I'd love this! In my opinion though true darkness should be weather and moon cycle bound when outside. Starlight and moonlight do give a lot of light if not covered by light pollution.

Last we heard nights won't be as dark as Ark or Mortal Online. Mainly because gamma hacks are extremely easy to do then the darkness has zero affect for those that have them. We've seen some footage of the night in the newest YouTube video. I expect that won't change to too much.

Much as I'd love truly dark nights, I don't see it happening, for much the same reasons as the poster above. People who don't appreciate full nighttime immersion ruin it for the rest of us, and force us to stoop to their level to compete with them >.>

I heard we will need torches to work at night and phenoix will glow so we can see at night. i hope nights are really dark so we have to use those sorts of things.

I want a scenario where tons of people are hiding in shadows and all emerge at once surrounding a company of warriors at a campfire and totally freaking them out. just sounds pretty cool from a story perspective to have dark nights

This.

They have said that a player could just cheat and jack up his or her gamma. They also said that they don't want to penalize players for playing the game properly.

That said, nights will be fairly dark, and the game will recognize if the area you're in is supposed to be dark, and it'll make it easier to sneak.

Here's an example of what night will look like. This is lighthened due to the forge, but that's a general idea.

Edit: Hope that is a good enough picture

Very nice picture. The sky seems fairly bright for how dark the rest of the scene is (forge and torchlight aside). Then again, this is a pre-alpha image, so everything could change by the time the game releases.

If it helps, one of the journals mentioned a scenario in which a group travelling at night would want to light torches, if only to be able to see the reflection of the torchlight in the eyes of any creatures that might assault them. That sort of implies that it'll be dark enough at least that seeing attackers in rural/unexplored areas will be fairly difficult without additional lighting.

Well from what I can see in the picture, it wouldn't be too hard to ambush a group of unsuspecting players. Wearing black clothing could make it quite easy to blend in with the darkness, and I doubt an assassin of sorts, would wear bright clothing to stand out, unless he wanted people to know he's there. So yeah, I believe an ambush is quite feasible.

I'm all for immersive nights. Night is so commonly neglected in videogames as an actual thing and can be defeated by simply increasing your brightness.

I'm all for immersive nights. Night is so commonly neglected in videogames as an actual thing and can be defeated by simply increasing your brightness.

@Jether - 2:35 PM - Mon Jul 18 2016

Yeah, it's sad that more people don't appreciate how good the night feature is in these kind of games. Makes the combat challenging, makes tools like torches actually worth it and well it makes for a world that feels real.

Dark nights are great for night time activities such as being at the tavern.

Here's an example of what night will look like. This is lighthened due to the forge, but that's a general idea.

Edit: Hope that is a good enough picture

@Kukos - 9:16 AM - Tue Jun 28 2016

while its dark at the floor, the sky is not as dark as night should be. it looks more like evening/morning.

Think it should be darker, but maybe they will tweak it farther down the line. Funny enough I think ark survival did a wonderful way to do the night cycle would like to see that in CoE or similar way Thought I heard/read somewhere they wanted to make it so the dark wasn't exploitable by gamma changing and such.

TL;DR: Darkness in video games are unrealistic. Normal human eyes adjust to see better at night. Most the time in video games the dark areas are close to no light emission, and light does not diffract properly in the environment. This is a technological limit of the monitor and programming, which ultimately creates a unrealistic simulation of dark area.

The thing about simulating darkness in video games is that it doesn't simulate it realistically. There's more dynamic to light in the environment than it being dark, which the later is what some people seem to enjoy. The limitations of a dark environment in video games is that the light is projected from your monitor at you in a hemispherical and semi-planar field at a fixed illumination. What does that mean? It means that light is projected in a low variation intensity at you in a fixed rectangular shape the same as the shape of your monitor. Light in a natural environment does not behave in this manner, it's chaotic and there are large ranges of diffused light. Our eyes can adapt to this later mechanism by dilating the pupils to increase absorption of light. However, in the former example it cannot, as the lights emitted by the monitor are at a standard intensity with varying frequency and the monitor's projection will interfere with our eye's ability to recognize illumination level. This interference will prevent us from being able to adapt to low light vision, which makes video game darkness too dark in most cases and highly unrealistic.

Video game developers recognized this problem and developed a technology to better simulate light casting shadows called Ambient Occlusion. The whole point of the Ambient Occlusion is to emulate diffraction on how light would interact with objects to cast shadows, but what it does not do is recognize condensation of light and the biological factor of how human eyes adjust. I don't recall seeing a reflective surface condense light and put a bright spot on wherever its directed at in video games. You can do this in reality, but improperly emulated in most 3d environment. It's more common for dark areas in video games to be completely devoid of light, which means you cannot see no matter how long you squint at the darkness even if there is a small amount of light in the environment.