Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta The loss of Day & Night Schedules.

The forums were down this weekend, which is probably why there isn't a discussion on this topic here already (I'm aware there are some on the blog and elsewhere, however).

Personally, I'm really disappointed with losing this feature, as it's the sort of thing that greatly increases immersion for both I and the friends I play these types of games with. We were also looking forward to the advantages certain builds might have at night (rogues, for instance), certain creatures becoming more dangerous after the sun sets, and even just the cosmetic changes in a way an area looks at different times of the day.

However, I more than understand the amount of work involved and in no way fault the developers for having to remove this feature. I only wish they had more money and manpower to push ahead on this front, but sometimes that's just out of a developer's hands. I want to make it clear that I am thoroughly impressed with the amount of progress I see being made with each update; sadly, there are a lot of crowd-funded projects out there that seem to be standing still in comparison (and some of these projects have vastly superior funding and much larger development teams available). In many ways Larian Studios really puts a lot of other development studios to shame.

I guess my real disappointment is aimed at the amount of flexibility the game allows, which ultimately had a large hand in interfering with the implementation of day & night schedules. While I completely understand that being able to kill any NPC (including questgivers) and having absolute freedom is important to many players, that kind of chaotic, haphazardly (and even malicious) adventuring just isn't the style in which I or my friends play these types of role-playing games.

Thus, we've gained the playstyle flexibility that really benefits only some portion of the playerbase at the cost of losing day & night schedules, which is a feature that (whether you appreciated it or not) would have had an impact on the gameplay of *everyone*. And, to me, that's not a tradeoff I'm particularly thrilled about. Try to understand that I will never run around randomly killing townsfolk and questkillers, so having this level of freedom and flexibility is simply useless to folks like myself. The best enthusiasm I can muster on that end is saying "Hurray for you..", with "you" being the players that like to run around killing everyone for some reason I will never quite fathom.

At the same time (and again), I completely understand that this sort of gameplay freedom is extremely vital for some players. I'm just not sure I agree with the decision to support an option that impacts a portion of the playerbase over an option (day & night scheduling) that impacts everyone. However, that's a decision that needed to be made a long time ago, early in development, and not something that can be changed now. Obviously (at the time) Larian Studios was convinced they could pull off both - things just didn't work out that way in the end.

Ultimately, I just want to say this is a feature that will be missed. In the time leading up to the announcement I've seen several comments on the forums that implied some players didn't care about day & night scheduling, and I didn't want the developers to think that everyone felt that way; some of us were really looking forward to it. I hope Divinity: Original Sin is such a huge success that it's a feature that can be eventually added after launch. I would love to see day & night cycles added as simply a cosmetic change (even if it doesn't alter gameplay in any way), but I realize that's probably just wishful thinking.

I'm not upset really. I understand why it was done. It's something that can be patched in later. I would, however, love if they are able to get it in before physical copies ship. But, again, no major big really.

I understand, I wouldn't have minded even a purely cosmetic day/night system. It is unfortunate, and Larian probably shouldn't have promised things they couldn't deliver on (and hopefully they'll learn from this overreach).

But I have to disagree that it was just a simple matter of cutting out things like killable NPC's. Day/Night cycles are not an easy thing to do, never mind bug-test. We're talking potentially several thousand bugs just from that.

In the Twitch.tv Q&A, Swen didn't say whether it would be patched in or if it was completely scrapped, but from the tone, I don't think he's that optimistic about being able to get them in. He said that to get them in the way it was envisioned, it'd cost about 30-40% of what the whole game cost to make.

Personally, I don't think it's getting patched in. At best, we may see a cosmetic day/night thing, but even that could disrupt the atmosphere of some sections and ruin the mood.

I'm mainly going by the explanation given in Swen's blog:

"The freedom we give players, coupled with the fact that we are introducing a unique type of cooperative multiplayer, makes for a very complicated quality assurance experience. You just have to look at a few of the “Let’s Play” videos to see that the level of imagination of players apply to abusing our game is boundless.

..

But sometimes, when I’m really tired, I silently wonder… Maybe we should’ve gone for linear storytelling through fixed cut scenes with nice, easily manageable bottlenecks. And oh yeah, maybe we shouldn’t have allowed the player to kill everybody. Or steal quest items. Or do everything in whatever sequence they want to…

Life would be so much easier."

The gist of it seemed to be that all this freedom has created a disturbing (but completely understandable) amount of bugs that needs to be addressed - so many that there simply isn't time to fix them *and* implement day & night schedules, *and* then find and address all the bugs that would likely introduced by including that massive system (especially when coupled with the freedom Divinity:OS allows) on top of the existing game.

While I appreciate that the game offers the level of freedom that it does, most of it is lost on my style of play, and thus not worth the tradeoff (to me). On the other hand, for some players I'm sure it is more than worth it. There is no right or wrong way to want to play this game, but a system one person appreciates another may find pointless.



I would like to see it even as a cosmetic change, but it doesn't seem likely. In the blog it said:

"One alternative would’ve been to put in a day/night cycle without a lot of reactivity from the npcs, just for the sake of being able to say that we’ve done it, but that’s something we didn’t want to do. The vision driving Divinity:Original Sin has been that every feature which is in there has real gameplay value and isn’t a gimmick."

..which I understand. However, for someone who plays Divinity like I do, features like the freedom to kill any NPC/questgiver might as well be a novelty gimmick: it's neat to say the game has it, but in the end not anything I'll ever make use of. Day & night schedules, however, would have been a gameplay feature that impacted every single player. I almost wish a vote on which feature to implement had been put forward a year ago when the kickstarter campaign began. I'm struggling to believe there are just that many players out there that absolutely need to have the option of killing any and every NPC or doing other activities that would normally break most games (and are thus prohibited).

I think the main draw to the fact that you can kill any NPC is the added flexibility that implies the game has (head out of town immediately, and the game will be fine with encountering quest related NPCs, etc, without talking to the main quest giver first). Even if you never attack a friendly NPC, there are multiple quest paths that you can take, which adds to the replay value.

Like most people here I'm sure. I've "finished" the Alpha a number of times and have done everything I believe possible. Honestly, I don't miss Day & Night. To me it is a nice to have but I rather them focus on the mechanics, story, and flexibility. The update was pretty awesome. And I'm already itching to finish the Beta again.

You can either focus on the downside that day & night schedules may not be a full part of the game, or you can recognize the freedom given to players in this game. Obviously I wish the day & night schedules were in the released game, especially being a kickstarter backer. However, I imagine there are difficult decisions made at this stage of every major game. Swen has been straight up with us throughout this process. Until he proves otherwise, I will put my faith in his judgement.

I hope it is not very difficult to add a simple day/night cycle via a mod to the main story line/main game. But i am only talking about a simple transition from day to night to day etc. I do not mean to also add NPC reaction/schedules, i.e. NO NPC reaction or anything more - just a simple day/night cycle, i.e. like a graphical feature! Because to me a day/night cycle very much adds to immersion. I do not mind NPCs not reacting to the cycle or any other consequences to the cycle.
REALLY hope this can be done easily.

I suppose given the choice, I would've sooner lost the multiplayer component, but the schedules and day/night things were really just the icing on the cake: I'd sooner have the game without them than not at all!

I wonder if the framework will be there for NPC schedules even if the schedules themselves remain unimplemented? That way I could add some of my own if the fancy takes me. And probably break stuff in the process.

Well, I think I've touched on the freedom concept a number of times, so I certainly recognize it and understand how important it is to some players. You're making it sound like that's escaped me, and it hasn't.

At the same time, it's caused an enormous amount of work which has now resulted in (to me) a more desirable (and certainly wider reaching) feature being cut. And that's disappointing, because it's a level of freedom that I'm honestly not likely to ever require simply because of the way I play RPGs. Thus, my appreciation for all that freedom is minimal. To me it's expensive fluff, one the game could have done without. Where as to someone else it may mean everything.

I don't (for example) randomly kill NPCs when I play through Divinity: OS. I don't even start a fight with the drunk guards at the bridge checkpoint. I'm not that chaotic or aggressive in my playstyle or role-playing that I need to kill off half the town without breaking the game in the process. To me, these are unrealistic avenues that I have no intention of going down, and so the fact that those alternate paths exist will always be meaningless to me. However, the impact it's had on Larian Studio's workload (which has resulted in the removal of the scheduling feature I strongly desired) is not meaningless to me. It's gone from expensive fluff to irritatingly expensive and costly fluff.

Obviously everyone will prefer one design element over the other and disagree on which one a game needs to be closer to perfection. Keeping that in mind, I recognize that players have the freedom to play through this RPG more haphazardly. But I'm not exactly going to throw a party over it, because it's a feature that is of no benefit to me personally, and the cost (I feel) was too high. It's a feature that will only benefit some players (while being completely lost on others like myself), where as day & night scheduling would have touched *everyone*. Unlike all that freedom, it's not a feature you have to seek out, it's a feature that pushes itself to the front and center every moment you're playing the game as the NPCs around you are reacting to both the changes in time and weather.

Of course, if you're more interested in just killing all those NPCs.. then who cares about scheduling, because you're going to be more interested in having freedoms and optional ways to cause havoc.

You are right, however, in that it was a difficult decision (both cutting day & night schedules, and allowing players to have as much freedom as they do) - the developers have said as much themselves.

Hah! That pairs nicely with what I said here:


..as I would be completely heartbroken to lose multiplayer, and my interest in this game would be substantially lessened without it. Where as other players could probably care less about multiplayer support because they have no interest in co-op.

It's too bad that day/night schedules won't be in the game, given how much work has been done in that direction already - adding second floor to the buildings, going to bed animations etc. I hope this partially done feature won't be glaring at us in a bad way throughout the gameplay.
Can some minor things still be implemented though?
Like, if there are two-story buildings in the game and the owners won't be going up to the second floor to sleep, then at least put some loot in there for us, because otherwise second floors would just be a useless empty space.
Also, thinking back at how it was done in Skyrim, I think sleeping in beds should recover players health and give some temporary beneficial boost (in Skyrim it was XP gain as I recall). Also, in Skyrim you get a special boost when you sleep with a spouse, same thing may fit very well in D:OS for those protagonists, who managed to bond during the course of the game - sleeping in bed together will get them some extra boost. I'm suggesting all of this because that way second floors at the inns can become more interesting - you could rent a room there. And to make things simpler for occupied houses, just put a message there that you can't sleep on the owner's bed because it's occupied (the other way, of course would be to implement a script for the owner to run up and kick you out of the house, or call the guards, but it may be too much work). I know, it probably won't be done with time running short, but it's something to consider as a way to tie up some loose ends with that failed day/night cycle implementation.
P.S. Also, if the game sells well, can day/night schedules implementation become a possibility later on in a form of an addon, DLC or somesuch?

I'm sorry but by your post is painfully obvious that it has.
You are oversimplifying one of the manifestations of this freedom as "killing everybody without rhyme or reason " and it goes beyond that, freedom implies divers ways to approach a quest apart from clicking everyone until they stop moving. And just because one specific options is not particularly interesting to you doesn't mean that is not an important part of the whole framework of actions.

Swen mentioned in the stream how confusing a special indication for quest items could be because of the plethora of options that the players has to solve a quest. If original sin is going to be even half as complex as the games mentioned as inspiration for it; factors like spells, information gathered, factions, previous quest results and a lot of other things that aren't just an alive/dead check are going to make the implementation of elaborate schedules hard.

Saying that any of those factors are pointless to you because of your game style is ignoring the fact that is thanks to the freedom of the game that you can have a game style in it.

It is what it is; I'm not unhappy the schedules are not in the game and they did add the basic mechanics so people can mod them in. I much rather see more focus on humour and richness (little details; bigger mazes; more dungeons; ...) then see them do a long drawn out fight trying to get night/day schedules to work well. Just my 2ct; every 100 room dungeon is worth 10x day/night; so if they can squeeze in a few more twisty little mazes by not doing day/night then it will make my day

Have to disagree. The multiplayer component to me is HUGE. There are plenty of single player CRPGs out there. To me MP makes this game for me. The co-op aspect is fantastic and I doubt that I would have sold this game by word of mouth to three other friends if the MP were not available.

It's not about killing random NPCs. It is about the freedom of how you approach a problem. I can pinpoint the exact moment that my sister and I became obsessed with this game.

It was our first play through and we wanted to find lots of gold to buy some cool gear we saw. We decided to break into a house - NOT realizing it was the "main bad person's" house. And low and behold we found all these clues, which then led us to more investigations. We essentially did the quest backwards and to our surprise it did NOT break the quest line. Which to me is AWESOME.

In my oldish age I grow tired of being rail roaded by games. The fact that we could do this even accidently was amazing to us and from that point on we were hooked.

I wish they would retain a day/night cycle atmosphere even without the NPC schedules to go along with them. I do understand and agree with the decision not to put in the NPC schedules though, even as a Kickstarter supporter that upped my pledge at the end to see it happen. I hope they consider putting the day/night cycle back in environmentally though, even if it means minimal game play change.

same for me, I am disapointed, I think this feature would have added many interesting mechanisms and made the world more "real". But I understand that this single feature represent a shitload of work. I just hope that this feature will be added later in an update or a mod...

I can only assure you that it hasn't. As far as "freedoms" (in regards to this particular topic) go, I believe we can summarize them as:

1) Multiple ways to advance a quest, which includes makings sure there isn't a set order in which to approach a quest.

2) The ability to kill any NPC without breaking the game.

Of the two, the latter has the most significant impact on production. The two are certainly linked, but the latter extends beyond the first in other ways. Are you seeing anything beyond those which I'm missing? If not, then I'm not oversimplifying it (although I do try and describe them in ways that are simple just for the benefit of the post).

And before they're mentioned, while mechanics like a classless design and a variety of skills and talents to choose from are certainly another form of freedom, they're not relevant to this specific topic.

You said..


..and these are all factors that another game with day & night schedules had to deal with (Skyrim). However, Bethesda prevented many problems by not allowing players to kill critical NPCs. This is something Divinity intentionally allows other players to do (despite the number of issues it causes), all in the name of freedom. And if it's an option you appreciate having, then great. For those of us that don't walk into virtual towns with the intentional of killing NPCs for giggles.. meh. I would have preferred less work on this front and more time spent on day & night scheduling instead.

In the end, a feature that only a portion of the playerbase will appreciate having has caused enough design headaches that we've lost a feature that would have impacted the entire playerbase. To me, that was a bad tradeoff. Day & night schedules would have had an impact on the gameplay of everyone, period. On the other hand, you could remove a significant portion of the freedoms we're discussing in this thread and players like myself wouldn't even notice.

Unfortunately, we are long past a point where anything can be done about that now (beyond expressing our disappointment or otherwise). But even that can be useful if it's kept in mind for the next game and/or future updates to this one.

I definitely wouldn't count on that. This doesn't seem be a "We can do day & night schedules, or we can squeeze in a few more dungeons" scenario. It sounds more like a "We can do day & night scheduling, or we can avoid bankruptcy and also get the game out with less bugs" choice. They're not looking to add more work at this point (which is understandable due to the number of bugs they appear to have to resolve still).

Maybe if the game sells really well, though.