Greetings, glorious adventurers! If you're joining in our Alpha One spot testing, please follow the steps here to see all the latest test info on our forums and Discord!
Options
Importance of the night in Ashes.
Sarkgp
Member
The first thing is to apologize if the text is not well written, English is not my language. I would like to know what you think of the night and how you would like it to work.
In my case, I would like the night to have an impact on the world, perhaps that certain corrupted enemies could appear or simply that the enemies of the world were stronger. This would make sense of the cycle of night and day and make him feel more dangerous.
It could even affect the corruption system by making karma accumulate slower at night, this would make the night scary due to the number of possible PK's and the strength of the mobs.
In my case, I would like the night to have an impact on the world, perhaps that certain corrupted enemies could appear or simply that the enemies of the world were stronger. This would make sense of the cycle of night and day and make him feel more dangerous.
It could even affect the corruption system by making karma accumulate slower at night, this would make the night scary due to the number of possible PK's and the strength of the mobs.
0
Comments
Various enemies, resources, npcs, natural events, etc should behave differently at night.
That would be the best for immersion and for gameplay.
so don't bother trying to make us use torches or something only for visibility - it needs to be buff/debuff related
Rather local events, mirroring the fight of the Seven vs the Others and maybe some other human-divine interactions. And should be short time and not very often.
The day-night could influence
- the rogue stealth abilities and trap detection maybe / perception skills
- direction of wind near shore or near mountains too
- animal behavior (could be important for tamers)
Edit: but could be both local events and a day night variation too, to some degree each. And where they would overlap, you could have spikes of very dangerous or very safe zones for 1-2 hours.
I don't like the idea of night-time lasting too long either, I think an accelerated day and night time would be good, day time lasts 3-4 hours, night time might last 1 hour, it doesn't need to be realistic. I believe it was mentioned by Steven that weather could affect lifeskills and gatherables as well so day/night could also possibly.
FFXIV 1.0 > ARR this was suggested. It's been a want for everyone. Then came BDO & we were told it was a thing including Dark nights. Well it wasn't, Except for the dark nights, it was pitch black on KR & for a few days on NA & then the nights were nerfed to the point you didn't even need the lantern due to complaints to grey.
I myself would still love to see night spawns, & some harder/buffed mobs - Not everymob, at night. But no lanterns & really dark nights. We tried dark nights & it failed hard to the point players boycotted it sitting in towns or logging out.
As a Bard, if I see you coming from 20 seconds away, I start the fight buffed and we have a fair fight when you attack me. If I see you from 5 seconds away, I just die.
Bards are balanced around having their buffs active. If I have time to see an attacker coming and buff myself, I am significantly stronger (i.e. actually equal to that attacker). If I don't, I have to fight without the significant buffs my class is balanced around having.
I'm all for a real, good cosmetic day/night cycle with lighting effects, but I need night to not nerf my class specifically. Sure it'll hurt everyone a bit, but Bard by nature has to spend time buffing in advance in order to match the other classes power. Stopping me from doing that is a major nerf.
Different buffs, animations, mobs, resources, area access, harder difficulty, etc. at night would be interesting. Aww shit, ghost ships! Sign me up for that.
The biggest question for me is how to balance darkness between the server and client configuration. I’m not an engineer, but I’d be fascinated to see how the team would approach finding a solid compromise.
Love the ideas about mobs changing with night cycles, different buffs / debuffs.
@SongRune - valid point in the Bard. I imagine the mage would probably be in that boat too. But there’s a part of me (unfortunately not a small part), that sees the other side of the coin - night provides advantages to players that set an appropriate ambush. Dark nights also provide cover for gatherers and caravans. There are a number of potential tools for players that could help mitigate the darkness - spells, varying sizes of lanterns, light emitting pets (like a giant lightning bug), and - my favorite - different spectrums of vision.
I think the big dependency is what level of server/client darkness is possible…
I agree that darkness effects of that type make for interesting ambush style gameplay, the problem is that the effects reach far beyond that. If I was escorting a caravan, I would be singing the whole time, keeping my buffs up and ready. I'd do this in the daytime too. But it's not something that makes sense to do while I'm fishing, gathering, exploring, etc. If nothing else than because the time I spend sustaining my buffs is time a Fighter would spend gathering more materials. This sort of effect ultimately says to Bards "you don't get to play the game for the same amount of time that a Fighter would, and you don't get the economic or other benefits of doing so." Whether that's because time spent singing is time not spent gathering, or whether it's because it's simply not safe to go out at night, the result is the same. An inescapable economic debuff specific to one class.
Lanterns, glow bugs, or vision potions solve this to some degree, but that just brings us into EITHER the realm of maintenance buffs (which certain classes need more, and therefore need to spend money on more frequently) or negating the impact of the darkness as a whole by giving long-term solutions to it.
If mitigating it requires no effort or cost, then the 'darkness debuff' isn't real. If it does, then as long as it hurts some players significantly more or less than others, some players have to spend more money, or more effort to mitigate it than others, giving those who do not a pure economic advantage over those who do.
You can't have this type of effect, and have it be fair. The best you get is adding another convoluted system that ultimately just negates this one, at which point you might as well not have it in the first place.
Dark nights should be cosmetic. Real visibility impacts can't be balanced, but there are other options to make the night more difficult or interesting. Intrepid should focus on changes to mob behavior with the day/night cycle instead. These can bring interest and dynamism, while affecting all players equally.
There are other ways to integrate night into various different systems that do not impact the base game experience for others in an unbalanced way. Perhaps at night, monsters wander closer to the road in some areas, creating points where caravan defenders face other threats, and ambushers can close in while they're weakened. This sort of thing can provide opportunities for ambush style gameplay which is similar, if not exactly the same, as darkness might, and that's just one quick idea off the top of my head. There are lots of ways to make night matter that don't unbalance the game.
I'm not looking for total darkness, although I would like that if I enter a cave at night I would need to cast a light spell to see, also making you feel more vulnerable by making it easier for other players to locate you.
Even so, the thread deals with the functionalities that the night itself can bring, beyond the light configuration.
Different behavior of Npcs, higher difficulty and danger would make many players prefer to spend the night in the city doing other quieter things rather than venturing into pure darkness.
For me in a world full of corruption... this would make sense.
I would also like to see different mobs out after dark that require different tactics/challenges for players to overcome.
I was actually thinking the other day about one specific thing that makes this LESS realistic in certain ways.
A screen is just one form of input.
As humans we experience 'sound', 'air pressure', heat, and scent, in a way that 'highlights' things in our surroundings for us. I think we might even have some fairly precise subconscious echolocation that we just don't use (quickfire Google search confirms what I remember, and it even 'activates the vision part of the brain' for spatial awareness).
For various reasons in my youth I did actually wander around in 'pitch black areas', and I 'remember that feeling' of 'ok I have an idea of what's around me'. So in some ways, even if you made the night 'very dark', the thing you would need is 'falloff' in terms of visibility/sense data. The screen is all we get, so it has to convey all those things your other senses do.
tl;dr - The night/caves being pitch dark may be realistic visually but not realistic to how humanoids, especially slightly magical trained humanoids, would experience night. I, for example, prefer VERY weak lights when it's dark because it interferes with my other sense-reliance less.
Night should look great from a artistic stand point, not from a I can't see anything because its night now. Or I can only see in a aoe of the lamp on me to see anything.
Only time you shouldn't be able to see anything and its true night is if it is part of some gameplay mechanic for a boss or something.
Imagine ranger at night lmfao