During the original Divinity: Original Sin crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, the very last stretch goal mentioned a day and night cycle, NPC schedules and weather systems. All of these could have impacted NPCs, monsters and magic. Do you still discuss the possibility of making a truly simulated game world at some point in the future?
Adam: I do in my own head constantly. I think it's a very different game. One of my favorite games of all time is Ultima Seven and it was the first game that I played that had proper NPC behaviors. You could wait for someone to go to the pub and then you could rob their shop. I love stuff like that, but a game that's built like that does very different things. We are very, very story focused as well and there's things that you lose. Also: multiplayer. We're a multiplayer game and day-night cycles in multiplayer becomes incredibly complicated. We're doing so many really complex things already that we know are going to be really good that, on top of that, it wouldn't fit this game.
Yeahhhh this is completely terrible reasoning, way overcomplicating a possibly simple implementation.
Larian could - Put all players on the same clock. If someone is in combat and someone isn't, it's not the end of the world times passes the same for both (I vote either tie it to the host or have time slow down for all players if any player is in TB) - Not have a real clock. Have the day progress based on clicking a button (1st short rest -> afternoon. 2nd short rest -> night) or by milestones (entering a new area, etc) - Not have complicated cycles for NPCs. A subset of NPCs simply disappear at night, and others come out. Easy. The story can be enhanced with day/night cycles. Story and day/night aren't mutually exclusive..???
So sure, Larian is not going to implement Day/Night in exactly the unnecessarily overcomplicated way Adam describes. But they could---and should, in many of our views---implement Day/Night in a simpler way.
Last edited by mrfuji3; 06/07/2203:09 PM. Reason: added an "or"
