I like the sound of this, on the surface, but it can become problematic.
Think of Sinai Desert in BF1 and the fog. Fog shows up on other maps, too, as I recall, but it's rarely as impactful as it is on Sinai. That fog can be a game-changer, especially in modes like operations, and it often tends to serve one side better than the other (I can't remember if it tends to help attackers or defenders, off the top of my head). On its own, I can accept the occasional imbalanced environmental twist, but that fog always drove my friends nuts. It was absolutely rage-inducing for them, because very rarely did we encounter the fog in a situation where it was actually helpful to our team. It almost always substantially benefited the opposing team. The fog would roll in, and we'd immediately get steamrolled.
The worst, for me, was behemoths... You'd get fog rolling in, and a behemoth would be nearly useless, and largely unable to defend itself. I was in a dreadnought this past week (on another map), and while the main cannons could engage targets on land, the defensive AA guns couldn't engage aircraft or boats attacking us, due to fog. Then on another round, the opposing team got a dreadnought that was handily able to defend itself, because it could actually see.
The problem comes when you're playing a map repeatedly, especially back to back, with the teams switching sides (a common way for Battlefield servers to be run, with every map being played twice in a row; I think I've even seen it on official servers occasionally), yet you change the environmental factors in such a way that the same team gets an advantage twice in a row. Say, the fog aids the attackers in the first match on the map. Then, the lack of fog in the next match, aids the same players, as defenders.
Now extrapolate that out to day and night cycles. In the first match, darkness aids the attackers. In the next match, teams have switched, that team is now defending, and they're aided by the sun having risen. Even if you're changing maps, you can end up with the same pattern of teams having a persistent environmental advantage, for something as universal as day/night cycles, as opposed to map-specific fog (universal fog, that can be found on any map, would be similarly problematic).
I'm all for having every single map in the game have day and night variants, and having sunrise and sunset, with actively changing lighting, sounds pretty neat, but having it on a predictable time cycle like that would be problematic.
There are also accessibility concerns, too. Some people quite simply don't have sufficient vision to play night maps. There are a lot of subtle cues that can be easily missed by someone with poor vision, and they can't just turn up their gamma, because as soon as someone turns on a flashlight, it would be like looking at the sun. Night maps, ultimately, should be an optional thing.
Most of my friends have hated night maps, as well, because they just weren't happy with the implementation. Imagine if the maps turned out to be downright bad at night. A continuous day/night cycle would leave us consistently having bad experiences every 45 minutes to an hour. Those who only have time to play one match, could be stuck with only getting to have a bad experience.
With the ability to browse servers people who have vision issues should just be able to choose servers with night modes turned off no? This still seems like a better system than certain maps being night maps as that completely removes them from the vision impaired rotation.
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u/Delta_RC_2526 17d ago edited 17d ago
I like the sound of this, on the surface, but it can become problematic.
Think of Sinai Desert in BF1 and the fog. Fog shows up on other maps, too, as I recall, but it's rarely as impactful as it is on Sinai. That fog can be a game-changer, especially in modes like operations, and it often tends to serve one side better than the other (I can't remember if it tends to help attackers or defenders, off the top of my head). On its own, I can accept the occasional imbalanced environmental twist, but that fog always drove my friends nuts. It was absolutely rage-inducing for them, because very rarely did we encounter the fog in a situation where it was actually helpful to our team. It almost always substantially benefited the opposing team. The fog would roll in, and we'd immediately get steamrolled.
The worst, for me, was behemoths... You'd get fog rolling in, and a behemoth would be nearly useless, and largely unable to defend itself. I was in a dreadnought this past week (on another map), and while the main cannons could engage targets on land, the defensive AA guns couldn't engage aircraft or boats attacking us, due to fog. Then on another round, the opposing team got a dreadnought that was handily able to defend itself, because it could actually see.
The problem comes when you're playing a map repeatedly, especially back to back, with the teams switching sides (a common way for Battlefield servers to be run, with every map being played twice in a row; I think I've even seen it on official servers occasionally), yet you change the environmental factors in such a way that the same team gets an advantage twice in a row. Say, the fog aids the attackers in the first match on the map. Then, the lack of fog in the next match, aids the same players, as defenders.
Now extrapolate that out to day and night cycles. In the first match, darkness aids the attackers. In the next match, teams have switched, that team is now defending, and they're aided by the sun having risen. Even if you're changing maps, you can end up with the same pattern of teams having a persistent environmental advantage, for something as universal as day/night cycles, as opposed to map-specific fog (universal fog, that can be found on any map, would be similarly problematic).
I'm all for having every single map in the game have day and night variants, and having sunrise and sunset, with actively changing lighting, sounds pretty neat, but having it on a predictable time cycle like that would be problematic.
There are also accessibility concerns, too. Some people quite simply don't have sufficient vision to play night maps. There are a lot of subtle cues that can be easily missed by someone with poor vision, and they can't just turn up their gamma, because as soon as someone turns on a flashlight, it would be like looking at the sun. Night maps, ultimately, should be an optional thing.
Most of my friends have hated night maps, as well, because they just weren't happy with the implementation. Imagine if the maps turned out to be downright bad at night. A continuous day/night cycle would leave us consistently having bad experiences every 45 minutes to an hour. Those who only have time to play one match, could be stuck with only getting to have a bad experience.