Night vision goggles rework?

[Rifluvr]

In all my 600+ hours, I have never found them more useful than a flashlight. They make vision worse, by blurring screen. Someone suggested the thermal vision option instead. But I've always prefer "light amplification visor" like in first Doom, which highlights enemies, rather than hiding them in the same color. At the moment, I find this mechanics practically useless, but interesting to develop. If someone is still engaged in the balance of the game, that I hope.

 

[o2xVc3UuXp0NyBihrUnu]

All the amplification visor from doom did is it forced the lighting of the scene to be 255 which is max possible. What you link is a reworked modded version.

As for KF2 the night vision helps and works as intended. If you ever wanted to use it the intended way, you could've switched to ultra quality graphics and change the gamma the way the game recommends it -- to have a left figure barely visible. With this setup the game becomes way too dark (which is obviously detrimental to survivability) but the night vision surely helps.

The reason it's not used is because people turn their gamma and brightness through the roof in order to have better awareness, which makes the night vision not as useful. For example, many early maps are actually have a middle of the night setting, e.g. Burning Paris, but since most people play it with out of proportion gamma/brightness they don't even know it's night as everything looks like as a middle of the day setting.

 

[Rifluvr]

Pretty fair opinion. But I don't see the point in lowering the already poor brightness for regular Hell on Earth players. No one will put themselves in obviously losing conditions (I play at high/ultra).

 

[o2xVc3UuXp0NyBihrUnu]

But I don't see the point in lowering the already poor brightness for regular Hell on Earth players. No one will put themselves in obviously losing conditions

Kind of yes, although for self handicapping reasons or when I'm recording in a way to show off the survival horror component of the game -- I do, it makes sense when everything is dark, as it's supposed to.

But given that there are so many ways to brighten the game up on a PC, if one wanted to, I don't see how would you force people to play in the dark environment, where the night vision goggles are useful. One can use built-in game controls, one can use ReShade, one can use gaming monitors that are capable to drastically improve brightness/contrast levels, one can edit the UE3 texture settings, etc. Without forcing the darkness on everyone you can't really make the night vision useful. Except on consoles -- there you can dictate how the game is played to a higher degree.

In the end one can kind of rework it so it provides some other utility on top of visibility (as visibility is solved through brightness/contrast by most players), but that would be sort of unrealistic. They wanted it to have advantages when used, but also drawbacks, just like in real world.

 

[Rifluvr]

you can't really make the night vision useful

You can. Flashlight is still useful even on an up-turned brightness + gaming monitor, like for me (the game is still dark).

"Unrealistic" in a game where there are clones with chainsaw arms, and constantly alternating circus seasonal events, is not such a big deal. Especially if it affects the gameplay, making interesting mechanics a ballast, that most players don't even know about.

You can easily make advantages through improved visibility in the entire field of view (as I gave the example above), and making the disadvantage in increased battery consumption (+300% to life drain). This will not replace the long run stability of the flashlight, but will make visor usage important in short critical situations. The actual problem is that night vision googles does not make the view any better than a flashlight, even with the same battery consumption, in my experience. Especially on ultra settings.