How bad can environmental effect be?

[Omnires]

This sounds like an odd question but it is a valid one. For example, at night how dark can it be? In a lot of game night time is never really dark. It is like there is a perma super full moon out every night lighting things up. There is not many games where going out in the middle of night with cloud cover and/or new moon means you can't see anything. So asking odd questions like this now I think would help us find some kind of happy area within the different types of environmental effects.

And yes, I was one of the people who in FireFall who asking for truly dark nights to come back to the game. Because I missed those night time battles where the only thing you could see was the things lighted up by the flashlight you and other players had or what the recon classed marked on SIN. Hearing gun fire off to the side of you and not knowing what they are firing at. Turning around only see some monsters right in your face because you didn't see it coming. Seeing a boss spawn and only knowing where it is because so many different people are trying to keep it in there sights because if it moving into the darkness it could easily kill some people because we don't when and where the attacks are coming from. The fun chaos of it all we great.

Light and dark are not the only environmental effects we should be talking about but I feel it was a good place to start because it is something we all have to do with in some way.

P.s. I play other games where environmental effects can mean life and death. As in your character will die if they become to hot or to cold and so on. And just for fun where is a video of a little game called RimWorld where the player had true darkness turned on, as well as other effects.

 

[Pandagnome]

Sandstorms can make it tricky to see and the fogs, i also think darkness would make it fun at night especially when you hear rustling sounds... is that a Reaper? or a tsihu? could it be a creature of the wildlife? etc etc

Worst case scenario is a sandstorm with a fog at night with small chunks of rock flying across scary!
That would probably be way too much so i hope it doesn't all happen at once.
Perhaps a combination of 2 not more would be interesting i think.

 

[liandri]

Budget-willing, I'd like to see intentionally vision-obscuring effects. Volcanic ash in hot environments, blizzards in ice areas, heavy rain and fog in terraformed zones. Just not too often, so every time it happens in the middle of a battle it's a "oh shit" moment, rather than a constant annoyance. Maybe that's something that the AI Commander can control to make encounters more interesting?

We'll have to wait to see exactly how the solar system is set up, but I'd love to see cosmic events too, instead of just world environment changes. Server-wide eclipses bring on true darkness for a little while, solar flares causing power fluctuations across the HOS and interruptions in the Fabric.

Edit: To directly address your example, dark should be dark, but given this is meant to be year 2287, light amplification and targeting technology should be such that it's never too dark. On the planet surface at least. Going underground should be nail-biting.