Dim the lights

Normally I rant here about numbers.  Sometimes I fuss about progressive politics and how it relates to games.

Today I am here to be grumpy about mood lighting.

In Battle For Azeroth there are a real variety of dungeons with a wild expanse of aesthetics and styles.  I like that!  There is a silly pirate town with a pirate boss riding a parrot, a dank prison on a remote island, and a goblin factory / research lab full of robots and mad scientists.

When I think about which dungeons I want to visit again and again though, there is an obvious pattern.  The dungeons I want to visit most are the ones where I can see what is going on.

Waycrest Manor is the best example of this.  The aesthetic of the place is a old manor house infested with witches, ensorcelled servants, magically animated constructs, and horrors.  It is dark, gloomy, and hits the look perfectly.  Heck, it even has an endless lightning storm going on so that when you are outside in the courtyard fires start from lightning strikes.  Great!

But you spend most of your time in this dungeon in a narrow corridor with dark brown walls, dark brown floor, dark brown ceiling, and dark monsters.  Sometimes you have to go into an alternate realm that changes the colouration of the place, and that places a dark purple tint on everything.  It is maddening!  It is so hard to see what is going on, and when mechanics require you to dodge stuff on the ground that makes it even worse.

With perfect room lighting it is workable, but my computer is in a room with windows, and under those conditions Waycrest Manor is just unplayable.  I can't see anything that is going on, because the entire screen is just a mess of darkness.

There are two ways that restricting vision usually happens - either lighting, as described above, or by restricting space.  Narrow hallways and low ceilings can be a struggle, but they are workable.  Low light conditions are, by themselves, a thing I am okay with.  But bother together is just misery and I hate it.

It is no coincidence that I want to run Freehold over and over.  It is outdoors with lots of room to move, has good lighting so I can see what is happening, and even includes a variety of routes to choose from in an open format. 

I get that people want a variety of aesthetics.  I can see the appeal to an old manor house, or a dank dungeon.  But Blizzard needs to resist the urge to make restricted areas also dark areas, even though that totally makes sense.  It just causes me to rage at the computer, desperately playing Battle With The Interface trying to figure out what the heck is going on.  I don't mind challenging mechanics and tricky choices - in fact, I quite like it!  But squinting at my computer, being unable to know what is even happening, doesn't feel like challenging or interesting - just frustrating.

Even if I get less variety in style and look, I want open format dungeons where I can choose my route, see what I am doing, and feel like I have choices.  Narrow dungeon corridors are a staple of old school fantasy gaming, but they mostly function to limit player choice, and that just isn't a compelling reason to continue to include them in the future.