That was a very informative post! Thank you for sharing
I appreciate the time and effort I'll assume went into confirming all of this. I do have a few comments of my own to add!
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.
This concerns me, since there is no pause function (as far as I've understood things?). As far as I am aware, the clock keeps ticking even when we've pressed "ESC". Now, granted that the time is very generous - but I really want to be able to go empty the washer, vacuum, walk the dog, tab in and out of the game wiki etc as I am playing. Knowing that the game DOES infact have a time function but NOT a pause function makes me slightly uneasy...
Also, before breaking down into details I'd like to add that no matter the options - there are MANY things tied to long rest that have to be fixed in order for either option to work, like the conversation camp triggers. We can't have companions demanding camp spamming (AHEM, GALE) when using a more realistic / immersive rest system. They'd have to rework the entire camp/conversation thing from scratch. Anyhow, here goes nothing.
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.
I believe in this option the most, AS LONG AS Larian chooses to go with slowing down the GWT instead of speeding up our running animations. And, I believe the easiest way to handle step 2 would be to just "pause" the GWT completely, since people do sometimes go AFK during conversations / battle. I'd be rather bummed out if I returned to my computer to find myself having spent like 30min GWT staring at the vendor...
I am also slightly curious what you mean by "demanding" a long rest? As in our characters start complaining? Or that the game refuses to let you go on without long resting?
Option 2. Easier and may help to maintain solid story flow:1. Remove GWT clock at all.
2. Add script day time for major events as in “Met Shadowheart at 8AM. Met Astarion at 9AM. 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.
Mmmh, do you mean that each zone has a set time? Like it is always noon in the grove, it is always night in the ruins etc? That's troublesome and can lead to multiple weird instances as it is impossible to know which zone PC will head into and in which order. This will result in very weird and "off" GWT unless the PC goes *EXACTLY* as the game has planned them to. Imagine if the game tells you to go to goblin camp after visiting the grove (where it is midday), but you choose to go to the swamp. The game thinks you'll go into the swamp AFTER the goblin camp, resulting in goblin camp being evening and swamp being midday because the game assumes you'll stop by the druid grove before going there. Suddenly - the ingame clock would go from midday to midday to late evening. Imagine involving the northern route as well!
I can't imagine a smooth solution for neither the journal system nor the scenery with this option. :X
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.
Good points! Making the map "bigger" is certainly a + for me. And the thing about Lae'zel mentioning (player-)camp when you havn't even been there... Yeah, I'd just assume that is going to get fixed. Same with the other companions. I would not say no to more active companions tho. c: But that is for another thread.
