Battlefield 3 night time mod is a tense stab in the dark

Modder Kiwidog has turned out the lights on some of Battlefield 3's brightest maps. The mod snuffs out the sun, but surfaces can still be illuminated by gun fire, street lights and explosions. The results are surprisingly tense and, thanks to Frostbite 2's extraordinary lighting capabilities, strangely beautiful. Smoke seems to have its own gentle illumination, which makes it possible to pick out foes as silhouettes among the debris. Check out these videos of the mod in action, spotted over on PCGamesN .

The mod will be running on private, punkbuster-free servers for now, but the night time mod demonstrates that it's possible to monkey around with Frostbite 2. Months before Battlefield 3 came out, DICE exec Patrick Söderlund poured cold slime over the possibility of mod tools. "If you look at the Frostbite engine, and how complex it is, it's going to be very difficult for people to mod the game," he said.

But WHY, Patrick? "Because of the nature of the set up of levels, of the destruction and all those things… it's quite tricky. So we think it's going to be too big of a challenge for people to make a mod." Oh.

Not too big it seems. Here's a trailer, and footage of some chaps fighting on a pitch black Grand Bazaar:

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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.