Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The elephant in the room that nobody is talking about

I really dislike their rationale for it too.
Among the examples they used I remeber that they'd need to add bedroom for all characters, give them a daily schedule and all that jazz.
And frankly THAT would cost a lot, but it would also be absolute overkill that no one is asking them to do.

The assumption that "You either go ALL THE WAY IN or you shouldn't even bother" is a stupid one. Most of us would gladly accept the compromises necessary (i.e. "daily" NPC that simply disappear at night -and the other way around- and similar shit).
There are plenty of advantages and improvements enabled even by a more conventional and modest implementation of the feature. Like the old BG 1 and 2 already proved in several circumstances and like plenty of other games did after them.
Well, actually even before, since I think it's Ultima that introduced it first.

And what's more relevant, there are consequences of not having a D/N cycle that go way beyond cosmetic changes or the chances to to add time-specific encounter design.
The whole fact that the game doesn't have a proper tiredness mechanic and that their rest system is such a half-baked and yet convoluted mess are arguably all indirect consequences of having a game that doesn't consistently account for time passing and doesn't differentiate about context.

This is why Owlcat can get away with a "cheap" solution with characters camping anywhere (at a risk) and having banters with each other while Larian has an instanced magical place that somehow is the same wherever you are traveling (even the Underdark!), improves by itself over time (who's building these fucking tents, anyway?) and where ALL the character interactions take place.

And somehow the first solution manages to comes off as incomparably more effective, consistent and immersive than the second, despise most likely costing a fraction.

That sounds surprisingly good!

It sounds surprisingly standard, more than anything.
I could go back to the 80s listing games that had something similar.

It's just Larian that seems to think you'd need to be at the cutting edge of tech to implement it.

I may be wrong but I don't believe they said it was a technology issue but a complexity issue. As in- adding day/night adds a layer of complexity to the already multiple layers of complexity they have in place. They would need to then add schedules to people's behavior, and they didn't want to do that.

Personally I would love to see it, even if they had to hire an extra 10-15 people to handle the workload and even if it delayed the game by 6 months or more. I would rather have it than not, but I don't know what the actual resource levels are.

It just feels really important to have a feeling that time is moving and to see Baldur's gate at night.

I mean, I'm talking specifically about what they said just two posts before.

That said, I don't even care about what would be the excuse, exactly. It has been done, it could be done and it should be their task to figure out how to do it more efficiently, not ours.
Personally? Aside for the fact that I'd gladly give up on other more... fanciful and situation features (coff coff... Origins) to get this, I'd be perfectly fine if they said "We are doing it, but we are delaying the game six months only for this".
Fine by me. Take your time and do it right.

Are they really not going to do day and night for the actual city of BG?

Can you please show me where larian have said this?

We need night time graphics to make rogue guilds and stealing ect more realistic 100%!!!

They said they are not going to do it at all. Anywhere in the game.

They never specified the limits of where that would apply.

Having certain quests or maps at night would be a half-arsed implementation IMO and only serve to reinforce the sense of a static world where we can only experience things at certain/fixed times of the day.

I've noted in these forums some have suggested that scripting the routines for NPCs would be problematic...and I ask out of ignorance but why is this a problem with BG3 but not a problem in Pillars of Eternity for example, where NPCs went to sleep? Something to do with the game engines...or what?

Larian said it so parrots repeated.

It never has been a problem in any games from the first D/N cycle and games have found / can find new ways to implement consistent D/N cycle.

If only that goal had been reached in DoS campaign...
They had (quote) "reworked 60% of their engine" for BG3 but it was unnecessary to implement time and D/N cycle because you know... Their games are amazing so why would they bother to change/improve what's not necessary ? (Combat balance, chain, D/N, origin characters, UI,...)

I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic or not, but the goal WAS reached.
Larian just declared at a later date that the feature was more work than expected and scrapped it.

But fine, they were a small financially troubled studio with a crowdfunded pet project. I accepted that.
Then the game turned out to be a massive success, a sequel came with a far bigger budget... And D/N cycle was still nowhere to be seen, because it didn't fit their vision and their style or something. Fine.

Now it's the time of BG3, which is shaping up to be a colossal game with a gigantic budget by "isometric/top down RPG" standards. Nah, Larian still thinks it's too much to ask and that "You aren't going all in, you better not even bother with it at all" which is an incredibly bad take, proven wrong by DOZENS of titles in the genre that did just fine with a compromise, a middle ground. And they were better games for it.

I wasn't sarcastic, I didn't know that.

What a shame, really.

Aside from the gameplay issues, there is also an emotional and aesthetic result of having day/night cycles. My most memorable moment from Neverwinter Nights II was walking up the trail to the HighCliff ruins while watching the moon cross the starry sky and reflect from the ripples in the water below. I literally stopped playing just to stand and watch that scenery play out for a few minutes. Ahhh!

Then the sun came up and it was time to put some zombies back in the ground.

Dear Jesus, is it this much work?
Solasta implemented D/N cycles a year into development with 17 people, whereas BG3 hasn't done (and apparently will not do so) after 4 years with 400 people.
Larian, please, you are coming off as lazy.

I think their biggest problem is how to do time in MP, which is the same engine as SP, but allows independent control of each player's time stream. If one player is exploring at, say, 5 real-world mins per game hour, while a second player decides to go into TB mode, where time essentially stops, occasionally advancing by 6 game seconds in a much greater amount of real-world time, then you are in a mess very quickly.

They could make SP and MP modes different at fairly significant development cost, but I don;t think they want to. They could also make TB apply to all players in MP whenever it applies to any one player, but I don't think they want to do that either.

If someone here that wants D/N can suggest a good mechanism for MP, then maybe Larian mat reconsider.

Whilst I don't know the codding challenges related to the issue, I have to add that Neverwinter Nights did MP coupled with D/N cycles 20 years ago and BGEE adapted the original code to work with MP, so it is definitely possible to code it.

Addressed in the very first page of the thread (and several times before in the past):

Incidentally someone just resurrected one of my old threads about this same topic in the "Suggestion and Feedback" subforum and made a fairly good summary of how this could be approached to several degree of commitment.
Here's a quote of his post, not sure if he will bother coming posting here himself:

Yes, implementing D/N cycles isn't particularly complex, and has been done many times before. It's somewhat gone out of fashion with some developers, but I've not read anywhere what their reasoning is.

It might be due to player pressure, since some players dislike dealing with people moving ( having to search for them ) or finding shops closed when they want to use them etc.

It's also possible that there are technical reasons; for example, some high quality lighting solutions in games pre-calculate illumination for scenes, which means there cannot be dynamic, time-based global illumination. You could still do D/N flip similar to Athkatla in BG2, by simply pre-calculating 2 lighting solutions.

There would definitely be a cost attached to adding a D/N cycle, but only Larian know exactly what that would be, and they are not saying.

Sure, Tuco, but that just sounds like making TB apply to all players when one player enters TB, which I noted was an option, but that I don't think Larian want to do that.

I don't play MP myself, so I don't know what is/isn't cool in MP; but I got the impression from others that the way DOS2 implemented MP ( independent player time-streams ) was a major point of satisfaction for the game, which Larian are therefore reluctant to change.

I suppose a partial solution that doesn't completely destroy their existing co-op flexibility might be to have a D/N flip similar to BG2, where players are only "frozen" when they pesonally have run out of day or night, and must wait for the others to catch up with their time stream. It wouldn't be problem-free, but might be less restrictive than every player entering TB whenever one player does.

Nah? It's the exact contrary of it. I said that when a player enters turn-based mode you stop the CLOCK in the background, the one deciding how long a day (or night) is supposed to last. I never said you stop the real-time flow for everyone.

Here's a practical example since for some reason you seem to be confused about it:

Let's say a day is supposed to last two hours in real time and a night other two hours.

- One player enters-turn based mode five minutes before dawn, when the night was already at 1 hour and 55 minutes of its "natural course".
- The clock for that player will obviously stop (otherwise he would experience transitions betweeen night and day while frozen in turn-based combat).
- The other players stay in real-time (at least until they get into combat as well)...
- ..but the "hidden clock" of the game stops its timer for the other players as well, keeping everything in sync.
- five minutes later the first player will go out of combat.
- five more minutes later the night will end. For the first player it would have lasted 2 hours, plus five minutes of turn based combat.
- for the other players, the night will have lasted 2 and 5 minutes of real time.
- There's a slight discrepance in the fact that for the other(s) player(s) the night "lasted few minutes of real-time more", but then again... So fucking what?