I think the day-night cycle sounds nice and good and first, but in my experience with games with day-night cycle it ends up being annoying when you have +50h ingame.
I remember in Elder scrolls games or Arcanum to come back to the city to sell something and find all the shops closed. So you have to wait till morning
You want to deliver a fetch-and-carry trophy to your questgiver and you have to track him/her because he/she went to sleep or back to their shop, so you have to wait until morning
You talk in the daytime with your fencer that wants you to "borrow" some trinket from someone in the city and of course, you have to wait till nighttime so they´re sleeping or till later so no one is at home.
Since day and night passes every 30mins-1h sometimes passes entire days without you sleeping or eating, and that is more unrealistic and immersion-breaking than go to sleep to your camp at nighttime.
All is fine at first, but when you are doing it for the umpteenth time it is not really that fun.
And that happens in SP mode if we are talking about MP mode things got much more complicated.
In previous versions of D&D, the day/night cycle was more important: clerics and druids regain spells at morning (or dusk for undead evil priests), some spells like summon shadow you cannot cast in daylight, etc... and I will be more interested in a day-night cycle if it has some kind of effect ingame, not merely a cosmetic change.
During the original Divinity: Original Sin crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, the very last stretch goal mentioned a day and night cycle, NPC schedules and weather systems. All of these could have impacted NPCs, monsters and magic. Do you still discuss the possibility of making a truly simulated game world at some point in the future?
Adam: I do in my own head constantly. I think it's a very different game. One of my favorite games of all time is Ultima Seven and it was the first game that I played that had proper NPC behaviors. You could wait for someone to go to the pub and then you could rob their shop. I love stuff like that, but a game that's built like that does very different things. We are very, very story focused as well and there's things that you lose. Also: multiplayer. We're a multiplayer game and day-night cycles in multiplayer becomes incredibly complicated. We're doing so many really complex things already that we know are going to be really good that, on top of that, it wouldn't fit this game.
I love simulated worlds and we have a lot of that stuff in there. We don't do the day-night cycle but we do the things where things in the world happen because you caused them to happen and they can happen off-screen. So, there are things happening off-screen. The world isn't just what you see on your screen. There are events that happen and things that will, because of the choices you've made, things will happen elsewhere. Those are real, those are systemic. Our systems are running in the background the whole time. There are incredibly deep systems. Some of them don't make sense for this game, but yeah, we think about it and we've talked about it.
https://wccftech.com/baldurs-gate-3-pax-east-interview-listening-to-fan-feedback-adding-raytracing/If that´s the reason they do not make a day-night cycle I can live with it.
