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

Wicked Feedback
1

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.

2

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.

3

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

4

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.

5

Full support of this!

6

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

7

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

8

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 …

9

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

10

Removing these timers and using in-game time to establish resets would improve the game by 90%.

11

It would be the opposite.

You’d have to stare at the screen waiting for the sun to rise/set to do something.

Or you’re in an activity and miss the in-game time to be somewhere to do something and you have to wait a whole other day to do it.

If you put in a mechanic like “use the bed to advance time”, you are literally just removing the timed events because you can do them at any moment, you just have to visit the bed before starting them.

No, as far as on paper this sounds like a cool mechanic, it will become obnoxious in the span of a week.

12

We should be able to rest or take nap during the day hours for buffs our luxurious beds provide.