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

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).