Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Timed Quests

I think the addition of several timed quests can add to the experience. Of course, for such quests to work, it should be quite clear that there is some kind of a timer. The most logical counter will be the number of long rests.


For example, the druid ritual might be completed if the party does not solve the relating quest within n number of rests. (Among other things, the motivation for stealing the idol of Sylvanus is kind of weak: why do it when your main hope for salvation is a druid?; time might be one such motivation)

Well ... it depends ...
If this game will have some general time flow, and those (or at least some) timer will start not with quest acception, but with entering Act ...
I believe it would be awesome!

On the other hand, if wold stay as frozen as it is now ...
And you simply add some timer to quests, that will start count down in second you accept that quest ... it would be odd in the end. :-/

Just imagine ...
1) You rush to Druid's Grove ... you get there first, or second day in the field ... and you find out that within a week, whole Grove will be sealed by powerfull ritual spell.
2) You take your time, exploring, fighting, resting ... the usual stuff ... and you get to the very same Grove a week later than in first case ... and you find out that within a week, whole Grove will be sealed by powerfull ritual spell.

Bcs he is not? :P

Putting things on timers will discourage exploration. Kingmaker had timers out the wazoo and most people hated it. Missables in RPGs are lame. No

Please no timed quests. They are the worst type of quest! I especially hate it when they don’t tell you a quest is timed, and then it fails.

I also appreciate a lot the idea of having some sort of time restriction on secondary objectives, as long as they are telegraphed clearly enough to the player and reasonably forgiving.
With a the caveat that I tend to dislike when it becomes a matter of choosing between CONFLICTING time restrictions. That's a thumb down from me.

For how I see it a game of this type needs to be designed in a way that makes exploring 100% of the content if not *easy* at least reasonably doable, ideally with time to spare if you optimize well enough.

It depends on how they're implemented, but some timers make sense.

Suppose you come across a wounded person lying on the ground, clearly on the verge of dying, and they ask for a healing potion. Quest received. Then you move on to find that healing potion, travel around the world a few times, and 40 years later you happen to come back on that same road and lo and behold, the wounded person is still there, waiting patiently for that potion. That doesn't really work, does it?

Same with the imminent gobbo attack on the druid grove. You know that it's about to happen, so you get going on the long journey from the gobbo camp back to the grove. But the weather is hard and the path is dangerous. Getting lost is a constant worry. Therefore it takes about 14 long rests before you make it. Oh look, the imminent attack that is starting right now hasn't happened yet. It seems the party made it just in the nick of time.

Same with the airship in the prologue that is totally going to be destroyed and you have to hurry and connect those wires to teleport away now. Right freaking now!! Or we're all going to die!! Any minute now... Certain death incoming. We're totally out of time, must hurry... Yeah, not really all that convincing, is it? But if something actually happened if you delayed enough then that would change the dynamic.

Here we go again.

My suggestion had to do with Long Rests. 1 Long Rest = End of Day. Therefore, I suggested that after X number of Long Rests, certain things happen. It would be a quasi-timed quest type thing, but one that would give the world a sense of time.

So, as an example, I said that maybe after you reach the grove gate, once you take 3 Long Rests, something happens like one of the tieflings comes to your camp the next morning and says, "Quick! We need your help. The druids were almost finished with the Rite of Thorns to seal off the grove, but one of the children, a girl named Arabella, stole the idol of Silvanus and stopped the ritual."

And so, THAT would be when you have the encounter with Arabella and Kagha and such in the heart of the grove, NOT when you first meet Kagha. Something like this would make more sense as to why the Rite of Thorns doesn't EVER get completed. I could Long Rest for a year and that ritual would never be completed. So having some sort of timed events makes sense.

But the idea is that you would have certain events occur because you take too many long rests, not that the quest would necessarily be auto-completed on you and you could never finish it. So, with the Rite of Thorns, after 3 Long Rests, Arabella steals the idol. The Rite of Thorns starts all over again. After another 3 Long Rests from that point, Rath stands up to Kagha and stops the ritual. Kagha and Rath fight and you have to choose sides or choose to stay out of it. Poor Rath might die if you don't intervene. Either way, the Rite of Thorns starts over again, buying you another 3 Long Rests to try to stop the ritual.

THAT is more of what I'm talking about. Timed events that show that the world is changing but they don't necessarily lock out quests so you can't finish them.

I would also like to see mundane conversations change or come to an end after a bit of gameplay. In other words, after a Short or Long Rest, the Tiefling Trio stop having the same conversation about "I care about our lives, our futures!" "All you care about is your precious Baldur's Gate." Different conversations and/or just people NOT having conversations at all would be greatly appreciated. They are SO annoying after a very short period of time. I would rather have a crowd ambiance in the background than actual conversations that just repeat over and over and over and over and over.... breathes in deeply... and over and over and over and over and over again.

Long/short of it = Mix it up a bit. Have some variations day after day in the game world. That would make it feel SO much less static and more like a living, breathing world.

No time limits.

I don't like timed quests but I like to have the feeling the world is living / is not frozen, waiting for me.

People already gave great exemples.
It would be awesome to have another experience depending how much time you take to visit the areas of act 1..

In exemple :
- After a few days the gnolls have killed the zentharim and are camping in the cave (chest still there for the quest)
- Wolves appear in the forest
- The two brothers are dead on the road leading to new dialogs/checks with ethel
- The goblins at the blighted village move rather than staying there forever if you don't kill them
- The iron fist soldiers are dead when you arrive next to the githyanki patrol and / or they're fighting.

People who cry at the mere mention of timed quest don’t know what the hell they are even talking about, more often than not.
They hate the idea more than the application.


Take a game like Wrath of the Righteous, where quests are “timed” only on the sense that in some cases you are told “you have to complete this one BEFORE moving to the next chapter” but without any ACTUAL restriction on how much time you could take to complete, and tell me what they’d take away from the their experience.

It’s somewhat ironic that you see people freak out about turn limits in XCOM 2 or timed quests in Kingmaker that you’d need to be basically mentally challenged to fail, but then they don’t notice that BG3 is occasionally already more punitive than both, given that it’s filled with occasional triggers like “when you enter this area you HAVE to do something immediately or fail that quest”.

Which can be fine in itself if you can make peace with the consequences anyway.