I’ve been tinkering around with Xenonauts recently and one thing I’ve seen which I think that game does really well is to make night time missions more dangerous than those which are undertaken during the day.
During night time missions the player’s soldiers have greatly reduced visibility (the AI’s is unaffected), and the fog of war is intense, the player can counter this via the use of flares, and beyond that has to take things very carefully, making use of cover and moving soldiers as a team to protect each other’s flanks.
I’d love to see some of the same in PP. You could play around a lot with artificial light sources, night vision/drone spotting, laser sighting. I can see some of PP’s mutated creatures being able to use night time to their advantage, whereas others might be just as disabled as the player.
Yep, it’d be very cool to have time-of-day affect both you and the AI, and both to varying degrees depending on either gear; from basic things like flares to more hi-tech solutions like IR goggles and such; or innate abilities and/or mutations.
I honestly think it’d be a huge missed opportunity if the game doesn’t end up having such a system. As long as it’s not only a penalty for the player, I’m all for it.
I absolutely love the oppressive atmosphere of X-Coms night-time missions. Peering into corners of darkened barns, slowly advancing through cornfields “plunged” into darkness… those are memories
I even use a modded version to play missions only at night-time…
Btw.: “Light management” with flares is one of my favorite features of the original X-Com and especially TFTD (because of the larger maps). Close second is the “motion sensor”; its range is very limited, but it is very useful when entering UFOs and in “confined spaces” (if this is the right word, I am from Austria…).
X-Coms night-time missions are like a sandbox for creating B-horror movie moments…
Why would nightime only affect humans and not mutants as well? Night time should reduce visibility to both, player and AI. Now, tell me that some types of mutant might have better night visions and we are talking.
Could also carry on to various research/abilities perks for certain soldiers (scout sorts)… Night vision goggles for new jericho, echo location suits or some sort of synergistic communication with the vibrations of nearby plantlife for synedrion, mutated see-in-dark eye stalks for anu… Could also have different visual styles; hazy dark green glow night vision, blobby thermal infrared, some sort of psychedelic vague outlines of moving entities…
I’d love to see some echo-location, infrasound, infrared and maybe even smell mutations or detection equipment. Maybe a “vision” tab could be added to the UI so we can switch from “Human-eye” vision to infrared/night/sound vision, if any soldier in the mission has that extra sense, so we can see the battlescape with a visual representation of what can be “seen” with that sense
