Any green night vision goggles?

[timmy123]

Do we know if there will be night vision goggles?

[mrmumbles]

I'm pretty sure the G22 goggles have nv, so I would say it's safe to assume "yes". But don't hold me to that.

[Enoch]

The problem is how you represent them to the player in a 3rd-person game. If you just put them on the player's avatar without changing the view the player sees on his/her monitor, they become little more than a fancy hat with a few stat bonuses for the dolly-dress-up element of the RPG. ("The Goggles, they do nothing!") If you tint the whole environment to make it 'realistic' when Thorton dons the goggles, you're undoing much of the work that your artists, et al., did to make the environments look good.

 

There's a reason that you don't see them much in the spy films that inspired AP-- the scene would have to be too dark to film in order for there to be much reason to use them. And in a visual medium like film (and games), I think it's better to compromise verisimilitude a tiny bit (by putting at least minimal lighting in your scenes) than it is to undermine the audience's visual experience by putting scenes in a green haze or in too-dark-to-see lighting.

[mrmumbles]

I'm going to ask that you forget what I said, and go off Enoch. He's got the right idea.

[Enoch]

That said, there are times when the demands of verisimilitude make ugly night-filters a better option. I hated the way the night vision spells/potions looked in Oblivion and The Witcher, but it is better to have that option than it is to make the player carry a light source or to put eternal torches in every troll cave.

 

With a game like AP, where the action is presumably all going to be taking place in environments inhabited by humans, it's easier to rationalize some lights being on. (I haven't played any of the modern roguelike/action games, so I really don't know whether or how they have included night vision.)

Edited April 16, 2010 by Enoch

[Jokerman89]

I dont see how it hurts what the artists have done when you only use them in the dark when you cant see much anyway.

[Enoch]

I dont see how it hurts what the artists have done when you only use them in the dark when you cant see much anyway.

It's not so much the goggles that hurt in that instance-- it's that you've made the scene too dark to begin with. You want to give the player a visually interesting environment. If you turn all the lights out, everything looks the same (with or without night vision goggles). That's boring.

 

Plus, night vision goggles do nothing to mitigate the most serious risk of a pitch black video game environment.

Edited April 16, 2010 by Enoch

[Sannom]

Since I'm French, I always had trouble to take those "grues" seriously I mean, how is this supposed to eat a full grown adventurer???