A way to incorporate time(rs) that's immersive and respects the players' time

Wicked Feedback
1

I actually like the temporal mechanics unlike some of the posts I’ve read. I think my biggest issue with them is that they’re based off of real-life time, rather than the game worlds time. It makes sense for things to take time to be built, but using OUR time is pretty immersion breaking.

I think it would feel better if you go off exploring areas and come back to town ~3 in game hours later and see buildings being complete. IMO it would enhance the gameplay loop of coming back to town often, and where time spent playing is how the game progressed, rather than stepping away from the game for a few hours.

The same is true for daily quests. It would also help keep the gameworld more populated with enemies if you could come back more often to get new bounties/challenges. Since right now, it’s possible to clear everything and then you have to wait a looong while for the enemies to re spawn.

Even better, is that sleeping at the inn now has a REAL purpose, to skip time, rather than just eating more food and being on your way.

2

Thas a nice idea, it’d bring more immersion and would solve money problem for early game, though rewards should be decreased to keep balance

3

Making enemies, sources, challenges, bounties and the shops reset after a in-game day would be good, and resting at a bed allowing you to skip the time would make me be able to keep playing the game without a time barrier.

Since the game is not a live service game, and you ain’t selling anything after the one time purchase, there’s no need in keeping the player playing more than he wants nor halting progress so he takes longer to finish the game, these things like daily quests and time to ready things are on MMOs to keep a high player count, and having than spend money on things to not waste time.

4

NRFW got an ingame watch, which shows time of day, one can think about it as they want.

But it can be considered a QoL.

But since we got a seperated timer ingame, I think you should stray away from putting timers ingame that uses real life time.

You can still have a timer that is 1 hour real life, but depicture it as what that would ingame (a day?).

It would remove the cheap mobilegame feel, and depicture how the works, ingame uses a day or two to work.

More so you could actually have works coming and going to the projects with material, and the vendors and so responding to the noise, or messy state of their shop at the moment.

I know, a lot of work, for a small feature, but personally I think it is such small details that makes you smile, when discovered.

Also cannot wait for the farming.

I know co-op is up there as a high priority, but for me it is just a small QoL thing.

Please do not teether the players, let us get lost from each other on totally seperated maps if that is what its call for.
And also make the crucible even greater with co-op, more insane powerups, hordes of mobs, and more terrible bosses. In other words make it scale with player numbers, but do not be afraid to let us be OP once in awhile.
It is just the crucible.

Also haven’t found the endless mode yet.

5

Really just the title, vendors, finley, and the constructions all run off real-life time, but you have a lock taking up a good amount of the top right corner, that does little more then show the time of day but the sun and moon do that well enough. I would like it if it either

A) Convert all the timer into in-game units
Vender restock once a week instead of a day
Constructions take x-days instead of hours
etc.
B) Get rid of the clock since we already have one on our phones and the computer we are playing the incredible game with
C) Have the clock follow real-life time with the day and night cycles syncing

6

Good point. I’d swap everything to ingame time. That increases immersion & escapism, and also makes things more cohesive. Every other stat refers to ingame things, eg a heavy armor doesn’t cost me as a player more stamina, the shop prices aren’t for real world currency, etc etc

7

I think it’s designed with multiplayer shared world in mind.

8

How so? Out of curiosity.

9

Time and timers…

Time and timers have been a heated topic throughout the game’s development. In this suggestion I go through a way to incorporate both the in-game time and timers that make sense in-game, feels immersive and respects the players’ time as well.

In short (tl:dr)

The in-game time that cycles through day and night should incorporate every time aspect of the game. Build projects, Finley, crafting stations, etc. Additionally, players should be able to actually sleep in their beds to skip time during the night, and only during the night.

Going more in-depth…

All time related stuff gets applied to the in-game time. Whether that’s build projects, Finley, crafting stations, time-specific quests, etc. Similar as in games like Stardew Valley.

Currently, if I want to visit Finley, I can only do so at 20:00-00:00 in realtime. This sucks for players that can’t play during those timeslots. They’d always miss out. Making Finley appear between 20:00 and 00:00 in-game time, people would be able to interact with him whenever they play, whether it’s 15:00 or 03:00 in realtime.

Finleys’s spawn rate can of course be tweaked if this would make him appear too often. Weekdays could make a return if this were the case.

And why stop at Finley? If Moon ever decides to bring time-specific in-game events or quests, those could perfectly be tied to the in-game time as well. Thomas once mentioned an idea where you’d have a monster that only appeared at midnight in realtime. This would be horrible for players that simply can’t afford to play a game until midnight. Correlating it with the in-game time instead would respect the players’ time much more.

This could also mean a return for build projects, but in a much less harsh way. Instead of having to wait 4 real hours, you’d have to wait 1 in-game day for example. Moon could reintroduce the ‘feed the workers’ mechanic to speed up the time again.

And if people still dislike it, they could sleep in their beds to skip time…

Wait, what? Actually sleeping to skip time? Wouldn’t that get abused?

This suggestion incorporates sleep in a way so it can’t be abused all too much as you’d only be able to sleep during the night.

When the clock hits 21:00, you’d be able to interact with a bed to sleep for a set amount of hours you decide. You would also be able to sleep throughout the night and wake up at 06:00 at the latest. This way people wouldn’t just be able to skip days at a time to quickly progress through something that shouldn’t be done that quickly. They’d have to play throughout the entire day before being able to skip throughout the night again. They would however be able to use this mechanic to speed up the time needed for build projects, farming, etc.

As mentioned earlier, if Moon ever decides to introduce a specific enemy or quest that can only be seen or activated at 02:00 at night (for example), players would be able to wake up at 01:30 to go to the designated area and encounter the enemy/quest rathern than have to sit and wait around, hoping they wouldn’t miss it if they ventured too far.

This would also make Caroline’s inn much more useful if you don’t have a house. Currently, the bedrooms in the inn are pretty useless. There’s no real reason as to why you’d want to sleep there. If you’d be able to skip through the night with it, that would make it much more useful.

Another thing (and this is a bit of a personal problem admittedly :sweat_smile: ): Much like everyone else, I absolutely adore the artstyle of the game. Especially during the clear mornings, days and evenings in-game. Whenever I want to explore a new area, I don’t want to experience it firsthand during the night. This means that whenever it turns night, I can’t really explore anymore. Being able to sleep to skip the night would solve this issue.

Final thoughts

Overall I really don’t see any downsides to this suggestion. It adds more uses for beds, gives players more control over time without going overboard, it lets players enjoy all of the game aspects no matter when they play and it adds a ton more immersion as everything is locked in-game. There’s no outside influence creeping into the game that might disrupt the immersion.

10

I just made a topic very similar to yours. I’ve already seen yours and gave it an upvote… take a look at my idea as well.

11

Oh I had no idea! Let me see if I can find it.

12

I’m really happy to know that other people feel the same way about real-life–based time systems. It really doesn’t make any sense, haha.

13

hi there,

first, sorry for my english it’s not my native language but i’ll try my best.

I wanted to give you my take about timers in the game.

From the beginning, we had some people saying it was a thing from mobile games ( wich in this case i don’t agree with ), now we have some talking about getting rid of it entirely for materials, some others liking it because of the sense of time in the game, things changing but not instantly ( wich was my case ), Thomas who seem’s to liked to take that side of animal crossing game design but not going to the point of using real time of day, but, you have finley who apply to that rule.

Now we have 5 seconds of wait for buildings, and long minutes for wood or ore, and from my point of view it doesn’t feel right, it’s all over the place.

So, maybe i’m wrong, but i like this idea, why not using the time inside the game ?

I don’t know exactly how much time in real life i takes to do 24h hours in game, but i know every time i play i’ll see night and day at least once, so, why not making the constructions, takes 3 days in game, and keep the workers of danos who will reduce time to 2 then 1 in game days for buildings, why not take 1h to 3h in game, instead of minutes of real life for the wood and ore but still keeping the coal and sap to be faster, why not put finley between 8pm to midnight every in game night, i think it can be fun to catch him knowing you have a short time to do trade with him, all this, for me, feels way more diegetic, you keep this sense of time, you don’t have arbitrary timers, and you don’t have that animal crossing design way too much bind to real time.

what do you think ?

14

You can atleast process wood, ore and hide/threads faster by putting in its associated Fuel.

15

yes, and it’s a good thing, but for me it’s about the sense of time passing by, that i think the team wanted to achieve, and i love this feeling, if it’s attach to the in game clock, i have the feeling that it will make way more sense than having all those time related mecanics that are all disconnected.

and we already have an in game clock that tells us what time it is in the game !

16

Full support of this!

17

While I respect the opinions above, I REALLY don’t want timers like that back in the game.

Especially with constraints on the sleeping.

That’d be a complete disrespect to player time in my view. I really dislike games that do stuff like this.

It’s a dark pattern that makes you come back when the game tells you to come back, rather than playing when you want to play.

We finally got rid of timers, let’s not poison the system with them again

18

This sounds cool, but in the end it becomes a huge QoL dump.

19

I agree, time is underused . Would be cool if some events happened on set time. Like someplace where you really don’t want to be at midnight …

20

I am not a fan of using time based stuff, but I’m ok with the game having some of it.

Some examples that I think are ok: Finley store, daily/weekly quests, D4 world bosses, GW2 world bosses, D2R terror zones

The main thing here is: none of these are core to the game, these are all “nice extras”.

Town upgrades aren’t “nice extras”, they’re necessary for the normal campaign progression experience.

I don’t think the normal progression experience should have any lengthy timers in it. Sometimes you have 1 day/weekend to play with a friend, sometimes you have multiple days. It would be poor design if either/both of these would not be able to experience the normal campaign progression because of artificial timers