Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The elephant in the room that nobody is talking about

"The engine doesn't have it" is a poor excuse, because no engine comes with the "day/night cycle button" and it's always a matter of implementing it.

It should also be none of our business to worry about how much work it can be to implement standard features in the genre, but that's another topic for another day.

What y'all didn't realize is that there is no day/night cycle because the DOS engine doesn't have it and it might be too much work to implement it.

a proper day/night cycle that changes gradually? I accept that. What they could do is have a night map and a day map and switch between them based on the number of long rests, or time since a long rest, etc. there are ways of faking a day/night cycle that would still have the desired effect of making people feel like the world is more alive.

Huh? Saradush had day & night cycles, you can even see it on YouTube videos. Night enables many unique things ... infravision, enhanced stealth, Ring of Shooting Stars, will-o-wisps, glowing potion bottles, peeping frogs, ladies/gentlemen of the evening, shadows, etc. Back to the original topic, Baldur's Gate is really two different cities, one under the sun and one under the stars. I do hope we get to see both!

Based on that article, it sounds like the combination of multi-player and turn-based combat creates the problem for day/night timing. I

it was a very simple limitation to work around in the end: "Freeze the clock for everyone when one of the players is in turn based mode. Make it march again when all the players are in real time".
I mean, the limitation that everyone needs to agree for a long rest (and that no one can be in combat) was already in place, anyway. So it's not like that was going to make a big difference.
Sure, the length of the day (or night) may extend a bit even for the player that was in "real time all the time". But so what?

Sometime I hear the designers at Larian saying things about "design challenges" that make me think of the proverbial "drowning in a glass of water".
Like when one of their lead gameplay designers explained on stream that "Sure, in pen & paper the player can choose to spend his battlemaster points (aka "superiority dice") only after he's sure a hit lands, but that wouldn't work in a videogame because it would break the flow of the action, so... tough luck for him".
Ehr...? What about doing so that you DON'T SPEND THE POINT if you miss the attack, without needing to "break", "pause" or "interrupt" anything?

Don't want to start a new thread so will ask here.
Now that Larian have rights to do bg3, can they also do a bg2 remake? Like fully voiced, new quests, new characters, new areas, better enhanced graphics, and all?
Even if all above sounds wonderful it may not even beat the original, as it's a masterpiece all in it's own but.. possible yeah?

Remaking BG2 with 2021 sensitivities and stay faithful to the original game? Impossible. All the things that made BG2 great; LIMITED slot base inventory(god I loved this...), TONS of spells/precasting complexities, slower game pace, lots of reading, etc...just would not work with current <I WANT IT ALL EASY AND CONVENIENT> gamers.
Oh and frack money grabbing remakes! Devs, please make original games.

"The engine doesn't have it" is a poor excuse, because no engine comes with the "day/night cycle button" and it's always a matter of implementing it.

It should also be none of our business to worry about how much work it can be to implement standard features in the genre, but that's another topic for another day.

It would make sense as long as it is a low-budget or at most medium-budget game. Then they could completely focus on opening the game in a relatively modern way.
A high budget is both a blessing and a curse for games. It supposedly enables the creation of a larger and richer game, at the same time it forces the creators to make many compromises so that the project not only pays for itself, but also earns money for another
When it comes to high-budget games, counting on fans of only a given type of games will in most cases end in a disaster.

I found a screenshot showing that Throne of Bhaal did have day & night ... here is Saradush:



you can see the little time pendulum in the lower left corner, with the night moon waning and the sun coming up soon.

so then it should be trivial for BG3 to do the same

Honestly, if they didn't want to program "Time" they could still set up a nighttime variant of the map by having us toggle the end day thing and then traveling out into the area. Creatures could move to a different position for night and have different nightime actions like sometimes sleeping and sometimes night will be more guarded, and perhaps different quests and characters will appear or be progressed. While this suggestion might be janky, it would just amount to a day and night toggle that adds some more depth to the game.