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Hi,

do we have a clue about the night/day schedule and a changing weather with interactions?


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From the Larian Kickstarter comments:

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we're not planning on having Night/Day cycles yet. It would be an awesome feature, but given the number of other awesome features that we want, it's very difficult. Right now we're focusing on things like improving combat, 4 player co-op, and a systemic, reactive world that we hope will blow your chainmail socks off!


I just don't see it happening unfortunately. They're going to have their hands full enough already with the current number of vectors in their quest paths.


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I guess it's possible they have a more establish and powerful set of tools, this should be easier to achieve.

If they can support NPC paths day and night cycles on their tools this should not be a very costly feature to implement on this second KS thought I'm just considering NPC that populate towns and creature spawns points.

Last edited by deathmachinept; 28/08/15 02:48 PM.
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very sad :-(
but again: i would be satisfied with a purely cosmetic day/night cycle


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Originally Posted by 4verse
very sad :-(
but again: i would be satisfied with a purely cosmetic day/night cycle


Me too.


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Day/Night would be nice if it has effect on gameplay (as in Baldur's Gate). Sadly Pillars of Eternity's is purely cosmetic, and then it's just "meh"

I'm unbiased on NPC cycles provided they can make them better than the naked nightwalkers of Oblivion.

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I have to say that from what I understand, this is the kind of thing which has to be built into the game from the start. Trying to shoehorn it in at a later date, after production has advanced to a certain stage is just going to be too problematic.

So I do not think NPC Schedules should be put into this game.

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It was a stretch goal for the 1st one. But as I understood it trying to fit it in after the fact became so resource intensive that it was counterproductive frown

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Yeah it seems easy enough to imagine how much work it would take to add NPC schedules to a game that doesn't have them already. The Day/Night cycle visually not affecting gameplay, to me seems reasonable though.

One stated they weren't happy with PoEt's cycle because it was only visual, but I liked it vs always one way. I get NPC schedules for open world games that are going for realism, but this isn't open world.

Something I'd like to see is 4x map sizes, the larger the maps, the more I feel I'm not in a square and that I'm in a living world with some real treasure hunting going on. Is there any word that the game canvas's maybe larger? And that is something that bothered me with PoEt, their map sizes were no larger than BG's and the load times were slower than BG. This is 15 years later on massive systems compared to then. D:OS was still well larger in size and had no problems with load/save times, but put me in for being ok with even larger area's to run around in without loading a new map.


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oh shit... I understand but definitely bad. That was my most expected feature !!


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Originally Posted by Horrorscope
One stated they weren't happy with PoEt's cycle because it was only visual, but I liked it vs always one way. I get NPC schedules for open world games that are going for realism, but this isn't open world.

In Baldur's Gate, especially in the cities, it made a lot of difference. Also plenty of night-only sidequests available.

Compared to that, in PoE in the night vendors don't even go away, all quest-NPC's remain (just random uninteresting civs get less), there's no night-specific quests. And the whole awesomely ONE(!) night-NPC is only a craptastic vendor.

So yeah, it was pretty hard for me not to be dissapointed in that.

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In games that include day/night cycles, I often end up feeling that the nights are way too long. So much of the charm and flavour of how an area looks gets lost when the screen goes "no, it's night now. You can't see". I'd still like to have it in the game though, but I'm not exactly heartbroken that I must suffer the ever bright, colorful, cheery, atmospheric and engaging world instead. smile

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It would be very nice to have day&night schedules not just for fluff but indeed with gameplay implications like special night content/quests, vampirism, stealth advantages at night, more dangerous exploration and so on...

But I can understand why they are not doing it. I'm not exactly a programmer but even from my limited understanding of how software or games work, I would guess that basically everything inside the engine would have to be changed to work "by the clock" or on a schedule.

For NPC schedules you could probably get away with some scripting but meaningful day/night schedules would demand huge architectural changes under the hood since every gameplay system would have to be put on a timer.

Since Larian are going to use the same engine it's probably just not feasible. I guess we're just going to have to keep waiting for that big RPG to dwarf them all wink ... in which we will hopefully have it all, day&night, NPC schedules and also seasonal changes/activities (I really miss games with changing seasons!).

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Just my two cents, I hate the idea of day/night cycles. Don't know why, but I do.


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I think the day/night cycle itself wouldn't be too much work. I got it working fairly well for my mod, though there are some issues. Nothing that couldn't be solved with some minor changes to the engine, I wouldn't think though.

NPC schedules are another issue, but I don't think having a limited number of schedules would be too overwhelming. You don't have to attach everything to a timer. Not every NPC has to go to do bed, have completely scripted behavior. If merchants stopped selling and there were a few night/day only quests and skills, I think that'd be immersive enough, though Swen doesn't like half-assing it. It seems like they want to do everything, or not bother. If they actually let modders edit the main campaign (not mostly locked like D:OS), I might consider trying to add in a day night cycle with a few NPC schedules.

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This stuff is not happening. From the Kickstarter comments section:

Originally Posted by Larian Studios
@Jimmious: Those just happen to be the ones we can't do. NPC schedules & cycles would make what we're trying to do very hard and require a bigger team than we have. Voice recordings I would love & I'll fight hard for it, but given the amount of dialogue we have, it's going to be tough. We recorded 7 months non-stop for D:OS EE & that was after the game was done. If we're going to have to add that much time to D:OS 2's development, I might be undead myself by the time it's finished smile


It IS a lot of work, a LOT more than you think, especially considering all the reactivity and different responses and quests for different party members.

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Having the time of day change is not really that much of an issue.

The problem comes when you have to design all 500+ NPCs to react to such changes and to not have conflicting issues between all of the NPCs.

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I know it's a ton of work to do it all the way (getting a town's behavior set up for just day is a lot of work, as I know from my mod), but a day night cycle with a fairly minimal influence on NPCs could be workable. It wouldn't have to affect any NPCs that are involved in quests, just the likes of some basic merchants and few citizens, and then a few characters might come out at night. Personally, I would find that satisfying; not asking for literally every single NPC to go to bed and have new dialogs for night, or what have you. 95% of events could work whether its day or night, but just having like, 5% of the characters and skills influenced by the cycle would do a lot to improve immersion.

But is Larian interested in doing this minimal approach? Probably not. I think they figure if they're going to do it, they're going to make it impact the game as much as the origins are, which is obviously a crap ton of work. So I understand why the day/night cycle won't happen, at least, not till D:OS 3 :P

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Well with a million dollars and 29 days left I don't think it would cost that much to implement a Day and night cycle and an interactive world like with the Ultima. Just make its more alive. Its an important feature to immerse oneself in gameplay.

They have the engine already created (done with first kickstarter). Just implemente it smile

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It's not happening.

Also, it's one of those issues where throwing a bunch of money at it doesn't really help. As much as I would like to see it, they have other priorities, and it's not happening for DOS II. From Swen himeself:

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So on the day/night cycle (Swen here again) - what we're trying to do at the narrative & scripting level is really complicated and my head is too small to even contemplate adding yet another extra dimension of complexity to that. The impact of your origins combined with at higher level of freedom than the already insane amount D:OS gave together with the option of multiplayer = complex development, and until we tame all of that, we won't add an extra layer. Perhaps for a next game, but definitely not for this one.


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