It fits neatly in the list of worthless graphics effects, such as chromatic aberration, vignette and motion blur. For some reason graphics artists feel obligated to put those things into the game, while literally every single person I know that plays the game, immediately turns those things off the first time they play.
I don't need the game to simulate the way my eyes adapt to brightness, my own eyes and my bright HDR monitor do a much better job of creating a real experience. Just remove that effect entirely.
I don't need the sun to be so bright that it takes up half of the skybox. The skybox would be much prettier if it had a realistic sun.
I don't want to literally spend half an hour in the settings menu, just because of the sheer amount of things I need to disable, just to make it somewhat playable. Graphics designers at EA should really consider having a "gameplay first" mentality where they just turn those things off by default.
What I do need is proper lighting inside of buildings. No building should be dark inside.
What I do need is soldiers that stand out from the background.
soldier models have like a light-grey contrast around them when they are in the dark, and muzzle flashes are powered by the sun itself making the entire player model glow. It's actually super distracting. may need to adjust your brightness levels in the settings. I'm also using nvidia vibrancy to make the game a little more colorful, maybe that's why I notice the contrast "fuzz" around player models more.
I don't think it should be necessary to rely on external tools just to make the game display proper contrast. Adjusting brightness does not work for me. If I raise the brightness, I may see better in the dark, but as a result the normal lighting becomes blown out.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like I can't physically see people, but having too much grey-on-black or grey-on-grey contrast is just very taxing to the eyes. It's like you easily overlook things unless you really focus on trying to see small details. Similar issues occur when you have shadows in exterior spaces.
It's a bit hard to describe, but it's like the dark areas in the game lack a proper refraction of the light. This in turn causes the dark areas to look extremely flat. It's this flatness of the light that makes it harder to contrast objects from the background, especially when they are stationary.
If you've ever used raytracing, you know how things subtly seems more real compared to rasterized lighting? It's because the light more accurately reflects on surfaces and that helps with creating the contrast necessary for depth perception. That isn't to say that rasterized lighting is bad. My point is that proper lighting can help with depth perception.
The lighting in general is not great either, but in addition to the exposure blow-outs.
Indoor lighting is especially lacking.
