I still have a hard time believing that they CAN'T do Day/Night. I don't believe anyone who says they can't.
Yeah, I'm 100% with you here.
I mean, I'm still confident it WON'T happen because Larian doesn't deem the benefits of working on this worthy of the additional manpower required, but I won't buy the *baffling* bullshit about it being technically unfeasible.
It can be done, probably in more ways than one, too, ranging from full dynamic lighting (at the cost of some performance) to having just two "pre-baked" options cooked into the game and swapped when it's time to switch between day and night.
Games have been doing this shit since the early '90s, on both 2D and 3D engines of all sorts.
Studios with half of BG3 budget did it. Devs with a FRACTION of Larian's budget did it. Single coders with no budget at all did it. Fucking amateurs who were just fooling around to test stuff did it.
Larian itself had the feature promised in the DOS 1 kickstarter (but then ditched it for lack of budget), then in the DOS 2 kickstarter (but then ditched it for lack of time)... And then they've been upfront from the beginning about not having it in BG3 (probably for a lack of SPINE).
Well, jokes aside, the one Larian employee who talked about this (and confirmed the absence of the feature months before EA even begun) basically admitted that it was mostly because it would match poorly with their plans to be multiplayer-focused (but we already discussed several times in the past how THAT specific design challenge could be easily circumvented) and because their design philosophy was allegedly "If we can't make this subsystem super-extensive and meaningful we won't even bother having it at all", which is both an idea I strongly disagree with in principle (once again: even the most basic and plain day/night cycle would be better than its complete absence) AND something that contrasts hilariously with how half-assed some other features they are working on turned out to be so far (reactions? Camping and Rest system? Inventory sorting and management? Control scheme? The abundant dozen of mechanical changes they made that turned out to be terrible and had to be reverted...?).
