A little Idea for Lights Out in the Future
Special stealth and Ambient Jumpscare events like Lights Out are amazing concepts, but they could get being completely ruined by players exploiting third-party brightness filters (Nvidia/Reshade) or maxing out the in-game gamma settings to gain an unfair advantage.
Instead of experiencing pure horror and darkness, honest players are getting sniped across the map by Killers or looped flawlessly by Survivors who turned their game into broad daylight.
To fix this issue without putting heavy strain on the engine, bhvr could change how the darkness is rendered during these specific events:
The Solution: True Black Fog Overlay (Anti-Filter Logic)
Currently, the mode just lowers the lighting, which filters can easily artificially boost. To counter this, the game should implement a Render-Layer Trick:
- True Black Post-Processing: Apply a 2D volumetric black fog overlay directly to the player's camera view after a certain distance (e.g., beyond 15 meters).
- The Tech Logic: In digital imaging, "True Black" (#000000) contains zero color data. External filters and in-game Gamma sliders can only multiply existing color values. If a pixel is programmed as True Black, no filter in the world can make it brighter—it stays completely black.
- Fair Play: This ensures that no matter what software or monitor settings a player uses, the absolute darkness beyond the event's vision radius remains pitch black for everyone.
Why this is a win for the game:
This simple shift in how darkness is coded would completely secure the competitive integrity of stealth events. It prevents cheating via settings, forces everyone to play by the same rules, and finally brings back the real horror element that Lights Out was meant to have.
Because in the Lights Out mode, I found out, that a lot of killers had their gamma set to the maximum, or otherwise used high brightness and color contrast, to gain an advantage (I’m on one of the biggest European Discord servers and have seen plenty of screenshots and video clips, so I know how bright most people set their game). Since playing as a survivor frustrated me, I only played the event mode as a killer after that. I definitely had more fun facing and playing against the survivors fairly, and I received positive feedback, especially since I scared many of them half to death xD
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