“General Relativity and storytelling have in common that space and time often appear as aspects of the same thing…”
I am making this post to discuss my observation that the way BG3 implements (or does not implement) time and distance is insufficient to maintain the illusion of the game world’s temporal and spatial consistency and connectedness, resulting in the loss of a sense of placement in time and space, which is detrimental for the game’s storytelling. Playing the Early Access, I have already experienced this as a major detriment in spite of the fact that only two major areas are available, but others’ perception may vary.
I will illustrate this observation by comparing different games.
Part I: The old-school compromise
Consider Baldur’s Gate 2. Time does not appear to be of particular importance in that game. You can take all the time you want to get out of the starting dungeon (unless you play with the SCS mod). It does not matter whether you take 5 days or 50 to collect the fee for Gaelan Bayle, it does not matter whether you arrive at Spellhold after 30 days or 100, in spite of the fact that the story heavily suggests that time is of the essence. There are some quests with time limits. These are important because they remind you that in-world time exists, but most of the time the passing of time will be irrelevant, and story events will wait for your arrival.
This is a familiar dissonance. You might be bothered by it but it is, in fact, almost unavoidable. If you play a game like BG2, you are doing three things: you are following a story, you are exploring the world, and you are playing a game. These elements are not always in accord, and it is usually more important that you can engage with the story and the world in a way that’s enjoyable to you, than maintain a perfect mapping of world time and story time. Not enforcing a plausible time mapping is an easy-to-implement compromise, and it is usually worth it.
This might bring you to conclude that maintaining world time is not important at all. However, this is not the case. Because the most important aspect of world time in a game like this is the fact that it exists at all. It provides a background clock against which we can place events and – through maintaining the illusion of travel time – locations.
To stay with BG2: How far is it from Athkatla to Trademeet. Here’s the real answer: two seconds of travel time. Is this answer surprising to you? Then the game has succeeded in maintaining the illusion of distance. And how does it do that? First, by telling us that traveling to Trademeet took us 20 hours. 20 hours? That does not appear very plausible. This would be less than one day, which means about 30-40 kilometers of typical road travel on foot, considering that we also need to rest and eat. You probably never thought about this, though, because the number is not very important. The number exists to tell you that you have traveled a distance significant enough to be relevant on the scale of a country, rather than only a city. It exists to tell you that you are far away from Athkatla, even though in reality, you are just two seconds away. Second, the game maintains the illusion by letting in-world time pass. Without the passing of in-world time, that message that you have traveled a significant distance away from Athkatla would be much less convincing. And third, the game tells you this by showing you the map of the game world and your place in it. It is important that this map is not just a representation of connections, but that its placement of symbols representing locations maps reasonably to in-world distances.
Time is also important on a more local scale exactly because story events often wait for your presence to happen. If you enter a location and find the fights too difficult, so you back out to come back later, it does not matter how much you do elsewhere before you come back, likely the situation will be the same. So did you go back in time? No, at least the in-world clock says so. It is now evening, not morning. This, too, is a dissonance, but it would be more of one if the in-world clock did not exist.
It may now be apparent how BG3 might be flawed in this regard, but before we get there, let’s consider a different game.
Part II: On Solid ground
Let’s move on to another game: Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Here we’ll find a very different implementation of time and distance. World time does not only exist, but it is relevant for the main story. If the story tells you that time is of the essence, it will usually be. There are still many events that wait for your arrival to happen, particularly in sidequests, but in general the game maintains a consistent mapping between story time and world time. The most important story events will happen without your presence, and if you’re not there to deal with them you will have to deal with the consequences. If you’re particularly unobservant, your kingdom might get destroyed.
The game is also more consistent about distances. There is no such thing as “you have travelled 20 hours and arrived at X”. You actually see a representation of your party move across the map, you can be interrupted and that interrupt will happen – as opposed to BG2 – at a specific point on the road. It matters where you place your settlements, it matters when you upgrade your kingdom’s Arcane stat enough to be able to build teleport circles. The difference between a neglectful ruler and an attentive ruler in that regard will accumulate: the former might be hard-pressed to deal with everything important before the end-game events hit, the latter may finish all small matters in their kingdom and have half a year left to the endgame events.
Why does BG2 do it this way and PFKM that way? If PFKM is a more rounded experience in that regard (which it undoubtedly is), why doesn’t BG2 do it the same way? If BG2 works the way it is, why does PFKM put in the extra effort? The answer lies in the kind of stories told: the plot of PFKM makes it, in fact, partly a strategy game. And in a strategy game, you deal exactly with problems of time and distance. It matters whether your ruler is four days away from the capital when an important kingdom event hits, or three days. It matters if you have built a teleport circle in the town across the next hill, so you can be home in one day rather than four. However, implementing time and distance this way restricts the kind of stories you can tell. You could not tell a story like BG2’s using the same implementation of time and distance without severely restricting exploration. And in a story-driven game, that takes precedence.
These were two games with different implementations of time and distance which both worked reasonably well for the stories they wanted to tell. They have in common that in-world time and in-world distance both exist. Now we move on…
Part III: Unmoored in time
Imagine playing BG3 EA with a medium-level party, say, level 3 (which is medium for the EA). You have not visited Waukeen’s Rest as yet. Imagine playing on the lowest difficulty, just in order to be able to deal easily with multiple combat encounters in sequence. Go to Waukeen’s Rest. Take a look at the burning building, but don’t do anything here. Instead, visit another location. And yet another. Visit as many locations and deal with as many other events as you can without taking a long rest. Then go back to Waukeen’s Rest. The situation will be the same as when you first visited. This might at first feel similar to the way you experienced events in BG2, but there is a crucial difference: there is nothing to counter the impression that no time has passed. The only information the game gives you suggests indeed that no time has passed while you were doing all those other things. And….now that the dissonance hits: how long did it actually take to deal with those other events? Two hours? That doesn’t make sense. It’s completely implausible in in-world terms. All right, how long is this supposed to have taken in in-world terms? Here’s the answer: <error>. That’s the only information you get.
All right, this is disappointing. It’s already worse than in BG2, where at least you were firmly anchored in world time, even if the events were not. But at least you have now learned that there is no in-world time and that even a raging fire will wait for your intervention, so you might as well take a long rest before you deal with the fire…. Right.
So a little later….the house is burned to the ground and some people are dead. Does this perfectly plausible outcome make any sense? Not any more, in fact. Did we not just learn that there is no in-world time? How long did that rest actually take? About 30 seconds I guess. Maybe more if someone wanted to talk to you. What the heck changed in those 30 seconds that did not in the previous two hours? All right, let’s force our minds into the world against the considerable resistance built up by previous events and ask….how long was that long rest supposed to have taken in in-world terms, so that you can adapt your perception of time? The answer: <error>. In-world time, after all, does not exist.
You have now become unmoored in time. Depending on how susceptible you are to things like this, the result will be anything between a mild dissonance and the impression that nothing makes sense in this world. For me, the result was that events feel clustered in in-world time because they *are* clustered in playing time, and everything happens on a very short time scale. Which is exactly the impression that a game telling an epic story should work to counter.
This is what happens if you do not implement in-world time and then try to make up for it by introducing a clock based on the party’s long rests. The world has lost temporal consistency. This is not trivial. It is, in fact, really bad. The game has managed to create a situation where a perfectly plausible event chain has ceased to make sense. Similar things happen in other locations, this was just one of the most noticeable examples.
But it gets worse.
Part IV: Anywhere is everywhere
How far is it, in your estimate, from the druid grove to Waukeen’s Rest? Well….there are some hills in-between and you can’t see the smoke from the grove, so….maybe a few kilometres? Let’s say five kilometres as a low estimate. About the same distance it should be from the grove to the teahouse. About 10 km from one end of the map to the other perhaps. But of course it’s not 10km. Watching our party, they appear to move at a plausible jog, so about 10km per hour maybe. It should take them one hour to cross the map that way.....oops, that can't be right. Of course it isn't. It takes about a minute. So, how far is it *really* then? One minute at 10km per hour….166m. This place is actually really, really small. It just appears different to us because characters and landscape are not built to the same scale. The hills are, in fact, rather more like molehills compared to the size they should really be. Houses are larger inside than out. This is perfectly normal for a game, and acceptable. Almost every game does this to some extent since of course we do not want to spend an hour to cross 10km of irrelevant landscape.
However, what is decidedly not normal is that there is nothing else that supports the illusion of distance. There is no in-world clock and no day-night cycle. The reality of this world consists of an eternal now. With an eternal now all distances are arbitrary and they actually feel arbitrary. There also is no larger map on which we travel. We do not even travel between local maps like in BG2 and the newer isometric RPGs. We just jump between them. Everything in this game except the local presentation undermines our sense of location in this world. Which means that except on local maps, distance is non-existent. And there is a limit to the size a local map can represent, as you might have already realized if you played DOS2. How big is the Reaper’s Coast supposed to be? Well, certainly quite a bit larger than the local travel map can ever make you feel, since at that scale your characters would be tiny dots even if you make mountains into molehills as usual. And of course, there, too, travel across the map takes you about one minute, with nothing else to counter the impression that this is a rather small island.
In BG3, this means, among other things, that a place as legendary and mysterious as the Underdark is but a trivial distance away. A trivial travel time away. Everything is clustered in space. Recall BG2’s Underdark? The sense of danger and isolation? As if it wasn’t enough that the brightly colored fungi already removed the sense of darkness and danger. Now the trivialization of travel has also removed the sense of isolation. The places you see in the distance still convey some sense of mystery. We shall see if at least this holds up.
The point? Stories that cover non-trivial distances need some mechanism that brings travelled distance into accord with in-world time - even if it’s a very loose accord. Such as travel maps. Like in the original BG games. Like in the POE games. The Pathfinder games. Like in every other game of this kind except the DOS games.
Can it get worse? Most definitely.
We now have a world where events are clustered in time and locations are clustered in space, where every distance is trivial and where we are unmoored in time. We are playing a story set in a temporal void and in a small expanse of space. Can space and time be even more trivialized than this? Yes. You can implement fast travel from anywhere. At the only place left where distances could still be felt – on local maps - they are now also made irrelevant.
And this is where we are now. I suppose there are many people not as bothered by this as I am. But I am a worldbuilding person. If the world does not make sense, that will create a heavy burden for its stories. There are things the game can do to offset this impression. But to find that a game as ambitious as this one has an implementation of time and space worse than every other game of the genre I know – and my knowledge covers 30 years and more – that is a big disappointment to say the least. And yes, it *is* worse than in DOS2. Time did not matter at all in that game, but at least it consistently did not matter.
