Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks [NO SPOILERS!] What does Darkvision DO in the current BGIII version?

Just as the title says: I was considering what character to make but, having played tabletop, I understand how important Darkvision can be. Thus, if Darkvision has no notable mechanical effect like infravision from vanilla BG1 & 2, I'm more likely to choose a race without it.

Thankee!

Right now it appears to be mostly a cosmetic change...it makes the image on the screen be better lit for you, the player, to see better, but it no longer has impact on gameplay...gone are the early access days when you'd have to make attacks at a disadvantage. I guess in the end Larian decided it was just too much to ask of new players who had never played D&D to cope with.

So I've been spamming dancing lights without any real effect all this Time ? -_-

You can tell from the tooltips when your characters have Disadvantage to attack because of darkness, or "target obscured". Then you need a light source or Darkvision.

I think they changed many places from Early Access to not be dark anymore in full release. Which is understandable because those places weren't actually visually dark enough and you could see just fine. Getting a penalty was unintuitive.

Personally I think many parts of places like the Underdark should be darker, and areas shouldn't be so evenly lit. Darkvision and light sources should come into play more in combat and there should be a bigger contrast between darkness and light. Monsters who have advantage in the dark should make the most of it.

It's because they couldn't get it to work properly. Myself and others noticed quite early on that the light/dark mechanics didn't seem to work consistently and sometimes it seemed impossible to get a high enough light level to make the target obscured disadvantage go away, not lighting your weapon, not using dancing lights, not fighting in the middle of a fire puddle, while on fire, with your weapon lit up with the light spell (that one in particular, was an encounter I had).

Darkness in pnp is relatively easy to deal with in comparison, because you don't light a torch, only to have the dm tell you that it's still too dark to see (assuming normal non-magic darkness).