Infravision/Nightvision.

In all the games I can remember, a race with a trait that has night vision has never been useful. Aside from those of you that play tabletop, can you think of anywhere is been implemented?

I seem to recall the Infinity Engine games using infravision, so selecting a character with it would cause any nearby critters to have a reddish glow. NWN had it too, or rather the later, slightly less ridiculous "low light vision". I think it just affected spot DCs at night and in caves or something, though.

Arcanum had numerous dark/light, day/night perks, and normal attacks took darkness into account that these would affect. I can't remember for sure, but the original Fallouts probably had this, too.

Menigal said:

I seem to recall the Infinity Engine games using infravision, so selecting a character with it would cause any nearby critters to have a reddish glow.

Click to expand...

Depending on what options you used, infravision could either work if you had a specific character with it selected, or it could work if one of the characters that you had selected had it. It was really useful to have at least one character with infravision in Baldur's Gate & Icewind Dale, with the option of "group infravision" on.

Thanks Fnord. I went back to IWD and found that option. Thats likely a reason I thought it was useless. I have it selected.

I will have to go check NWN for the single character selection thing Menigal.

Khajit night sight was very useful in Skyrim.

One game that had this was the original Everquest. When you started your life in Everquest, things were DARK! unless you had some sort of light source (you started with a torch in your backpack but it was pitiful). It was very easy and (good) frustrating to find your way around, and some races had advantages over others as they had infravision (elves) or even better, ultravision (dark elves). One of the first things I did when I played a new char was to kill a fire beetle and loot its glowing eye, which provided more light than a torch. Races that had infra/ultravision leveled up more slowly because of that advantage.

Unfortunately these were removed later as people got new video cards and learned they could just crank up their gamma setting, so they could choose 'faster' leveling races like humans without their drawback. Still, I remember with fondness being utterly lost in the elven forest at night, or in one of those nasty caves.

wolfing said:

Unfortunately these were removed later as people got new video cards and learned they could just crank up their gamma setting

Click to expand...

Should have been fairly easy for the developers to make everything black in the distance. The Amberstar/Ambermoon games did it like that and you really had to make use of light sources to see where you were going, although there was nothing akin to infravision. VtM Bloodlines offered a skill that let you see the aura of living beings in the dark or through walls.

I saw this in Baldur's Gate and couldn't really figure out it's use.

I set the game to show Infravision when the party is selected, but it didn't really help things much. I think it would have been more useful if there were something like ambushes used in the game. Say, a few bandits hiding behind a tree or something that would normally be hard to see. Then, if you have Infravision, you can see them and get the initial advantage.

Other than that, I can't really think of any use it had in Baldur's Gate.

I think may be useful to see invisible enemies ahead of time in NWN/2.