Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Day/Night Cycle

Its a wonderful idea, BG vanilla had it.

If they did consider it, it would be best sooner than latter to take advantage of it for plot lines.

I honestly go back and forth about what I most want in this game, and Day/Night is at the 1st or 2nd place slots. It's hard to decide.

1. Option for actual, balanced 5e gameplay
2. Day/Night
3. Party of 6
4. Better camping and long rest mechanics

But not necessarily in that order.

Night play would be so fun and would offer a truly fun ambience. I imagine the surface with Underdark lighting, sneaking up on enemies with advantage as a rogue or ranger, etc. Sigh. It would be so awesome.

As much as I push for more 5e, I actually think it's number 3. I think Day/Night is 1, Party of 6 is 2, 5e balanced gameplay is a close 3, and then Better camping and rest mechanics.

2 and 3, though, go hand in hand in my opinion. The game could be balanced with minimal work with party of 6 and 5e stats and rules.

it would be nice to see a day / night cycle. if it's getting implemented i hope they timed it right. day / night dont last too short or too long. also need to a wait time option (if didnt have one yet. can't recall if it does as i completed first EA long time ago). +1 for 6 party characters.

Day&Night. Most importantly night. Gimme.

Gimme Gimmme your maps after midnight

For anyone to young to know it: /https://youtu.be/XEjLoHdbVeE?t=70/

I want passage of time!!
(Is this the right megathread to express that sentiment?)

Just think of how great it would be to be able to slowly grow a beard! And there are some other advantages too ... like things making sense.

Yes, this is the right thread for expressing sentiments about day and night to the great unresponsive void.

I’ve convinced myself that Larian are going to make a day/night cycle. Time for some wild speculation.

The world design means every event is player-facing and nothing ever changes without player input. Some sort of time system is the obvious answer to bring life into BG3.

There are many ways to simulate time. Day/night would certainly justify putting this much work into the lighting engine.

DoS2 didn’t have day/night, so the original plan for BG3 may not have included it either. If it was added to the plan due to incessant clamor, it might be the kind of thing that doubled the length of EA.

If we know anything about Larian, is that they’re secretive and detail oriented. (They claim to read every forum post, but if they do it’s done in secret). They can’t possibly have missed that every clock is stuck on 4pm. And if they were planning to do anything about that, they certainly wouldn’t leak it before it’s ready.

Lastly, not doing it would be a huge missed opportunity. This game could sell ten million copies if done right and Larian know it. It’s a follow up to a legend made by a studio coming off of a smash hit. Expectations are high and Swen Vincke has repeatedly said Larian will do everything in its power to do the game justice.

Like every good charlatan, I will now make predictions which I will ignore should they fail, but will otherwise be proof of my genuis.

BG3 comes out Q4 2023 with a full day/night cycle.

The resting system stays fundamentally unchanged aside from QoL issues. Higher difficulty requires more food to rest. (Not what I hope, but what I have forseen).

By the time BG3’s definitive edition comes out, the game will have a million rule options, including full 5e.

May the hype be undying. Please, Larian. Don’t crush my dreams.

Apparently implementing it requires deep changes in their engine. And since BG3 is running on upgraded DOS2 engine one can only pray to god Larian got enought money from EA sales to start working on the said changes. We will never know until release. The only thing we know is the above( confirmed by modders, composer here on the forum + Sven who said pre-BG3 EA release the game won't have a day/night cycle).



"Lastly, not doing it would be a huge missed opportunity. This game could sell ten million copies if done right and Larian know it." It already sold millions copies and it's like...not even done. Like at all. 70% of the game are missing lol.
So for me that little fact is the light at the end of the tunnel.

I suspected their were serious limitations in the engine that caused them to make certain decisions.

Well they can only do what they can do. They should double-down on the other aspects that make their world immersive then.

Companies, like individuals, go through growing pains. Doing a D&D title was a serious step for them. The genre is defined by the crazy level of detail and vibrant lore.


Now even the oldest engines did a day night cycle. Perhaps they need to find someone old school to show them how to do some coding 'magic'.

Bottom line, I would not fault them if is simply not feasible. If this is truly the case, its time to upgrade the engine. It would be embarrassing to show up to do a portrait using a 4 inch paint brush.

I still have a hard time believing that they CAN'T do Day/Night. I don't believe anyone who says they can't.

As has been pointed out numerous times, even games in the 90s could day/night and have weather. Geez! Even side scrolling old Nintendo/Sega games had levels that suddenly went from sunny days to stormy dark nights.

Come on. You can't tell me they can't do it. It might be a pain, but they can do it.

And proof? They took the original cutscene with the crashing nautiloid and turned it from day to night. If they can do that, they can rework a day/night cycle.

Yes. It'd cost money and time and resources. Yes. It might not be worth it to some.

But it's worth it to many, and it's, as some have said, embarrassing that you have this "We're the have-all-be-all D&D 5e experience" game of 2023ish and yet NOT have day/night so something as basic as drow sun sensitivity and such actually exist like they should. Come on! It's kinda ridiculous. Solasta has it and their budget is so much lower. Pathfinder has it, and same. I get that graphics are way better for Larian's game here, but you can't tell me it can't be done.

That said, I will accept that day/night and weather COULD create limitations on low-end PCs, and so, in an effort to appeal to a wider audience, they are trying to make sure they don't tax the lower end PCs as much. That makes much more sense to me, especially for weather effects. Night? Yeah. I'm not sure that makes as much sense. I guess maybe more shadows could cause issues, but I have a hard time believing it'd actually be more taxing to have a darker landscape.

My sense is that Larian doesn't want a day/night cycle in the game because it somehow interferes with the type of game they intend to create (could be wrong, but this has been asked for A LOT, and there hasn't been much done on it). Otherwise I think they'd be more receptive and responsive to this kind of feedback. Not the end of the world, but I hope they know that day/night cycles are a very good way to immerse the player in the experience of the world (same with a weather cycle, like the occasional rain after a long rest that could give everything a wet status, along with ambient sounds) and that, for the sake of immersion (which is lacking), they will need to find other ways to compensate in situating the player's mind and focus within the total experience of the world they are crafting. The lack of a changing/life-like world is a shortcoming of this early access (and of DOS2, as fun as it was), despite how fun this game is. But this specific game needs to be more than fun; it needs to be absorbing. That's the essence of BG2; that's the essence of what people imagine tabletop RPG to be (when you get around the schedule conflicts and the chatter and the rule checking); that's the essence of what most modern (A)RPGs are attempting.

This is exactly the main reason ...

It would require to take every cutscene and manualy rework it for any amount of light.

The best you can hope for is manual switch between middle of the day and middle of the night, wich would both stay forewer ... even that would require tremendous amount of work, but it would mean least work compared to other posibilities.

But would it? Do you KNOW?... Or are you just guessing that is the truth? Did they actually say this?

Yes i do ...
As i allready told you several times.

And basicaly, yes they also said it ... when they say to us that while they implemented minicamps, they had to re-create cutscenes for every single one of them.

//Edit:
Actualy ... you can know this aswell.
Take litteraly any companion you want, and walk them to any place you want on your camp ... then select Tav and start conversation with them ...

Do you know what will happen?
Thats right ... you will be teleported on their spot, bcs that is where the dialogue cutscene is created.

Once you see that you can experiment even futher ... add some sources of light, or disable them ... you will notice soon enough.

yeah kinda bothers me that they prefer spending 1000's of monies on voice acting stupid lines of secondary npc's buried in an infamously large number of 'permutations' instead of going all in on the overall in-game universe 'immersiveness'. Seems weird to invest so much in lines of text many players will never even experience while the in-game world which all players have to experience is seriously lacking in terms of its representation. Players need to make abstraction of time-space, suspend disbelief for teleport stones, accept obvious plot armors to have vamps running around in the day, etc. etc. etc. but hey, that random npc with nothing to say or offer has fully acted voice lines and ray-tracing in his farts. No schedule though, that's too much...

As much as I enjoyed the EA, this post is too true. Except for the vampire point, as I expect Astarion not having a problem with vampirism has more to do with Netherese Shadow Magic in the tadpole than the tadpole itself.

Yeah, I'm 100% with you here.

I mean, I'm still confident it WON'T happen because Larian doesn't deem the benefits of working on this worthy of the additional manpower required, but I won't buy the *baffling* bullshit about it being technically unfeasible.
It can be done, probably in more ways than one, too, ranging from full dynamic lighting (at the cost of some performance) to having just two "pre-baked" options cooked into the game and swapped when it's time to switch between day and night.

Games have been doing this shit since the early '90s, on both 2D and 3D engines of all sorts.
Studios with half of BG3 budget did it. Devs with a FRACTION of Larian's budget did it. Single coders with no budget at all did it. Fucking amateurs who were just fooling around to test stuff did it.

Larian itself had the feature promised in the DOS 1 kickstarter (but then ditched it for lack of budget), then in the DOS 2 kickstarter (but then ditched it for lack of time)... And then they've been upfront from the beginning about not having it in BG3 (probably for a lack of SPINE).

Well, jokes aside, the one Larian employee who talked about this (and confirmed the absence of the feature months before EA even begun) basically admitted that it was mostly because it would match poorly with their plans to be multiplayer-focused (but we already discussed several times in the past how THAT specific design challenge could be easily circumvented) and because their design philosophy was allegedly "If we can't make this subsystem super-extensive and meaningful we won't even bother having it at all", which is both an idea I strongly disagree with in principle (once again: even the most basic and plain day/night cycle would be better than its complete absence) AND something that contrasts hilariously with how half-assed some other features they are working on turned out to be so far (reactions? Camping and Rest system? Inventory sorting and management? Control scheme? The abundant dozen of mechanical changes they made that turned out to be terrible and had to be reverted...?).

Well said