Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Day and night cycles NPC

Although I'll probably never use it, I'm glad the priority is on co-op play. I'm on the fence about day/night cycles; it seems few games use it properly anyway and spending a lot of time sleeping just to get to a day cycle to do something is foolish. I'm not saying Larian wouldn't make it worth our while, but I'm with the studio on it's decision.

Is it premature to start brainstorming on what kind of incremental features we would like to see in a day/night cycle mod? It's one of the things I plan to take a look at when the toolset is released and it could be helpful to start compiling a list of reasonable modifications now and then evaluate what is most feasible once we get under the hood. I have my own ideas, but I would like to hear other opinions.

For instance, I suspect one of the easiest things to do first would be strictly enabling the environmental changes. Then perhaps we could contemplate buffs or penalties to certain abilities and/or creatures based on time of day. Then we may want to target specific quests for having a day/night schedule where it would be particularly fun or interesting.

Obviously, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to implement a comprehensive day/night cycle for the game, but I think it would be fun to start thinking about the low hanging fruit that would still supply additional fun to those who really wanted to see some of this in the game.

That's what I was thinking too. Simply allowing the time of day to cycle and change without affecting the world should be doable. In enemy infested areas where you more or less just fight it should be possible to change the enemy spawns based on the time of day or simply implement sleep schedules for the lowly bandit equivalents roaming around. It would be also be cool if we could create perks that would be effective against sleeping targets to go hand inn hand with this. The heavily populated areas and quest givers will likely be much more difficult to alter but it wouldn't hurt to try.

Actually by the end of the Kickstarter, the final stretch goal was ever so slightly out of reach (after tallying up paypal). In the Kickstarter ending stream they said that because it was so close they would do it anyways.

Now I am not sure if they stopped accepting paypal pledges at the same exact moment with Kickstarter but I would assume so. But if that is not the case it may in fact be that the goal was actually reached (the site certainly lists is as achieved, however, that could just reflect the verbal promise during the stream as well as actually reaching it).

Either way, they overestimated what they could do timewise basically (not to mention the release was technically pushed back once already afaik). So rather than try and do it and push back the release even further or potentially run out of money before it is complete they chose to axe it. The update video talking about this explains the "why" of it pretty well.

The gist of it being that it would complicate existing systems and require way more time to test and develop than they have resources for, and rather than compromise their vision of this feature because of constraints they chose not to do it at all. However, the engine and editor support for it already exists so it is more accurate to say that the main campaign will not be using it rather than it not being done at all is my basic understanding of the situation. Of course outside of aspiring modders and content creators this is poor consolation but better than nothing.

It's a risk you take isn't it? There's no signed contracts between the backers and developers. Backers are not shareholders in the company. I think you are much better off just acknowledging that putting money in Kickstarter is always a gamble. You may or may not get a feature, you may or may not even get a game. In this situation I think it's a bit presumptuous to start demanding features. Of course the devs want everything mentioned to be put in their games, but they do have to make a reality check.

They need to leave day and night cycle in even without NPC schedules. Without day and night cycle game won't feel as immersive and as good... PLEASE have a day and night cycle in game on release and when you have money/time if ever add NOC schedules. I'd rather have day and night cycle without NPC schedules than nothing at all.

Really? No day/night cycles? That is a bummer...