Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Day/Night Cycle

OK. I know this has been said before, but I'm gonna repeat a bit with some new stuff.

First, I love the new nighttime sequence at the end of the prologue.

That said, you didn't carry it over to the beach. Suddenly, it's broad daylight. So that's a bit odd. I was all excited that it was going to be dark out on the beach and slowly get lighter, but instead it was like night, then you threw a switch and suddenly it is day.

Then, on top of that, I've said it before and I'll say it again here, it's weird to go from night to day to "Let's rest" shortly after meeting Shadowheart at the door of the ruins. Night, day, then first camp to end day happens all within a few minutes of gameplay IF you listen to the game tell you that you should long rest shortly after fighting the intellect devourerers. If you don't do this, and you put off camping, you put off story elements or skip them entirely.

So, I get it if you still don't want to implement a realtime clock with day-night cycles and weather. I think that'd be the most awesome and immersive gameplay, but I also get that it would be a huge change and hard to implement without overhauling the budget.

Therefore, how about this idea? Keep everything dark as your character stands up on the beach and you take control. However, instead of your character being fully healed up and rested, have them carry over whatever injuries, etc. they had in the prologue at the end. Thus, they might need to, from a gameplay perspective, rest to recover spells and hp. As the character is moving east, have it start to get brighter as if the sun is rising. By the time you reach Shadowheart, have it be in that in between stage where it is not quite dawn. You have your conversation with her. Then, as you conclude your conversation with her, the sun has peaked on the horizon off to the east. Bam, start of a brand new day.

After this, fight the intellect devourerers. Then, instead of a tutorial tooltip saying that you can long rest to recover and call it a day, have your character think something like, "After everything we've been through in the Hells, I know a new day just started, but maybe we should find a place to camp and rest. I think I need some time to recover after all that. Besides, it might be good to have a base camp." Then display the tutorial long rest tip. Thus, the game is suggesting to the player that they should call it a day even though they just started the day. This then guides players to have that first night story convo with Shadowheart, and they don't miss it because they're thinking, "Rest? Already? That's dumb."

Then, if you don't long rest, you continue however long you want as normal, and if you miss that convo then you miss it. No big deal. When you do eventually long rest, show the cutscene where you first make the camp your own. However, make it a daytime scene instead of night. Since it is day until you long rest, it should be a daytime scene when you first find the camp and make it your own.

Now, add a cutscene or two that shows the party spending time at the camp during the day and then again at night, doing different things like sharpening weapons, talking, eating and drinking, etc. simulating that they have been at the camp for some time. Use this cutscene, or similar cutscenes each and every time the player chooses to long rest, making them skipable for those who hate immersion. Thus, you are showing that whenever you long rest they aren't just teleporting to camp and it is suddenly night. They are going to camp and resting there for hours before it gets dark and then the nighttime camp scenes occur. This creates the illusion of time without having to implement the realtime clock with day/night cycles.

BUT...You still need a better way to nudge players to long rest for more story content. You need to give them a reason to long rest at camp more often. I pretty much missed a ton of story the first several times I played through because I was trying to go as long as possible without calling it a day. I don't mind calling it a day more frequently if I have a good reason for it. Right now, however, it seems actually counter-productive to ever long rest unless I absolutely have to since I know that every day moves me one step closer to a mind-flayer tadpole turning me into a monster. I need to be practically made to long rest since I know that every day counts.

So, allowing 2 short rests is fine, but there should be a potential risk even to do this. If you short rest, you might trigger a random encounter. The more dangerous the area, the more chance of a random encounter. This will force players to either long rest or fast travel to camp to short rest. Don't allow resting at all in areas like the Druid's Grove. Then, whether it is calling it a day or just short resting at camp, allow story conversations to occur while at camp. That way, people aren't missing out on a lot of good dialogue simply because they aren't long resting.

Make food NOT able to heal people unless they do a short or long rest. As long as I have plenty of health regen items like potions and food, I'm going to push the party as far as I can in a single day, like I did my first few playthroughs. Food should be needed to recover when short resting or long resting. Consume certain quantities of food based on how much HP you recover while resting, and that's the only time it heals you. Thus, you may start running low on recovery items and spells and be forced to end the day to long rest and recover, or at the very least port to camp to short rest safely. This also gives you a reason to pick up all the food items you can find and even makes sense as to why you would send them to camp instead of keeping a ton on you. It also gives you a reason to fight a battle or two and maybe call it a day, since you will need to in order to manage healing items more effectively. So potions are more important, food has a unique use, and so do long and short rests. AND, on top of it all, you nudge players to rest at camp more often to trigger more story so they don't miss out. AND, you simulate day/night more effectively, showing that they aren't just waking up, adventuring for ten minutes and then it is suddenly night and they should go to bed. AND, you no longer need characters to say, "Let's call it a night," after they've only been adventuring for 10 minutes and they haven't even used any spells or lost any HP.

It makes me wonder how long was i falling ...
Or how long was i hanging head down over that beach. O_o

Really ?
That's not how it look at all because as soon as you're in the game, there's an animation of the character falling.

I have the exact same feeling as OP. It looks wierd at all.

I'm also very hyped by those night cinematics but it doesn't have any sense without a D/N cycle.
Even a cosmetic D/N would add a great value to the game and I heard that a mods added it in DoS... So I guess it's not so hard especially with the rest system.

1) Long rest = sleeping at night. When you wake up, short cinematic from night to day.

2) 1st short rest = short cinematic from daylight the end of the day (before the night, don't know the EN word)

3) 2nd short rest = short cinematic from the end of the day to night

1) Long rest = begin at night, then short cinematic from night to day...

Of course a real D/N with a real impact on shadows and light + characters moving or sleeping would be better. This unliving world would sudeenly become alive.

This is brilliant idea!
You really should post it in feedback, so it dont get lost around here. :-/

Its not a priority.
Cringy cinematic short dialogues with non essential world characters is more important than silly day/night cycles that create atmosphere and more opportunity to RP with unique quests.

Thank you^^
I already mention this a few monthes ago but who knows what's lost and what is read.....

I guess +500 Reddit upvote are necessary for devs to consider an Idea...

I honestly don't care a whole lot how they do day/night. It just needs to make sense. I feel like as I play I have no concept of time and yet I'm racing against it with a tadpole in my head. And I love story, so I'm constantly afraid I'm missing out on story unless I frequently head to camp to end my day.

Just as long as they have in options the ability to turn these animations off. Yeah they would be cool for first few times, than it would just be a matter of spacebarring to ignore it. Animations can easily be over done.

You just click to stop the 6 sec cinematic... Like in the old BG games.... It's just a transition from a situation to another.

Right. Let us have the cutscenes with skip in case you don't like them.

Very true. The current time/rest system doesn't mash at all with the plot they've chosen to go with, even moreso because pre-first dream they never really try to ease up on the sense of urgency.

Immersion is not Larian focus.

To be honest I find day/night cycles fairly unimmersive just because the days and nights pass in the span of minutes while I've been watching my character move and talk in real time the whole time. I prefer this "the questing day is as long as you make it" strategy because I can imagine my characters being worn out after a couple big fights and wanting to rest the rest of the day.

The simplest way to fix the transition between the ship falling at night and the game beginning in the day is to just NOT have a falling animation when you hit the beach. Have you wake up. It implies you fell unconscious when the magic energy dropped you on your head.

Also the sense of urgency problem was largely fixed with Nettie getting a ton of new dialogue. She now explains to you that your tadpole isn't changing you and that it doesn't seem like it is going to change you for the foreseeable future, which informs you the player that you can take long rests more frequently.

It still isn't perfect because it seems like the game is designed assuming you rest before you ever meet Nettie, as meeting Nettie will trigger the Raphael scene and overwrite you making camp. But it is a big step toward smoothing out the gameplay vs narrative conflict the resting system creates.

My biggest issue is that story is often missed if you don't end day frequently. Regardless of what Nettle says, more than one person says to get a healer and fast, so I don't want to end day often. Natural tendency is to push on as much as possible. Thus, I miss story because I don't end day every 10-20 minutes of gameplay or whatever.

My second biggest issue is that there have been times I literally long rested, ran through Blighted Village, and no fights and a party member said they were tired and we should call it a day just because they had some dialogue to share.

I just think, if you want to only have major dialogue at camp, give me reason to go to camp to dialogue other than end day. Make any time you go to camp a time to potentially dialogue and make it so that camp is the only safe place for short rest. Outside camp, potential random encounters. Then people will camp and have more chance to dialogue besides end day.

I feel like days are quicker than XCom when you speed up time. Lol.

And food needs to not heal outside of resting. Too many healing items that make no sense in combat. Eat an apple as a bonus?

I don't need a cleric or potions. I have ribs. I also don't need to rest because I have lots of healing items. Only time I really need to end day is before major battles. Thus, I typically miss different dialogue scenes.

This sounds a pretty arbitrary thing to complain about, given that most games do day/night cycles at different ratios (i.e. a full cycle may last 2, 4, 6 hours or more...) and in some cases it's even a customizable option.
Also, NO, definitely not a fan of "make believe" mechanics where you decide in your head what matters and what not and there are hardly any real in-game consequences.

Regarding day and night cycle, I am indifferent. I would settle for either.

But, while on the subject, I'd like to say that I do absolutely 100% approve of Larian's choice to have characters have their majority of conversations that requires interaction (aka. proper dialogues instead of a monologues or quick comments) happen during camp time, because if it was one thing that left me unsatisfied in Pillars of Eternity (both 1 and 2, but I noticed it more during the 2nd game) then it definitely would be the extremely annoying dialogue queue system and how it would pop up in absolutely terrible moments. During my playthrough in PoE2:D I literally spent **15-20 REAL TIME HOURS** doing content and questing without having a SINGLE dialogue with ANY companion, and then all of the sudden when I touched the main story line they ALL bombed me at the same time as we were about to engage enemies - that felt extremely out of place and weird...

So please, Larian, keep the idea of dialogues primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) occurring during camp - BUT PLEASE TELL US WHEN WE NEED TO CAMP TO NOT MISS OUT ON THE CONVERSATIONS. I, like plenty of others, hate missing out on content because I didn't rest at the "right" time. Make our companions hint at us that they got something to say:

"Next time we make camp, I'd like a word.", "Do you think we could rest a moment?", an ingame symbol somewhere that shows us that new conversations are available at camp... or anything. Help your players understand that we'll miss out on content unless we rest at the particular moment. I missed soooo much during my first playthrough (roughly 40 hours) because I had no idea that I would have to rest so often to get certain conversations and got very confused when I saw people discussing said conversations later. I rested only out of necessity when I had to get some spell slots or HP back and well.. By now most people here know what that means...

I believe i would prefer to inspire from Dragon Age: Origins ...
Where your companions specificly tells you "we need to talk, come to me when we have time in camp".

In fact, it was strange to me that they changed this scene. Why did they make night if they didn't plan on making night on the beach? Time really changes too fast.

Apparently there was always a "day" planned on the beach, because if u play as Astarion after fall he says "sun and I still alive???" So why they add night to cutscene? Just to demonstrate lighting? I don't understand, honestly.

I feel like the easiest thing they could do, if they don't want to implement a full day/night cycle, is advancing time after certain actions are taken, or after certain quests are completed. For example, once reached the grove, or coming out of the ruins after exploring them, time could advance to night. It'd make things somewhat less jarring, at least.