pet. Even when I am alone, I still can't see. I thought that I was going blind.

 

If I were to walk into a wall, I would feel it. In SotA, you wouldn't know it was happening; you wouldn't even see your own character.

They're going to have to do a lot better (better than any video game) with the audio if you think I should use my hearing to navigate an environment. Even that wouldn't be enough.

Don't use "realism" as an argument when you know clearly well that the game isn't equipped to accommodate it. No game ever was; that's why night scenes are usually better lit. It's also more interesting to look at something rather than pure blackness. Even horror games don't do this.

If I'm only supposed to see/play when I'm outside in broad daylight, then the only thing horrifying about all this is the game itself.

 

Really need a proper gamma / brightness adjustment in the game - if people use it or not, is up to them.

 

That's an interesting part of our history indeed. Copper use ended with the Age of Bronze. And what you are describing is the making of steel, if I'm correct. But things are a bit more complicated I think. In fact, iron was already well known in the early Antiquity. I heard somewhere that the early iron produced was spongy, and was actually inferior to good bronze weapons. Also bronze was more resistant to oxydation and didn't rust (because rust is reserved for iron as you know it perfectly). As far as I know, the reason that these inferior weapons replaced bronze at that time was mainly that bronze was much more expensive since it involved shipping tin. Bronze was economicaly inferior to iron. And, yes, bronze is shattering when it breaks while iron is more likely to get dented or chipped. But few weapons had this problem as many soldiers used... polearms and no full plate/chain armors.

That said, as I told you, I never defended that choice anyway. I was just thinking about it, striking obviouslinesses. And you begin with the idea that I think everything must be realistic, which is wrong. I said that trying to complain all the time about some aspect of the game which help with its depth is a bad choice. Night and day is meaningful in this game. And I'm glad that it is. Because I don't want a boring game where everyone activate the option to have full time day just because there would be balance issues not to do so. You have many games which delete every single thing that a player could find annoying. Are those games good ? I don't think so. You don't like darkness ? Use a torch. You don't like torches ? Use spells.

 

I thought there was one? I'd look but I'm working ehehe.

Edit to add: I do quite love the atmosphere in-game. The dark shadowy-ness of the night and in crypts etc is mesmerizing! However, our light sources do need to cut through the dark, for sure.

 

The lighting in this game is so awful because there is some kind of non-linear crushing where anything that isn't very bright is significantly darkened. A sort of anti-gamma.

There is a setting in OS X to change your gamma, but when I do it to the point where I can see well enough, the original dynamic range of the image was so crushed that it's all washed out and solarized.

Even worse, on at least some versions of OS X and GPUs, it is even more dark. For a few releases, I could see the entire screen shift darker during the 50% loading stage when entering the first zone after logging in, then I could see the screen shift lighter at a 50% loading stage when logging out. That seems to be gone, but in a few areas (particularly Owl's Head and Desolis), the screen goes darker during camera rotation, whether from mouselook or the square bracket keys. (Haven't tried it in R44 yet though.)

Even on my good PC, I still have the TV set up extra bright to get somewhat normal looking lighting.

I think part of the problem is when devs are sitting in unlit rooms with monitors that maybe were even cranked up but they forgot, and it looks fine to them.

 

I haven't had time to try this but you may be able to make adjustments to the game in the NVidia control panel. I do remember creating custom settings in the past for specific games but that was years ago. Modern games usually do a pretty good job of including enough user adjustable settings so the game displays properly on a variety of hardware.

 

Yep. If it was not for my NVidea control panel, I would be making a fool of myself on this topic. I just right click on my desktop, choose adjust color settings from the NVidea gump and raise brightness to 82. I also have Alienware but have not bothered with the gaming set ups. There you can have your computer automatically adjust to your preferred settings whenever you start up various games. With regards to gamma.... this is a very difficult setting to change that doesn't compromise something else you don't want changed. For me, just the video card brightness setting is adequate to avoid the extreme dark in SOTA.

 

I will try that when I get home and tomorrow morning when I am back on my laptop. Forgot about NVIDIA card.

 

@neveser Ahh.. I didn't think of trying the NV control panel! Nice!

 

I adjusted my settings outside of the game to combat this a while ago - makes reading websites and watching video difficult

 

Do we have a moon that goes through phases? If so, does it change the illumination level at night? Because if they are going for realism, and we have full moons, those should be bright enough you don't need a light spell.

 

The moon phases to make a difference, IIRC, but I'm not sure both moons are bright enough that you don't need a spell.

 

Also, the human eye takes 40 fully minutes to adjust to darkness, but starts immediately. Unless it's a zero illumination night, that means we should be able to see fairly well in under 1 minute of game time. If we're trying to be realistic.

 

Honestly, the way a light spell should work is that you cast it, and you get daylight-levels of light or near daylight-levels of light.

In gaming, there's no good reason to be stingy with it.

Make the player have to cast it for a limited period, have it go out, if it's still night time, the lights go out and the player has to re-cast it. You can add some effects to that light to let the player know it's still night time and you're just using light, but it should never, ever, be "here's a little bit of campfire-level light". That does not make for fun gaming.

Before Night Sight was implemented, this is actually exactly what I thought Night Sight was going to be, and to be honest, it almost is - except for that incandescent green effect which ruins it. I can only imagine that whoever decided to make that the effect and to keep it in the game did not use it for any reasonable amount of time that a typical rogue would be required to.

Torchlight should be a weaker light level than magical light. I don't know a great way to balance this - maybe durations and easy crafting.