Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback About time and space. Some numbers inside

I know It was already mentioned that the game has some problems with the scale of the area and no normal way for the player to perceive the duration of the events, because of frozen moment design. And here I’m coming just with some more detailed approach, connecting both problems.

Lets first create some terms:
Play time (PT) - the real time that passes while we are in the game.
Game world time (GWT) - the time that passes in the game world from the game perspective.
Game meters (GMs) - the meters of the game world from the game perspective, not from how we may see them on our screens.

After someone mentioned days in the journal I thought that it may be worth checking to get some idea on how the game itself counts days. And my experiment showed that:
1. The game does actually recognise time flow existence.
2. 1 PT minute is equal to something near 4 GWT minutes.
3. The GWT clock totally ignores if we were in the turn-based mode, in a fight or in a dialog, it just keeps on running 4 times faster than the real time clock.
4. The GWT clock totally ignores the landing cutscene night and any other nights.

Even before that I intended to check on the length of the road from the Druid Grove gates to the Goblins Camp gates in GMs. Because you know it’s scaled-down and if it didn't take too long in PT it may be just because our characters are always running to save us from the boredom from walking slowly through the down-scaled world… Maybe those goblin scouts are not as bad as we thought… And the length of the road is something near 250 meters and took a bit more than 1 PT minute (~4 GWT minutes).
Normal walking speed in D&D would be 91.44 meters per 1 minute. So even if we imagine that our characters are walking instead of running, the road from the Grove to the Camp should take ~3 minutes of the GWT, but my character was running and it stil took 1 minute more in GWT.

Finally, in Larian twitter it stated that Astarion is 5'9" (1.7526 meters) tall. His speed in meters per turn is 9 in the game by the moment. And I did my best to compare his model height with that distance to make sure that the game measures the distance more or less properly. I will blame the revealed small aberration on the impossibility of perfect measuring of the model height from the screenshots. So the game does measure the distance properly.

Sad conclusion: the time and space correlation is perfectly broken in the game and goblin scouts are really bad at their job.

So here are my suggestion on how to fix that with possible implementation of so desired D/N cycle:
Option 1. Complicated, but more immersive:
1. Speed up our character’s running animation or slow down the GWT clock a bit so that our running speed by GWT would be perfectly equal to walking at normal speed in D&D.
2. Create additional time flow modes for dialogues (PT=GWT) and turn-based mode (1 turn = 6 GWT seconds) or stop clocks in those, cause it's just a few minutes anyway.
3. Add GWT skip to the short (1 hour) and long (8 hours) rests.
4. Add lighting changes every few hours.
5. After 14 GWT hours since the last long rest our characters should demand the long rest.

Option 2. Easier and may help to maintain solid story flow:
1. Remove GWT clock at all.
2. Add scripted time duration for major events as in “Meeting Shadowheart and all events after took 1 hour from 8AM, so met Astarion at 9AM. Events after meeting Astarion took 6 hours, so entered Overgrown ruins at 3PM...””
3. Set and change lighting on each location according to that scripted time-flow. If we wake up on the beach early in the morning it should look like early in the morning. If we leave the Ruins late in the evening, the scenery around us should get a late evening look.
4. When we get to some scripted late evening moment our characters should demand the long rest.

Important for both options and even without them:
1. Split the current global area in 2 by the line between the Risen Road plus Blighted Village and the Silvanus Grove, where the river and the mountains are creating the vertical line through the map.
2. Add some actual Wilderness to the Silvanus Grove map so distances would make sense from the Narrative point of view. It should get
a) much more space between the Grove and the Blighted Village, even if at a certain point that space would turn into something like a narrow mountain path.
b) some more space between the lower and upper entrances to the Overgrown ruins. Make the lower entrance lead to a tunnel, not straight to the hall with sarcophagus. Those gates don’t make sense with all that protection anyway.
c) some space and events between Lae’zel and the rest of the companions, so we won’t find her before finding the camp. So we won't be forced to talk to her about the camp, when we didn’t even find it. (Or raise the party limit?)
3. Patch up Aradin’s story a bit. Either we shouldn’t see goblins chasing him while we are landing, or he should mention that he was trying to throw goblins off his tail somewhere in the Wilderness for the whole time we spent between the landing and coming to the Grove gates.
4. Make sure that NPCs (Wyll for example) would mention days and nights passed only if there actually were days and nights passed for us.
5. Balance the hostile encounters with the time flow. So we won't run out of spells early in the morning with 5 fights ahead.

That was a very informative post! Thank you for sharing I appreciate the time and effort I'll assume went into confirming all of this. I do have a few comments of my own to add!




This concerns me, since there is no pause function (as far as I've understood things?). As far as I am aware, the clock keeps ticking even when we've pressed "ESC". Now, granted that the time is very generous - but I really want to be able to go empty the washer, vacuum, walk the dog, tab in and out of the game wiki etc as I am playing. Knowing that the game DOES infact have a time function but NOT a pause function makes me slightly uneasy...

Also, before breaking down into details I'd like to add that no matter the options - there are MANY things tied to long rest that have to be fixed in order for either option to work, like the conversation camp triggers. We can't have companions demanding camp spamming (AHEM, GALE) when using a more realistic / immersive rest system. They'd have to rework the entire camp/conversation thing from scratch. Anyhow, here goes nothing.



I believe in this option the most, AS LONG AS Larian chooses to go with slowing down the GWT instead of speeding up our running animations. And, I believe the easiest way to handle step 2 would be to just "pause" the GWT completely, since people do sometimes go AFK during conversations / battle. I'd be rather bummed out if I returned to my computer to find myself having spent like 30min GWT staring at the vendor...

I am also slightly curious what you mean by "demanding" a long rest? As in our characters start complaining? Or that the game refuses to let you go on without long resting?


Mmmh, do you mean that each zone has a set time? Like it is always noon in the grove, it is always night in the ruins etc? That's troublesome and can lead to multiple weird instances as it is impossible to know which zone PC will head into and in which order. This will result in very weird and "off" GWT unless the PC goes *EXACTLY* as the game has planned them to. Imagine if the game tells you to go to goblin camp after visiting the grove (where it is midday), but you choose to go to the swamp. The game thinks you'll go into the swamp AFTER the goblin camp, resulting in goblin camp being evening and swamp being midday because the game assumes you'll stop by the druid grove before going there. Suddenly - the ingame clock would go from midday to midday to late evening. Imagine involving the northern route as well!

I can't imagine a smooth solution for neither the journal system nor the scenery with this option. :X


Good points! Making the map "bigger" is certainly a + for me. And the thing about Lae'zel mentioning (player-)camp when you havn't even been there... Yeah, I'd just assume that is going to get fixed. Same with the other companions. I would not say no to more active companions tho. c: But that is for another thread.

Yes, the game keeps on counting time, even if you're on ESC screen. But in the same time looks like at the moment the game doesn't use that flow for anything but Dialogues journal entries. So be at ease, it doesn't seem to be something really impactful.
That I considered to be an obvious thing. If you have an adventure that takes only 5 days always, you need to take that into account on all levels.

Actually I would vote for speed up running animation, because we have very comfortable 1 GWT day without night = 3.5+ PT hours that way. And we still won't run too fast, our characters are like 25% slower that they should be to reach that equation. And yes, pause may be the best option for step 2. It will also allow them to address that "no pause for AFK" problem, turn-based mode would work as one.
Actually both. First to ensure that the illusion doesn't break, second to help Larian avoid creating full night part of cycle for all maps. After all in TT a DM would also say from time to time that the party is too tired and sleepy to proceed.


As I wrote "set and change". So if we know for sure (and we do) that we wake up after crash on the beach in the morning it should be set to morning by default, but if we go somewhere, do something than return to the beach, the game should count the amount of events passed, connect them to time and set the beach area to the proper day-time. It's just you move the time by actions, instead of time goes on it's own. I think I better rephrase the 2nd step: replace "day time" with "time duration" and the journal fake-quote should be “Meeting Shadowheart and all events after took 1 hour from 8AM, so met Astarion at 9AM. Events after meeting Astarion took 6 hours, so entered Overgrown ruins at 3PM...”. Fixed that in original post.
By the way at the moment you always go through the area around Blighted Village and then either to the camp or the swamp or the northern route. So it's quite possible to set the village to midday for example and those 3 areas to evening by default.

Impressive post, though I think reasoning and solutions are flawed - I don't think it is relevant if distance between locations make real life work sense, or if game tracks time in a way that make sense. The problem is that at least some portion of players notice how artificial the world is.

Making space between Grove and Goblin camp FEEL like a journey is more important. I don't think how game counts hours passing is terribly relevant, as most players won't think in those terms (I personally had no idea that there is a time clock).

I don't know what the process for creating an area like that is, but after playing D:OS1&2 and BG3 EA, it feels to me like they are made in zones - zone 1: crashed-ship, zone2: grove, zone3: forest, zone4: burned village, zone5: goblin camp, and then those zones are stitched together. I don't feel like there is enough thought given to how journey between zones will feel. And unfortunately, while impressive, single maps like that leaves little space to manouver - just adding more dead space to walkthough is probably not a good idea, even if it's possible (aka. wont destroy the map layout, or go beyond memory limits etc.).

To solve this problem or at least reduce the amount of those players they need to start with understanding from where it comes. And it comes from what you say "I don't think it is relevant" - distance that doesn't connects with narrative and time tracking which practically works in 2 unrelated time-flows. If you are fine with the game world as it is now, just say that and move on, but don't bring this "I don't think" with total zero of thought through arguments.

Who said that the space should be dead? Is that so hard to image some wilderness with little adventures of it own?

Hmm... I don't know, I think I'd still vote for a slower ingame clock - especially considering that most players seem to severely dislike the stress that comes with the game keeping track of time. (... From observing the discussion when people bring up Pathfinder: Kingmaker). But I suppose you're right - speeding up the animations with 25-ish % should not be that much of a deal.

Ah! Alright, I see where you're going. Now from a DnD perspective, I have no complaints about this (as long as the issues regarding conversations are solved) - however, the less-DnD-more-CRPG side of the community might be opposed to this. I do not know.


Ooooh! Now am following - sorry, I guess reading detailed posts at 3AM got to me :'] Yeah, that could work rather well. But I would honestly believe that, that would make option 2 as difficult as option 1 - making option 1 superior in at least my eyes. I mean, surely from a purely technical sense, option 2 might be easier to fulfill (I must admit this is outside my territory of expertise) - but the amount of preparation tinkering it would require would probably make option 1 easier in the long run. Someone can correct me if I am wrong in this department.

As far as I know people feel the stress with time tracking in games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker because that game actually uses "real" time to decide if you succeed in certain quest or not. And as far as I know Larian they never use such design for quests, seems they don't like it themselves. There is only one case of different outcomes depending on how fast you "go there" in DOS2, but that how fast has nothing to do with actual time, it depends on how many quests you close before you go in certain direction. And my Option 2 is pretty much based on that approach plus the fact that they already had different lighting settings for map areas in DOS2. So I believe the programming is already there at least partially.

I think the less-DnD-more-CRPG side of the community will be ok with that as long as we will have our cut-scenes and conversations each evening. That maybe one more plus for Option 2, because that one can allow Larian to script the actual amount of days for our whole adventure and prepare something for each evening.

Oh no, that's totally on me, I really could phrase it better from the start. So you helped me to catch a bug in my feedback.

I'm brinning up this thread to add an option.
Above I suggested to fix the problem of connection between the plot and the amount of space through adding some space. But recently I realiesed that it actually could be fixed the other way around.
Suggestion:
Replace the fact that goblin scouts cannot find the grove and report to Minthara with the fact that she's well aware where the Grove is, but she doesn't "want to lead a suicide mission" so much that she's forcing them to find some additional path inside. This will only need some fixes to the dialog with Minthara and the prisoner. Also would be better if Minthara would actually expect us to do some sabotage work in the Grove, before starting the siege, and we could lie to her about our accomplishments if we are willing to lure her in the trap. For example she could expect us to turn off traps in the tunnel and then she would send some forces through the tunnel.