Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Suggestion: Sunlight as an indicator of fatigue.

I understand there are no plans for a day night cycle, but the lighting system in this engine is robust(In earlier patches, the angle of the sun would often shift drastically for the first couple seconds after loading a game) I appreciate camping taking place at night, the narrative function it serves, and I see how a day night cycle could interfere with that. But, at the same time, outside of camp, how many narrative elements are tied to a specific time of day?

Going with the principle of show vs tell, why not, instead of simply having characters complain that they are tired in the middle of the day, have the lighting of the outside world be a reflection of that. The angle of the sun, not being a binary state, like it is now, nor changing linearly with time, but interpolating, imperceptibly slowly, towards a value representing the average fatigue of the party. Even if, the world never fully entered night, but simply reached sunset, until the player chose to camp, and things were reset to morning upon leaving. This way, it wouldn't be necessary to alter things, like the expected location of NPCs, due to a full day/night cycle.

Even if this was a mostly an aesthetic change, having no interaction with deeper vision mechanics, it would be an easy means of providing a greater sense that the world is dynamic, and increasing immersion through atmosphere. All while still serving a mechanical purpose, and non-intrusively guiding the player towards the narrative pacing developers hope to achieve.

I like this idea. No clue if it's implementable, but it would definitely make the story progress even better.

I'd rather it just be a fixed cycle. I don't want it to be night after every single extended fight.

The question is, would you rather it remain static? I'd prefer a fixed cycle too, but they've already said they aren't going to do that. They've built some mechanics that they consider important around not doing that. Provided the outdoor scenery they've built looks acceptable to them, as lighting conditions change throughout the day, this wouldn't interfere with those mechanics, and would only require a small amount of code.

I didn't suggest a value for the scale of the ratio between fatigue and time of day, as that would have to be adjusted through playtesting, but the code involved would still be quite simple.

Since I don't think we will have a fixed cycle, I think this could be really cool to implement, as your companions get more fatigued, the more it seems to be heading towards what looks like the evening.
It'd give a sense of time passing and would give some indication of when someone should long rest.

This and the idea to tie passing time to short rests seems so far as best suggestions about time.

I think both could be implemented together. In 5e there is exhaustion. Not sure if there's any plan to implement that here eventually, but to the extent it's comparable to the current fatigue mechanic, short rests do not remove levels of exhaustion. Following from that, it's not as if they would be logically incompatible with the system I've proposed(like reducing fatigue and consequently rewinding time would be), and they are only supposed to last an hour anyway. Maybe a short rest could just be as simple as the sun immediately assuming the angle representing the party's current fatigue value, as opposed to continuing the imperceptibly slow interpolation towards it.

Keep in mind light is tied to stealth. Diminishing lighting, could influence stealth breaking Larian’s existing design. Of course, day and night cycle would be welcome with dynamic stealth systems, but those will be harder to pull of the more detailed the systems are. (I generally find that “it’s dark! All gain plus 2on stealth rolls!” works better then trying to redesign handcrafted scenarios).

The effect you suggest could be simply cosmetic, but I think it would be more confusing then helpful - like if it’s only role is to indicate your party members getting tired, it’s an unintuitive overkill which might help to transition between broad daylight to camp, but it would be odd if it didn’t interact with other systems (NPC schedules, visibility, monster presence etc.)

Currently, weather works the same as DOS. It's all on position-based triggers on the map.

You can be standing in complete sunshine and walk 2 tiles and it's raining and vice versa. Who knows if they're capable of doing anything else for something that resembles actual time passing.

I believe this actualy is planned, since you can allready find potions that specificaly "removes exhaustion".
Either that, or is simply some magic debuff. :-/

Oh that is true. :-/
Shame ... but understandable.