Bring back the beta night!

On very low graphics night is nearly identical to daytime, except the sky is a darker shade of blue

Night time must be brought back! Oh how I remember beta night fights. They were something to behold that is for sure! You want immerseive MMO FPS experience, well SOE you killed it. Ya had the chance to leverage the ONE thing that would make PS2 stand out from all the other FPS games out there. Nop, scrapped due to who knows...

The reason they made nights brighter is a good reason - people didn't like fighting in the darkness, they didn't like not being able to see things. On top of that, people would just crank up the gamma to bypass dark nights.

However, making ALL nights brighter was the wrong solution to this problem. As this thread has pointed out time and again, they should've instead made it so that it's always daytime in at least one continent. When they add Hossin, they can make it a full cycle, one continent could be experiencing dawn while another is at midnight. At the same time, the third would be at noon and the fourth would be at dusk so you always have somewhere to fight no matter what time of day you prefer fighting in. I mean, the planet is round, let that be a factor in how people play the game!

Alternately(or additionally), they could make it so that some continents are brighter at night than others. Hossin, for example, is a murky swampland with trees everywhere It should be very dark at night there. Amerish has a lot of forestry and what-not as well, it should be relatively dark, though perhaps not as dark as Hossin. Indar should be relatively bright, unless you're in the shadow of a mountain or something while Esamir would logically have the brightest nights with all that reflective snow everywhere.

Another thing they could do to solve the darkness issue for people would be to implement flares. They could be an underbarrel grenade launcher attachment. You fire a white flare into the sky and it slowly drifts downward over a period of two to five minutes. There could also be a flare launcher that takes up your pistol slot. Maybe infiltrators have special flares that aren't as bright and burn out quicker but spot people automatically.

They could also add lights to towers, walls and other structures to light up the area around major battle-zones...because those places would logically be well-lit on a planet that's engulfed in war like Auraxis.


I don't know, all of these things have been brought up before but they're all still valid points. The developers solved the issue of dark nights bothering some people by ruining nights for the rest of us. I mean, there's probably more people that don't care about nights than there are people who love or hate dark nights, but still. This needs to be reassessed and they need to come up with a better solution to this simple problem. Literally everyone can win here.

SOE, Y U NO DO ANYTHING!?

Because SOE, as a company, has no idea what they're doing or where they're going.

banned for not being on the banning game thread.
also you are more or less right.

you have my support

Would be nice if we could get an updated idea on what the devs think about nights and junk >_>

Needs more dev transparency like we've got with the Landmark and H1Z1 folks.

Bumping this thread. Game needs more dev transparency and better communication.

Dev Transparency, you say? ;P

But aside from that, I took some basic screenshots of ArmA2(with ACE mod) to showcase some night time effects and things.

1 year+ and counting...

and still waiting...

and waiting...

and waiting...

and waiting...

...

Soon™.

Most people who play a game don't post on the official forum. We here are a minority. I wouldn't at all mind more challenging and rewarding night fighting (and more low-visibility conditions in general) but it isn't a given that everyone who doesn't care for it will swap continents once it gets dark. It's just as likely that they'll get annoyed and stop playing because they can't see much on Indar or w/e.

If darker nights were to be implemented, I do think that a basic flashlight should be added as a free upgrade for at least the starter weapons. It shouldn't spot infiltrators like a darklight does but it would show you which way you are pointed.


Longer and darker nights would make infiltration without cloaks a lot more viable and I could def see an upswing in LA use. I know I would invest in a dark camo and go hunting with my LA...

I'm aware of that. However, the plurality of players probably don't have an opinion on how dark the night is. They undoubtedly don't care either way. That's how DayZ was back in the beta, most people didn't care that nights were impossible without a personal light source. What bothered people about it, though, was that they were so long. In Planetside 2, nights aren't so long that they'd become an extreme hindrance even if you hate darker night time.

Very true, but the minority on the forums probably represent the majority who aren't fairly decently, as they'll often have similar opinions to those who just play the game without talking about it.

A valid point, but imho if a player is too lazy to switch continents every once in a while maybe they shouldn't be the ones getting catered to. I mean, if taking 20 seconds to spawn at the warpgate after death and warp to another continent will make somebody stop playing, then just as likely they'll stop playing next time they get instakilled by a dalton round when they didn't even know there was a liberator close by.

On that note, personally I think that you should be able to spawn on another continent without having to go back to the base and warp. I think redeploying, spawning at the warpgate, accessing a continent panel, selecting a target continent, then spawning at another warp gate, redeploying with "instant action" or spawning a vehicle to get to the front is WAY to many tasks to go somewhere else. They had us doing all that for a while. It's a little better now but not much.

I think they should go all the way and let you select the continent you want from the top of the map, select a target spawn location on the map then press spawn now. If they add a "Are you sure you want to warp to another continent?" popup I'd be fine with that, but all the legwork you have to do by default is a little ridiculous sometimes. Don't get me wrong, I purposely spawn at the warpgate and manually get to the front all the time anyways (specifically when I'm using aircraft) but being forced to do it on occasion is, I think, pointless.


If they did make switching continents easier then having to switch continents to avoid dark nights would be less on an issue.

I absolutely agree. Way, way back in this monster of a thread there's a lot of creative conversation that's been done by players to come up with a way to "make the dark nights work". If they just make things really dark cold turkey with no real ways to play in it it'd mess up a lot of players, but with a little work and added equipment I think it could work. Here's some of the things I can think of off the top of my head that have been brought up by players:

1. Free flashlight available for every weapon. They'd be dangerous to use as everybody would see you flashing it around everywhere, but they'd also be an effective way to get around and fight properly. These would include MAXs, which would have forward facing lights on their shoulders. Darklights could be considered to be a sort of "advanced flashlight".

2. Flares, which would light up a large area for an extended period of time, (maybe 2-3 minutes, like in real life) making everything in the vicinity visible. They'd almost function like reverse smoke screens, making things visible for a little while instead of masking them.

There are lots of flare options:
Thrown flares to use in your grenade slot.
Droppable aerial flares for ESFs, liberators and Galaxies. (ability)
Launchable aerial flares for underbarrel grenade launchers.
Launchable aerial flares for secondary flare guns (a utility that would take your sidarm slot).
Launchable aerial flare launchers on your tanks, and possibly sunderers and harrasers (ability)

3. Vehicle lights. These would come by default on all vehicles, including aircraft, and could be turned on or off.

Imagine sitting on a hill firing down on an enemy location when suddenly a pair of bright lights start shining down on you, you look up at it and realize it's a scythe which up until now was flying dark. Now it's turned them on to properly see where to put it's 14 rockets. You see many of your allies around you die in a volley of explosions, then the lights go out and the sky goes dark again, leaving you wondering how long you have until it comes around again to finish you off.

I would think these would also be attached to the turrets of vehicles, so gunners could see properly as well. They could design them so that the pilot/driver of a vehicle has a master switch, so he/she can turn on or off all the lights on the vehicle.

On top of all those, IR/NV sights are already available for weapons and vehicles.

I think it'd make everything more fun, I like to play games of cat and mouse in FPS games, and it'd make them happen a lot more often then they do now.

Also, I would think that even if someone is fairly indifferent to the idea of night combat the basic fact that it'd mix things up by adding some drastically new mechanics and game-play styles to Planetside 2 should make people enjoy it all lot. Well, in my thinking anyways.

I think the best way to bring back beta night is first of all ading equipements allowing us to see through that dark shade


1. adding free flashlights for at least starter guns (as some people have already said)

2. adding frowable flares, flare guns, etc... to brightin up a bit the battle field

3. Night and thermal vision gogles, we have super high tech helmets with a fancy HUD right? So why would'nt we have the option to add specific vision gogles and activate/deactivate them like in rainbow six

4. Maybe also add projectors on galaxys and liberators (they could toggle on/off at will) so they can show the battle field and help the gunners or the infantry below (this isnt necessary but could be a nice little tweak to the game)


with all that no problem in fighting a night time with super dark nights


there is also the problem of lights in bases taht could be shut down, but thats another topic on base improvements

I was just watching a video on H1Z1 and I noticed that they have dark nights: (watch at 1:13, to see a jeep driving in the early morning then experiencing a sunrise, and 4:30 to see a guy running around at night)

Hopefully they'll put them back into PS2, as H1Z1 uses PS2's engine and, I would hope, a lot of the work could be shared back the other direction.

Or you know, they might just keep dark nights around for H1Z1's beta, then decide it's not "user friendly" and "doesn't look good enough" and remove it from the game at launch...

(Thinks about this being present in PS2)

*drools*

SOE PLEASE.