Weather needs to be more intense where the visibility drops at times to like 100m or less for a bit. Also, night has to be darker where people cannot gamma cheat by jacking the brightness up to 100% while people who run 0% get f*.
I want to agree with you about weather, but we all know what Wrel thinks a cool weather effect looks like...
Additionally, think about the performance. A particularly intense effect could obliterate peoples performances, while a basic effect could potentially make IR Scopes and Recon abilities broken.
About the weather: that should not be hard. It can be a cosmetic thing which just says "there's rain" and your game simulates rain like we have had since before 2000. Visability reduction using weather is actually a trick that most games used to use. Especially thick mist was a popular way of hiding the scenery and limiting what would need to be loaded. Anything beyond a certain visibility would simply be hidden behind a solid vision wall of the background weather color. A sandstorm being sand-colored, mist white colored etc. This would be a relatively easy way of adding functional weather that changes gameplay, especially if it affects certain things in the game. Heavy snowstorm on Esamir? All small-arms bullets gain a small movement in the direction of the wind. Heavy rain? Could mess with shields to create occasional sparks which can be used to spot farther into the weather. As for darker nights, that would not really work as the gamma users would still have an advantage over those not using it. The only solution with darker nights is to make it work like weather and just add a wall of black that shrouds vision after X distance, which can be pushed back by lights. But the game Firefall went in the other direction. It had dark dark nights balanced off by bright days with some bright objects. If you made your nights visible enough with the gamma you were practically blinded if you ran onto a white sandy beach by day. Similarly flashlights could be used to actively punish gamma users who switch their gamma during the day by blinding them at night.
Weather looks cool. Plays like garbage. Night-time is the same way. Looks great! Playing in it? Most players hate it. They don't want to swap their sights for NV. They don't want to adapt, because it's annoying to do. Maybe if every player had a built-in NV or Foglight button into their visor it would be different... ... ...nah, even with that, I'm pretty sure people would hate it. Looks great for promotional images, though!
Again, I'm thinking about performance here. Planetside already kinda runs like garbage on a lot of peoples systems. Thats more the codings fault than anything I assume, but you saw what the Esamir storm did to some peoples framerates. If I was playing while the storm was still a thing, I know my frames would have committed die. These ideas are cool, but we already have a way of hiding what can be loaded - render distance. And I can't see weather being a possible pick without another continent rework to make it be viable without strangling our performance in the spaghetti code. And given the way these forums violently despise the containment sites... yeah there isn't another coming for a bit. Its a really cool idea and I'd love to see it affect gameplay - but my god would it tank some peoples performance. On the individual ideas - afraid I must hard veto the Heavy Snowstorm one. Changing the way bullets fall? Not only sounds like a mess, given bullets dont have side to side drift, but it would make Vanu guns somewhat OP - they dont suffer bullet drop already, so they wouldn't be affected most likely. Forget a snowstorm, affecting the ability of people to land shots would start a ****storm. Visibility reduction would also possibly A. make IR Optics and the Implant OP, especially in the hands of an Infil (assuming they bypass the storms visibility reduction) or B. make Stalker infils god tier (you already cant see - if the storm didnt cause some kind of cloak distortion they would become terrifying ambush predators, stepping out of the storm to kill you then slipping away). In any other game? I would dig the hell out of a Snowstorm + The Predator game mode. Here? Recipe for instant Infil hate generation. The heavy rain idea is decent though, I can back that. Lastly, regarding the Firefall comment - theres another Darklight buff idea. Make it apply a Flash effect if you tag an Infil, or well anyone. Of course, that just opens the door for infils to counter with their own Darklight flashbang out of nowhere, or possibly while in cloak, but its an interesting idea.
Years ago on Indar the sandstorms would make it barely visible, to be honest I thought it was quite awesome.
Not sandstorm. You have locked the skyfile from south west Indar to your player so it follows you wherever you go. You get the thick fog, sky color, lighting color and time zone of the Indar grasslands.
Pretty sure passive weather is something they wanna do alongside storms that impact gameplay more intensely. When they added the Tempest Storm they said themselves that the intent was to really push it with what a storm could be capable of so they could see the impact of it. Having that being a timed thing tied to a campaign was a pretty good execution if you wanna do something like that. I really liked the feeling of fighting in the Tempest Storm, it just sucks that it killed Sunderers and other vehicles so effectively and suchwith lots of fights. Definitely had more fun while it was around compared to current Esamir with Containment Sites, especially with the final version of it that wasn't as destructive. Minecraft snow on Esamir for April Fool's when?
