That's normal ... If you look at the fire with the Gamma your screen will fade to black

how can it be normal to go completely blind when near a fire? its night time, want to be cosy, not be completely incapacitated.

well if you think about it in an Irl aspect if its completely pitch black outside with no Light eventually you would be able to see because your eyes would adjust to the dark, now Flick a light on shining into your eyes now Shut it off, guess what you just went Completely Blind, because your eyes adjusted to their being light, Same thing ingame.

So you just have to take down the gamma :)

I think HDR quality option adds it's 5 cents.

the effect is stupid and way too strong, i hope it changes with the new renderer (i am quite sure it will)

Have you found yourself "blinded" looking at the Moon yet?

I hope this changes with the new renderer too

I've had this issue where I'll look directly at a camp fire in the night and won't even look away yet the entire world renders as black except the camp fire, glowsticks that are 'broken' and flares, there won't be any light, the objects themselves glow though and are the only visible items for a few seconds to a minute (or if you run far enough away) and by completely black, I mean that I took a screenshot and tested the colour values (RGB) and it returned 0,0,0 across the entire screen except where there were glowing objects.

While I agree that looking at a light source should force the character's eyes to adjust (camera exposure and all that) I doubt the entire world turning to perfect black is intended. I tested this with HDR set to 16-bit (low) as oppoosed to 8-bit (very low)

Gamma was default value (1.0)