It alway amazes me how the trolls in this forum think all Larian does is perfect and there is no room for feedback/improvement/complaints.
The rest camp shown so far is the total opposite of immersion, where it shows a huge camp out of nowhere. It needs a lot of improvement to even be believable.
The D/N cycle in BG2 was not perfect but it was nice and had some consequences on gameplay as well.
No one is a troll just for disagreeing with you, or for defending Larian’s decisions. Feedback and suggestions are good. Complaints can be useful too, but some complaints are just over the top. Such as this:
Not having day/night cycle is a major immersion breaker. Also I hope exploration is not like in DOS2. They are taking away all the attention to detail that BG2 had. And all of that because of multiplayer.
Clearly Larian are putting a huge amount of detail in the game that wasn’t part of the originals. According to the interview posted earlier, they found that some of their systems didn’t work with a day/night cycle. Or at least they couldn’t find a way to make them work.
One of those is co op multiplayer, which you or I may not personally care about, but it’s really big deal for many people.
The other is how the game reacts to the choices you make, which is something I do care about. Despite the huge increase in computing power since the 90s, RPGs haven’t really improved on what I think should be a fundamental part of the game. Some would argue they’ve generally gone backwards, with choices making little real difference or only changing the ending. Now we have 2 big RPGs coming where the developers say they are trying to make your choices really matter throughout the game- BG3 and Cyberpunk 2077. How well they manage that remains to be seen, but I think certain fans of the old games should at least give them a chance before writing it off for being different.
I’d have also liked there to be a day/night cycle, NPC schedules, etc, but not if it would mean throwing out other things they are trying to do. It’s not going to happen anyway, so it’s probably better to concentrate on feasible changes to what is in the game, such as the camp system.
I agree that the camp as presented so far seems weird. I suspect there’s scope for improving it during early access.
The closest example I know of is Dragon Age Origins. That doesn’t have a day/night cycle either and the camp seems similar as you can talk to your companions and a couple of other characters (the dwarfs) show up. It doesn’t seem weird though, as it’s only accessible from the world map.
In D&D however resting replenishes spell slots, and in BG 1&2 you can rest anywhere outside of towns. What seems odd in the gameplay demos is that you appear to set up camp wherever you hit the rest button, but the environment doesn’t currently reflect that. I see 2 options that might improve it-
1. Change the camp environment according to where you are. The downside to that is your camp will grow will various follows, and they could seem to appear out of nowhere as you said. Also making the camp environment work for wherever you are could be hard to program.
2. Have a more permanent camp, perhaps on the edge of each map and make it so a long rest really means returning to your camp (maybe fast traveling you back). There should probably still be different camp environments, but they’d only need to design one per map.
I think the second makes most sense from what I’ve seen so far. It would be similar to Dragon Age Origins which works pretty well IMO, and it’s probably the simplest change. Although I’d have to actually try it to give proper feedback.
I also hope we’ll also be able to stay in taverns and that will have have some advantage. Maybe eventually get a house in the city or something?
