Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback About time and space. Some numbers inside

I know It was already mentioned that the game has some problems with the scale of the area and no normal way for the player to perceive the duration of the events, because of frozen moment design. And here I’m coming just with some more detailed approach, connecting both problems.

Lets first create some terms:
Play time (PT) - the real time that passes while we are in the game.
Game world time (GWT) - the time that passes in the game world from the game perspective.
Game meters (GMs) - the meters of the game world from the game perspective, not from how we may see them on our screens.

After someone mentioned days in the journal I thought that it may be worth checking to get some idea on how the game itself counts days. And my experiment showed that:
1. The game does actually recognise time flow existence.
2. 1 PT minute is equal to something near 4 GWT minutes.
3. The GWT clock totally ignores if we were in the turn-based mode, in a fight or in a dialog, it just keeps on running 4 times faster than the real time clock.
4. The GWT clock totally ignores the landing cutscene night and any other nights.

Even before that I intended to check on the length of the road from the Druid Grove gates to the Goblins Camp gates in GMs. Because you know it’s scaled-down and if it didn't take too long in PT it may be just because our characters are always running to save us from the boredom from walking slowly through the down-scaled world… Maybe those goblin scouts are not as bad as we thought… And the length of the road is something near 250 meters and took a bit more than 1 PT minute (~4 GWT minutes).
Normal walking speed in D&D would be 91.44 meters per 1 minute. So even if we imagine that our characters are walking instead of running, the road from the Grove to the Camp should take ~3 minutes of the GWT, but my character was running and it stil took 1 minute more in GWT.

Finally, in Larian twitter it stated that Astarion is 5'9" (1.7526 meters) tall. His speed in meters per turn is 9 in the game by the moment. And I did my best to compare his model height with that distance to make sure that the game measures the distance more or less properly. I will blame the revealed small aberration on the impossibility of perfect measuring of the model height from the screenshots. So the game does measure the distance properly.

Sad conclusion: the time and space correlation is perfectly broken in the game and goblin scouts are really bad at their job.

So here are my suggestion on how to fix that with possible implementation of so desired D/N cycle:
Option 1. Complicated, but more immersive:
1. Speed up our character’s running animation or slow down the GWT clock a bit so that our running speed by GWT would be perfectly equal to walking at normal speed in D&D.
2. Create additional time flow modes for dialogues (PT=GWT) and turn-based mode (1 turn = 6 GWT seconds) or stop clocks in those, cause it's just a few minutes anyway.
3. Add GWT skip to the short (1 hour) and long (8 hours) rests.
4. Add lighting changes every few hours.
5. After 14 GWT hours since the last long rest our characters should demand the long rest.

Option 2. Easier and may help to maintain solid story flow:
1. Remove GWT clock at all.
2. Add scripted time duration for major events as in “Meeting Shadowheart and all events after took 1 hour from 8AM, so met Astarion at 9AM. Events after meeting Astarion took 6 hours, so entered Overgrown ruins at 3PM...””
3. Set and change lighting on each location according to that scripted time-flow. If we wake up on the beach early in the morning it should look like early in the morning. If we leave the Ruins late in the evening, the scenery around us should get a late evening look.
4. When we get to some scripted late evening moment our characters should demand the long rest.

Important for both options and even without them:
1. Split the current global area in 2 by the line between the Risen Road plus Blighted Village and the Silvanus Grove, where the river and the mountains are creating the vertical line through the map.
2. Add some actual Wilderness to the Silvanus Grove map so distances would make sense from the Narrative point of view. It should get
a) much more space between the Grove and the Blighted Village, even if at a certain point that space would turn into something like a narrow mountain path.
b) some more space between the lower and upper entrances to the Overgrown ruins. Make the lower entrance lead to a tunnel, not straight to the hall with sarcophagus. Those gates don’t make sense with all that protection anyway.
c) some space and events between Lae’zel and the rest of the companions, so we won’t find her before finding the camp. So we won't be forced to talk to her about the camp, when we didn’t even find it. (Or raise the party limit?)
3. Patch up Aradin’s story a bit. Either we shouldn’t see goblins chasing him while we are landing, or he should mention that he was trying to throw goblins off his tail somewhere in the Wilderness for the whole time we spent between the landing and coming to the Grove gates.
4. Make sure that NPCs (Wyll for example) would mention days and nights passed only if there actually were days and nights passed for us.
5. Balance the hostile encounters with the time flow. So we won't run out of spells early in the morning with 5 fights ahead.