Importance of the night in Ashes.

A lot of people in this thread have mentioned problems with night-time visibility limits, but no-one has mentioned what is by far the largest one: They have a major effect on game balance, and hit some classes much harder than others:

As a Bard, if I see you coming from 20 seconds away, I start the fight buffed and we have a fair fight when you attack me. If I see you from 5 seconds away, I just die.

Bards are balanced around having their buffs active. If I have time to see an attacker coming and buff myself, I am significantly stronger (i.e. actually equal to that attacker). If I don't, I have to fight without the significant buffs my class is balanced around having.

I'm all for a real, good cosmetic day/night cycle with lighting effects, but I need night to not nerf my class specifically. Sure it'll hurt everyone a bit, but Bard by nature has to spend time buffing in advance in order to match the other classes power. Stopping me from doing that is a major nerf.

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I agree that darkness effects of that type make for interesting ambush style gameplay, the problem is that the effects reach far beyond that. If I was escorting a caravan, I would be singing the whole time, keeping my buffs up and ready. I'd do this in the daytime too. But it's not something that makes sense to do while I'm fishing, gathering, exploring, etc. If nothing else than because the time I spend sustaining my buffs is time a Fighter would spend gathering more materials. This sort of effect ultimately says to Bards "you don't get to play the game for the same amount of time that a Fighter would, and you don't get the economic or other benefits of doing so." Whether that's because time spent singing is time not spent gathering, or whether it's because it's simply not safe to go out at night, the result is the same. An inescapable economic debuff specific to one class.

Lanterns, glow bugs, or vision potions solve this to some degree, but that just brings us into EITHER the realm of maintenance buffs (which certain classes need more, and therefore need to spend money on more frequently) or negating the impact of the darkness as a whole by giving long-term solutions to it.

If mitigating it requires no effort or cost, then the 'darkness debuff' isn't real. If it does, then as long as it hurts some players significantly more or less than others, some players have to spend more money, or more effort to mitigate it than others, giving those who do not a pure economic advantage over those who do.

You can't have this type of effect, and have it be fair. The best you get is adding another convoluted system that ultimately just negates this one, at which point you might as well not have it in the first place.

Dark nights should be cosmetic. Real visibility impacts can't be balanced, but there are other options to make the night more difficult or interesting. Intrepid should focus on changes to mob behavior with the day/night cycle instead. These can bring interest and dynamism, while affecting all players equally.

There are other ways to integrate night into various different systems that do not impact the base game experience for others in an unbalanced way. Perhaps at night, monsters wander closer to the road in some areas, creating points where caravan defenders face other threats, and ambushers can close in while they're weakened. This sort of thing can provide opportunities for ambush style gameplay which is similar, if not exactly the same, as darkness might, and that's just one quick idea off the top of my head. There are lots of ways to make night matter that don't unbalance the game.

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I was actually thinking the other day about one specific thing that makes this LESS realistic in certain ways.

A screen is just one form of input.

As humans we experience 'sound', 'air pressure', heat, and scent, in a way that 'highlights' things in our surroundings for us. I think we might even have some fairly precise subconscious echolocation that we just don't use (quickfire Google search confirms what I remember, and it even 'activates the vision part of the brain' for spatial awareness).

For various reasons in my youth I did actually wander around in 'pitch black areas', and I 'remember that feeling' of 'ok I have an idea of what's around me'. So in some ways, even if you made the night 'very dark', the thing you would need is 'falloff' in terms of visibility/sense data. The screen is all we get, so it has to convey all those things your other senses do.

tl;dr - The night/caves being pitch dark may be realistic visually but not realistic to how humanoids, especially slightly magical trained humanoids, would experience night. I, for example, prefer VERY weak lights when it's dark because it interferes with my other sense-reliance less.