Importance of the night in Ashes.

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.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Ironhope

The night should be dark af making players adapt their style of playing (skill use, item use, group roles, etc).

Various enemies, resources, npcs, natural events, etc should behave differently at night.

That would be the best for immersion and for gameplay.

TheDarkSorcerer

Love this idea! But I would suggest this would only be in certain areas of the map. Not everywhere. I love the beauty of nighttime, and I can only imagine with Ashes UE5 lighting this will look incredibly with the moon light shining through the trees. The nighttime glow from plants and little firebugs flying around. Would love to enjoy the nighttime environment in peace. But open to having these dangerous encounters in certain areas only.

Liniker

I support this idea of night time being more dangerous- however it should 100% be in regards to buffs/debuffs on our characters and NPCs and bosses and Not just visibility - because gaming monitors can have profiles set up that with 1 click you can bypass the darkness real easy... or using filters, and there is absolutely no way you can detect or ban this

so don't bother trying to make us use torches or something only for visibility - it needs to be buff/debuff related

Strevi

Sarkgp wrote: »

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.

I would like a karma variation but not sure if related to day-night cycle over the entire map.
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.

Heartbeat

AoC showed off some of their weather effects with season already that look very nice but I don't believe night time has been touched really. Hopefully night time feels legitimately dark, rather than just how some games do it by putting a grayish looking film over everything and calling it dark. But forcing the use of torches or some spell to emit light doesn't feel like the kind of night I would want to experience, i'm hoping there will be a good in-between of a very dark, low-visibility environment but not one so dark I can't see where I am or what im doing without some external source.

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.

WHIT3ROS3

I'd love to see spawning animations of Zombies clawing their way out from the ground (and other undead spooky bois) which happen at night. It would also be really cool to have certain areas that are really dark and require you to use a torch.

prymortal

Heartbeat wrote: »

Hopefully night time feels legitimately dark, rather than just how some games do it by putting a grayish looking film over everything and calling it dark. ly.

Trust me you don't there is a reason why.

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.

SongRune

A lot of people in this thread have mentioned problems with night-time visibility limits, but no-one has mentioned what is by far the largest one: They have a major effect on game balance, and hit some classes much harder than others:

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.

Rhorden

Night in a game is a hard concept to master because of all the variables. The biggest being the individuals eyesight. Some people just have shit night vision which would make the game unplayable. Other people would adjust comp/monitor settings and others would mess with game files. In a single player game you can do what you want and the player can set it to desired levels but in a MMO, at this current time, it's just not practical. Would be nice if game studious would pursue it more. Eventually it would make progress.

Different buffs, animations, mobs, resources, area access, harder difficulty, etc. at night would be interesting. Aww shit, ghost ships! Sign me up for that.

CROW3

I’m a huge fan of dark nights, but there are some legitimate concerns on how this would work in an mmo. Gamma settings being one, player accessibility (ADA) being another, and third being the ‘I don’t want to stare a black screen’ response.

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…

SongRune

CROW3 wrote: »

I’m a huge fan of dark nights, but there are some legitimate concerns on how this would work in an mmo. Gamma settings being one, player accessibility (ADA) being another, and third being the ‘I don’t want to stare a black screen’ response.

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.

Sarkgp

The light and dark settings are a very interesting topic, but it is true that today there are ways to easily avoid it with gamma and monitor settings.

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.

Mattchoo

Put me in the category of preferring a distinct day/night cycle with significant changes to environment and visual changes by players required such as spells or torches to allow adventuring at night.

I would also like to see different mobs out after dark that require different tactics/challenges for players to overcome.

McShave

wherewolves

Azherae

Mattchoo wrote: »

Put me in the category of preferring a distinct day/night cycle with significant changes to environment and visual changes by players required such as spells or torches to allow adventuring at night.

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.

Mag7spy

I swear to god i responded to this post....

Mag7spy

No one wants to play a game where they cant see shit at night. Since name plates should be shown clearly above the heads of mobs it shouldn't be a factor of not being able to see well at night . This is not a survival game nor some simulation type game...

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.

Mag7spy

SongRune wrote: »

A lot of people in this thread have mentioned problems with night-time visibility limits, but no-one has mentioned what is by far the largest one: They have a major effect on game balance, and hit some classes much harder than others:

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.

Imagine ranger at night lmfao

Child Item