I mean, ideally yes there would be months and seasons and years. Also ideally things in the world would be happening on that timescale, which would then affect one's gameplay experience, because otherwise there's no reason for to keep track of time passing in such a way. It would be weird if it takes a year of in-game time to track down the abducted duke and he pretended like it had only been a few days. Some people don't want there to be any time-involvement in quests though, and entire seasons changing without the main questline responding to such time passage starts to become incredibly obvious and immersion-breaking. However, I'd argue that time-passing on weeks+ scales is qualitatively different than individual days & nights in BG3/D&D 5e.
D&D 5e mechanics are intrinsically tied to sleeping and individual days passing, and BG3 in fact already indicates when a full day has passed via long resting. It's always shown to be "going to sleep at the end of the day," so time is already tracked that way. Thus, adding in a better day-night cycle (whether it's a basic 2-state "click here to fast forward to evening," or is a more detailed X real-time minutes = Y in-game minutes with realistic light progression and NPC schedules) would add immersion and additional quest/roleplay/mechanics opportunities while not actually changing anything about the overall time progression in the game.
One could say there is already a day/night cycle in BG3; it's just implemented in the laziest way that prevents actual exploration of the world at night. Tracking the progression of individual days for long-resting purposes doesn't necessitate the tracking of weeks/months/seasons/years, but the two systems could complement each other very well.
Last edited by mrfuji3; 07/08/22 12:42 AM.
