Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Day/Night Cycle and Dynamic Weather

I would love to see day/night cycle and having to do a long rest and eat something or suffer a level of exhaution everyday

I would like to see day/night cycle for several reasons.

1 - immersion
2 - giver me more versitility for stealth approach
3 - parties with low darkvision have more i sentive to go to camp at night
4 - i could finally stop seeing Astarion act like he's dying of poison and complain about sunlight every 5 minutes.

up
looking for more opinions

What is vaguely bizarre for me is that Larian claimed that "day/night was going to too much work to do right" (but hey, Larian, I would have been fine even just with day/night done just ok, frankly) and then they are now wasting their time and efforts to build up this a fairly convoluted "camp system" and all the rules for it, that even at its peak will probably always stay a poor replacement of the former.

I am definitely all for Day/Night Cycles and Dynamic Weather, I just highly doubt Larian will add them. Ultimately I get the feeling that their aim is not to create an immersive, open & dynamic world, but instead to tell a story and let the player influence parts of it. An area won't have a dark and stormy atmosphere unless it serves the story, the same for day/night.

I agree with those that say the lack of these features makes the world feel less alive, it makes things feel much more artificial.

100% down for it. I think that aside from simulating a more immersive world, the day/night cycle can actually add an entirely new gameplay element into certain quests.


Giving us the option to do certain quests at night - i.e. ones where you're stealing an item, or sneaking into a certain location makes a tons of sense. It'll also add an additional element for dark-vision races.

I have actually found day night cycles become irritating to me in current games. It is constantly cycling and I just keep exploring having to deal with low visibility periodically.

If a day night system should exist, it should be based on user decision to explore at night versus day. Beyond that it is just a cosmetic. Also with the inclusion in BG3 of darkness lowering chance to hit, night cycles make combat harder for non-nightvision characters, so that is another conscious decision by Larian to not have cycling day/night impacting combat.

We have to think how it impacts the game as a whole and not just "it would be fun if".

I felt the same about the system even in og BG. The only games who ever did anything interesting with day/night circle were the elder scrolls games, specifically the option to become a vampire in these games

Just rest... Many adventurers don't like traveling at night

Then comes the mechanics. Should day night cycles rotate every 10 minutes? 20 minutes? an hour? If it is too frequent then you are constantly resting, if it is too far between, people will be irritated that it takes too long. I really think a good implementation is to compromise and allow users to cycle the time by choice and adventure at night or in the day based on camp decisions.

Some quests can happen at night, it would be easier to act as a thief or assassin at night, add a new aspect of strategy with npc patterns of life. Less people moving around but more roaming guards, permit ambushes for certain encounters, etc.

That would be sweet, aren't there any mechanics / interactivity in D&D tied to day/night cycles too?

Anyone know if the DOS2/Larian engine supports global dynamic lighting?

Jeez, imagine mechanics tied to making contact with specific shadows, that would be rad.

While i would love Day/Night and weather cycles id like to start with a modest request of only weather cycles since they dont really need to do to much extra scripting, only check if is raining/lightly/downpour whatever..
And it would increase immersion and just the cool factor by a lot.

Id love for day/Night cycle as well but if that involves scripting each NPC in the game and extra quests and such maybe ay least add it without extra scripting just for the cool factor and specific quests like vampire related stuff

D&D is balanced largely around the question of resource management, namely day&night cycle.

When playing, this is handled by the DM along with the players through narration. But in a game like BG3, it becomes a little more difficult.

One issue I encountered while playing was the ever present feeling of cheating the game anytime I pressed the "rest" button. Because yes, resting in D&D is ALSO a resource to be managed.

And so, since I can rest anytime I want, reset my spells after every fight, engage every ambush with full hp with no cost whatsoever and succeed this way much more often... Well I feel like I deserve none of these successes.
"Well, then, just rest less often, you absolute inane QQ machine", you'll tell me (in more gentle words I hope). Your advice would be sane. But what do I gain by not resting? And what interval is the right one? Who decides? I have no DM to turn to, and the game gives me no obligation, no limitation, nothing to aim for. I just limped away from a fight against a horde of goblins, closed the makeshift door behind me and blew off the torches best I could. Now, surely, the goblins are looking inside every room to find me. But the magic button teleports me in a magical forest, where my magic campsite awaits, with weirdly uncomfortable-looking sleeping bags.
Right now, the campsite feels like it's nothing short of a level 6 "Druid Grove" spell or a level 7 "Mordenkainen Magnificent Mansion" spell. Only it's FAR better, as it's completely free and doesn't require casting time or anything.

Anyway, I'm belaboring the point. Bottom line is: it feels weird to not have days and nights. It causes me to second guess every single spellcast, leads me to feel like I don't deserve my successes and kinda breaks the spell&rest system a little bit. As it is, it's a poor way of managing resources.

+1 for Larian to at least consider adding some kind of day/night cycle.
For me it's more of a world building / immersion issue. It just feels stupid that everything is the same all the time, it's like as if the world is a theme park run by robots instead of being populated with what should be credible npc inhabitants that close their shops by night and either go sleep or get a drink in a tavern.

If they would add some kind of narrative reason for act1 to take place in eternal sunny afternoon I could live with it, but as it stands now it literally makes no sense to me.
It might make sense for a very good oriented party - as the day allows them to avoid certain light-averse creatures, but it certainly makes absolute no sense for a vampire spawn and priestess of Shar. It makes the whole 'evil' (or even 'unlawful' ) route unsatisfying. I'm especially worried for how this permanent noontime stuff will impact other area's and notably the city of BG or other larger settlements which imo will feel very static, artificial and forced because of the absence of day/night cycle also meaning there will be no 'activity' cycle, meaning the city wont be 'alive' but rather frozen in time at 12pm.

I am also unable to understand how WoTC agreed to this as the day/night , bad/good, dark/light thing seems a central idea of their world-building and it seems super weird to simply drop such an important element of what makes a world immersive and realistic. It feels ridiculous that Astarion and Shadowheart (it's even in her name ffs) would nicely go to bed once it gets dark. Especially considering the supposed urgency of the tadpole thingy and the fact that the act1 map is in fact very unsafe for travelers given the conflict with the goblins, it would make A LOT of narrative sense to simply travel during the night...

As it is now, I feel like having to watch Lord of the Rings, but instead of Frodo and Sam traveling trough Mordor, they are actually on the teletubbies while pretending to be in Mordor.

Only thing that gives me some hope is that I believe people at Larian are aware of this and maybe even willing to do something about it given day/night cycle was one of their DO goals that didn't make it. Given the record sales BG3 made in EA alone I really hope they address this as it's a bit of an embarrassment not being able to deliver on a feature which a) already existed in the 20 year old prequels and b) is an undeniable aspect of any modern game that has a world exploration aspect to it (RDRD2 , Assassins creed series, kingdom come, etc).

Please, also don't see this as a bad spirited critique, I love the game, I realize it's Larian's child and in the end it's up to them, I just wanted to emphasize the importance of the issue for me.

I'm very much in agreement about the issue of long resting all the time. It takes away a huge portion of the balance of 5e when you only get one short rest per long rest (and short rests are handled poorly too)

It would improve the game if there was a limit to how often you could long rest. And maybe tie "camp scenes" to short rests too. That way we can still go to camp, and get the scenes, without long resting all the darn time.

They should bring in the short rest mechanics of hit dice etc as well. (and maybe reducing the number of consumables that restore health somehow). I'm sure people will find another way to scum around any constrants though, but right now the game is poorly balanced around long rests..

I've said quite a lot on this topic in other threads concerning day/night cycle and weather, so I'll just add this: it makes the world so much more believable and alive. Immersive. I don't know how many people here played it, but for me implementation of time passage was great in the first Witcher game. It was very much eurojank, but it had an amazing atmosphere, and a part of that was how the world changed with time. A lively (if very troubled and quite grim) city became different at night - it made you uneasy and wary of whatever creature may have been prowling the night. City outskirts, populated by hard-working people during the day, turned dangerous after nightfall, when all sorts of monsters (sometimes in human form) would crawl out. The music (excellent in this game) reflected this very well. And the weather - once it started raining, all the people rushed to flock under any roof they could find. Townswomen took joy in spitefully wishing it would rain on their neighbours' laundry. The world felt alive, not as a setpiece - and it was a game that had to overcome many technical challanges.

I agree.

Not sure how it work, but I guess it could be "easy" to add a cosmetic D/N cycle (i.e after 30 IG minutes, an animation/cinematics pops up and when the load is done, you're in the world at night).
It would add a great value to the game even if it's only cosmetic.

Resting and ressources management is another problem that has to be solved a way or another.

Could we at least get some weather?!

Yes, +1 to OP and everyone who wants a damn day/night cycle and weather. As of now, even though the world Larian crafted is visually stunning, it feels too stale, too safe.

You've got no idea how disappointing it is to rest with the knowledge you won't be beset by bandits, or ambushed by any other beastie out there. As of now, there is absolutely no danger in resting after every fight. Why would you short rest when long rest is much better? It all needs some rebalancing. Not to mention racial abilities like darkvision (or the spell) could actually become useful outside of dungeons/the Underdark.

But the biggest disappointment of it all is: Larian has stated multiple times they aren't planning on implementing day/night cycle in the game. I do hope that we can get them to reconsider. I mean, very old games, archaic by today's standards had day/night cycles, hell, even some semblance of a weather (both BGs, both Icewinddales, both NWNs and the list goes on). It can't be that hard to change some visuals, add a clock and make some racial skills activate on night time. Mind you, I know nothing about game development, so I could be entirely wrong about the 'hard' part.

There already seems to be a main light source that moves, it happens when loading in and looks like fast forwarding a couple hours. Not sure what this is about.

Not having a day/night cycle is such a pity, the gameplay of nightly raids alone or seeing the landscape at night. Some locations like the goblin camp would look even more stunning if they held their celebrations at night.
Astarion could get a slight boost at night etc etc

Dragon Age had frozen in time maps and it was incredibly strange to return to such stagnating maps.