As technology improves and game design gets better, more and more systems will be added to model real life in certain ways. One of these systems is a day/night cycle. Sometimes this cycle is event driven, which makes day and night merely a visual change. Environments change entirely (both what events trigger, what people/creatures appear, etc.) in other games with day and night. Some are even more specific and have hours in the day where the sun is up from 6-6, but stores are open from 8-7.
The closer to reality a game can be made, the easier it is for people to relate to it. Day and night happens in real life, so if games can have day and night, it'll feel more realistic and developed. Unfortunately, this realism comes at a very annoying (for me anyway) price. Imagine this scene: in the morning you enter the big city. You go to the tavern to see if there are any interesting rumors. A shady character says to meet him at night for details on some possible adventure. You go finish all your other errands in town and it's only noon. So...now you have to wait until night to start your quest? What do you do in the meantime? Hopefully the game has some way to automatically make it night time, but then what did having day and night actually add to the game? It added another step you have to do to get where you need to go. It is more realistic that shady people would need to be met at night, but couldn't he just have easily met you in a dark alley? Or in a dark corner of the tavern?
Not to mention that the method to make time pass generally doesn't make sense anyway. In Skyrim, you can "wait" for hours. So to the NPCs there's just this guy standing in the middle of town like a statue for hours on end? Or a group of adventurers are sleeping through the middle of the day? I guess adventurers keep odd hours, but it seems like it would be difficult to sleep in a tavern bustling with activity, so realistically, you shouldn't get as rested as if you slept overnight, but that'd be even more annoying. Sometimes games will have events switch between day and night on their own, but this again makes me wonder what's the point of day and night other than just a change in visuals and settings?
Collectibles that only appear at night (Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom), shops that are unusable during the night (Skyrim), having a schedule you have to keep making free exploration difficult for the OCD (Bully), having monsters appear in town at night making it a big pain to explore then (Skyward Sword), and always needing some way to switch between day and night or to the hour you want or just standing around stupidly until the appropriate time. Are there enough (or any) benefits to having day and night pass in your game to outweigh all this?
That's a really interesting question. I've been thinking about it all morning.
ReplyDeleteI think having day/night cycles is cool, but it either has to not matter (or not matter in any critical way, like in Planescape: Torment), or else it has to matter a LOT (i.e. have cool differences between day/night) AND have a way to switch easily (e.g. Zelda: Ocarina of Time).
I haven't replayed Planescape Torment yet, so I can't speak for that one, but Baldur's Gate definitely had quests that only started at day or night and it was kind of a pain to switch since resting came with the risk of being attacked. Baldur's Gate 2 was a little better about it.
DeleteI think Ocarina of Time might have done it the best because there is interesting stuff that happens at night and it's super easy to switch between the two.
My original thought was to just get attacked more at night, but not have any quest/important things to do, but then that'd just make night time a nuisance, so you'd just switch out of it all the time.