Darkness Unleashed

As familiar and satisfying as the gameplay on your favorite level can be, repetitiveness quickly becomes an issue, especially when coupled with the original development studio dropping support for the title as they focus on the sequel. This is where community-made modifications come to the rescue, providing passionate players with game-changing projects such as Darkness Unleashed.

One way of increasing the re-playability potential of content as difficult to develop and balance as maps is by offering a dynamic setting for the time of day, which could either follow a certain time zone or server time-lapse, depending on the granularity of the game engine’s capabilities.

Given the lack of native support for this feature, a more flexible approach in the form of custom presets can be applied according to the server admin’s preferences thanks to the mod at hand, which not only alters the overall atmosphere of the map in question, but it also requires players to change their strategies and emphasize stealth when it comes to infantry-focused gameplay.

Those who prefer an even more challenging setting can opt for increasing the fog presence throughout the nighttime levels for strategies that prioritize teamwork when spotting and clearing areas of enemies — an experience akin to certain missions from Battlefield 3’s campaign.

Since the AI can be cumbersome to adapt to conditions designed to be fully effective on real players, if you happen to prefer training against bots, the ability to increase the visibility of bullet tracers should come in handy to aid you in figuring out the positions of enemies whose vision may otherwise be unaffected by the mod’s changes.

By making use of the customization potential provided by Battlefield 3’s dedicated modding platform, Darkness Unleashed allows players to not only devise new strategies for existing maps, but also change the gameplay style to a slower-paced one, in contrast with the original sandbox-based vanilla experience.