Thanks for the reply, but I was referring to GTOS, and not GTMF or TW as in your link.
I've already enabled night battles. I'm talking about the standard darkness for night battles. In the version that I played a few weeks ago with no DLC, night battles (e.g. the first fight at Radgospnoye in the German Taranovka campaign) were pitch black. After downloading DLC and reupdating, the night battles wouldn't get as dark--you could see the terrain features.
I think I may be remembering it wrong--I may have bought the game and DLC all at once, but Steam b0rked the installation, so I was playing an old version of GTOS without knowing it. After reinstalling and updating properly, the pitch blackness was toned down with more light.
In this video, the map fades to black, completely obscuring terrain features, after the initial orders phase:
https://youtu.be/xv2rhzNk_tM?t=297In the most recent version of the game, it will only fade 75-85% of the way, allowing you to see pretty much all terrain features in a low-light condition. From what I've been able to gather, this was added in an update somewhere along the way because too many new players complained (most new players seem to start on the Taranovka campaign, like I did).
The original feeling of leading a few lost platoons in the darkened, howling, freezing, all-encompassing wasteland whose Leviathan expanse swallowed you whole was what made me fall in love with the game in the first place. And the tracers! The flares! The fire-lit explosions! What more needs to be said?
I also loved the fact that Graviteam had the balls to start you out on a night mission. Most other publishers would be far too afraid of scaring away new players to do that. But Graviteam's devotion to realism overrides all else, and I love that about them.
"Are night battles off-putting? Too bad, because historically, it was this dark at this time of night in this location for this campaign, so you're just going to have to deal with it."
In the current version, with the visible terrain features, the effect isn't quite the same, I must admit.
Does anyone know if it can be changed back via a setting in a config file somewhere?