Lighting in this game is weird
potatoZMaster
Israel Join Date: 2020-06-20 Member: 261999Members
Israel Join Date: 2020-06-20 Member: 261999Members
I want to preface this by saying i think in recent updates, a LOT of stuff has gotten better, and fulfilled most of my concerns with this game. however, there is still one SUPER big concern, that hasnt been addressed, and in fact may have even gotten worse.
lighting.
in nearly every biome in the game, you can traverse the biome with no need of any sort of light whatsoever (with the small exception of the thermal spires and lily pad islands, but only at night), with no difficulty at all. the only real exceptions to this, are on land inside caves. This is a huge problem for a couple reasons:
1) There is no situation ever, that land based caves, should be DARKER than UNDERWATER based caves, and that is currently the case for nearly every single biome in the game.
2) As you go deeper into the ocean (crystal caves, fabricator caverns, lily flowers, deep purple vents, etc), the biomes should get DARKER, because you are going further away from the sun. however, its almost the opposite. the lily flower biome used to be one of the darkest in the game; now its one of, if not THE lightest biome. as you go from the lily pads to the lily flowers, the game actually BRIGHTENS instead of darkens, and this is a huge issue for me.
3) one of the major draws of the dunes and the blood kelp zones from subnautica, was that they were super scary to go into. a huge dark trench in the ground? sign me up. you NEEDED a sonar, or a light, to go there and feel safe, whereas in bz, you dont even need a light, let alone a sonar. it totally removes the excitement and fear of going into these biomes.
4) it removes the concept of bio-luminescence, one of the coolest concepts of underwater exploration. every time i see a shadow leviathan, or a rock grub, im underwhelmed, because they dont really glow against the incredibly light biomes theyre placed in.
5) its just weird to have biomes that have no light source, under 500m, be brighter than biomes directly on the surface. the biggest culprit being the fabricator caverns here, which looks like its in broad daylight, despite having no light sources, and being more than 1k meters below, but there are plenty of others as well that suffer from this (crystal caves, lily flowers, deep twisty bridges, kelp caves, tree spires caves, etc.)
Solutions:
1) darken the biomes in the water. if i enter a biome that is deeper than 500m, and its brighter than a surface biome, something is wrong. when i enter the lily flowers biome, it should be darker than the biome above it. let the flowers and spores light the biome, and forget about the natural ambient lighting, it just makes the whole thing look bland and unrealistic. in the crystal caves, let the crystals glow, and make everything else dark as night. make it scary to enter the biome, make it hard to navigate without sonar or lights. list of biomes i think should be darker:
-crystal caves (and the fissures inside them)
-fab caverns
-lily flowers
-deep twisty bridges
-glacier passage
-kelp caves
-thermal spires caves
-deep purple vents
2) reintroduce the sonar upgrade for the seatruck. this was one of my favorite things in sn, and its sad to see it not return in bz. currently there isnt a need for it, because everything is so light, but if the lighting was fixed, it would be nice to get the sonar with it, to really push that feeling of deep water exploration.
lighting.
in nearly every biome in the game, you can traverse the biome with no need of any sort of light whatsoever (with the small exception of the thermal spires and lily pad islands, but only at night), with no difficulty at all. the only real exceptions to this, are on land inside caves. This is a huge problem for a couple reasons:
1) There is no situation ever, that land based caves, should be DARKER than UNDERWATER based caves, and that is currently the case for nearly every single biome in the game.
2) As you go deeper into the ocean (crystal caves, fabricator caverns, lily flowers, deep purple vents, etc), the biomes should get DARKER, because you are going further away from the sun. however, its almost the opposite. the lily flower biome used to be one of the darkest in the game; now its one of, if not THE lightest biome. as you go from the lily pads to the lily flowers, the game actually BRIGHTENS instead of darkens, and this is a huge issue for me.
3) one of the major draws of the dunes and the blood kelp zones from subnautica, was that they were super scary to go into. a huge dark trench in the ground? sign me up. you NEEDED a sonar, or a light, to go there and feel safe, whereas in bz, you dont even need a light, let alone a sonar. it totally removes the excitement and fear of going into these biomes.
4) it removes the concept of bio-luminescence, one of the coolest concepts of underwater exploration. every time i see a shadow leviathan, or a rock grub, im underwhelmed, because they dont really glow against the incredibly light biomes theyre placed in.
5) its just weird to have biomes that have no light source, under 500m, be brighter than biomes directly on the surface. the biggest culprit being the fabricator caverns here, which looks like its in broad daylight, despite having no light sources, and being more than 1k meters below, but there are plenty of others as well that suffer from this (crystal caves, lily flowers, deep twisty bridges, kelp caves, tree spires caves, etc.)
Solutions:
1) darken the biomes in the water. if i enter a biome that is deeper than 500m, and its brighter than a surface biome, something is wrong. when i enter the lily flowers biome, it should be darker than the biome above it. let the flowers and spores light the biome, and forget about the natural ambient lighting, it just makes the whole thing look bland and unrealistic. in the crystal caves, let the crystals glow, and make everything else dark as night. make it scary to enter the biome, make it hard to navigate without sonar or lights. list of biomes i think should be darker:
-crystal caves (and the fissures inside them)
-fab caverns
-lily flowers
-deep twisty bridges
-glacier passage
-kelp caves
-thermal spires caves
-deep purple vents
2) reintroduce the sonar upgrade for the seatruck. this was one of my favorite things in sn, and its sad to see it not return in bz. currently there isnt a need for it, because everything is so light, but if the lighting was fixed, it would be nice to get the sonar with it, to really push that feeling of deep water exploration.
Comments
While somewhat* true in theory, it is a huge problem for gameplay design. Navigation in ILZ in the original is very challenging and this made that part of the game annoying for me, not fun. I guess, tastes might differ on this, but still universal darkening isn't a grand idea.
*somewhat comes with the fact that deep ocean floor might have more life than deep ocean waters. This comes both from the fact that detritus falls down to the floor and that ocean floor occasionally contains vents of water saturated with hydrogen sulfide, methane and other compounds that can be used by chemotrophic bacterial produces. Both types of communities contain small amount of bioluminiscent organisms.
Now, realism aside, let's think from a game play perspective. In order to explore, you need to be able to navigate. You need to be able to see in front of you. The light cones from the flashlight, Seaglide, and Seatruck are all fairly limited. Sonar would greatly help, but has not been implemented in SN:BZ. Such a small radius of lighting makes navigating very difficult on a map with tight spaces and so many twists and turns, it's already incredibly difficult to navigate. And we have no actual map. We get a compass, some waypoints on the HUD, and our memory. We need to be able to see, and the extensive ambient lighting helps. I'd argue it's critical to make the game playable.
Deep Twisty is already significantly darker than Twisty. Deep lilypad is already darker than the crevasse which is darker than >150 Lilypad zone. I think they already do a decent job with the general zone lighting, and keep in mind, it gets even darker half the game when it's night. It makes farming resources or exploring new territory even harder because you frankly can't see the environmental queues you need to see. I've literally had to stumble upon alien artifacts or other key things because the lighting is, IMO, too dark.
I think the last thing we need is to make exploration even more difficult.
I personally think darkening biomes adds more to the gameplay if anything since it gives light producing structures and tools a use, and makes the player think differently about navigation and what lies ahead, providing a fun and challenging change of pace. I'd also like to say that the ILZ is quite a bright biome, so I feel the problem there may be more that it has a lack of distinctive landmarks and ground colors found in other biomes so it ends up blending together.
It's interesting to see different perspectives on this. I've personally never had a problem with gameplay elements being too hard to see since almost all of them glow even in the darkest of biomes, and besides the point of something being dark is that you should bring a light source to be able to see. Are you sure it's not like them being more out of the way that makes them harder to find, because most of these glow very bright and would benefit more from darker environments so they don't blend in?
I will say though that the Deep Lilypads being darker than the crevice and most of the biomes being dark at night isn't accurate, with there barely being a change between day and night in a good chunk of them. (Sorry for the double comment I finished my previous one just after Catalytic's but still wanted to respond)
I totally agree with navigation bit.
Maybe. the central chamber in ILZ isn't as bad as lava corridor though. That one is positively atrocious. I guess, something can be worked around with imitating eye light sensitivity adaptation, but I dunno how to design relevant mechanics.
Let me see if I can illustrate with an example. ** Spoiler here for those wishing to avoid them **
There was nothing to tell me that this important thing in the game was there. It was so dark that even with my Seaglide light I had missed it after multiple passes because I had tunnel vision, even while exploring. That's part of the experience that the deep dives create because of the time pressure. But there was no glow to tell me it was there until I was well past the entry point that I actually needed to find, and making an already dark zone even darker wouldn't have improved anything.
Many of the things I was supposed to find throughout the SN:BZ storyline came up like this. In fact, I even built a whole base nearly directly on top of a key story element before I finally found it. This one was on land and in broad daylight. The map already hides things very well without making things harder to see and urging players to adjust the gamma and brightness on their monitors to try and compensate for too dark of a game.
This does sound more like a level design thing than anything to me, unrelated to the specific brightness of a biome, especially with that last part. These Alien Artifacts are supposed to be pretty hidden too, as they're entirely optional as far as I'm aware.
The difference in below zero, is that the light does NOT come from bioluminescence or terrain. It’s just... there. It’s ambient lighting, as one would expect from the sun, or moon, in surface biomes, and often times (as is the case with the deep lily flowers), the deep biomes are actually brighter than the surface ones, NOT because of glowing terrain, but because of ambient lighting just being wayyyyy too bright. THATS my issue here. As I pointed out, I think the easiest and best fix, would be to take away the ambience, and add more bioluminescence, as well as terrain that glows. In the crystal caves, it would be SO much better, if instead of ambient lighting, we just had glowing crystals. It would be a similar effect to the blood kelp zone, increasing fear in the player while also encouraging you to explore further. Lily flowers provide SO much opportunity for glowing, and they just lack that because the ambient lighting overpowers everything else.
Tl;dr: I agree with everyone saying bioluminescence and glowing terrain is good. I want the ambient light removed, or at least lowered drastically, and the glow of terrain and life increased, as you’ve all suggested.
Cory at one point had said that in the Crystal Caves there would be precursor light fixtures mimicking the lighting in this concept, but they seemingly haven't gone through with that.
here are some comparison images from the first game and the second game. notice how in the first game, nearly ALL of the available light is coming from coral, and bioluminescence, giving you a real deep depths feeling, and giving the player a reason to want light sources. compare that to the second game, where the light just kinda *exists* with no source, drawing attention AWAY from bioluminescence, making it totally unnecessary to have extra lights, reducing fear factor, and drawing away from the realism.
locations in each game used:
sea treaders path caves (400-500m)
blood kelp zone
north (200-500m)
crystal caves (800m)
fabricator caverns (900-1000m)
These areas were designed with the Cyclops in mind and were barren landscapes. Darkness was therefore a nice trick to hide the lack of details. If you take other regions from the original game, like the lost river or the lava zone, you'll see that these were quite bright as well.
There's no Cyclops in BelowZero... only a SeaTruck. So the crystal & fabricator cavern are designed to be narrow cave systems for small, slow-moving crafts or divers. If you make them much darker, you might constantly hit something.
Nevertheless though, I agree that the devs went too far in some cases. So I recommend the ExtraOptionsSML mod.
Here, you can adjust the color filters to match your preferred visuals. My settings for the crystal cavern:
Have you tried the Filmic setting? Assuming BZ is the same as Subnautica, there's a color grading setting, try "Filmic"
The sea treaders path makes sense, it’s pretty barren. Blood kelp trench though? Not barren in the slightest. It was filled with blood kelp, and generally was actually small enough that the cyclops had a rough time traversing it. My first play through I never even took my cyclops down there because I was scared of it getting destroyed; something also ironically cause by the darkness of it.
In regards to the lost river and lava zones: the reason these were so lit up was because there was *actually light sources there* rather than light just seemingly being there for no reason. The ghost weed, and the brine, both glowed green, giving the biome its signature look. And in the lava zone, obviously there was lava, giving that biome it’s red glow. My problem isn’t with the light itself; it’s with the AMBIENT light, that seemingly comes from nowhere. Take that out, and make the FEATURES glow, specifically the crystals. The result would be a similar level of light, just coming from an object, rather than just “being there” as it is currently.
Haven’t seen this but I’ll check when I get the chance. Even still, the default settings should look good, if you want a game to come out polished.
It's a tradeoff. Easier gameplay vs realistic. With Filmic, you actually NEED light sources when it's dark out or you're very deep and there's not much natural lighting around.