Stats & hunger, sleep, weather

I think the feel it would give to the game would be that every time you leave a town, you're preparing for a big journey, a big adventure, and I like that.

You mention monster farming, and I hope that's not in the game. I hope battles, when they happen, are meaningful, and because they're meaningful and rare enough you have the time to slow down, and living in the game-world doesn't get in the way of monster farming. I also hope the endgame character doesn't feel like a super-powered god, armed to the hilt with loot that makes him invincible and with stats high enough that he can crush orcs like they're flies. I hope leveled characters are only moderately advanced over beginning characters -- with advantages, but not god-like advantages.

In my experience, its those types of things that make the game tedious and boring, not eating and sleeping.

 

Read it again, Redfish. In the example I'm AVOIDING the monsters, not farming them. What I am farming are the resources I'm gathering, such as ore, wood, and herbs. And in every MMO I've ever played, sometimes you find yourself gathering resources, while avoiding the monsters, and just putting in the time needed to maintain your supplies.

 

I like the idea of making eating and sleeping have a purpose. However I feel that making people do it is the wrong way to go.

I would prefer a system that rewards actions like eating and resting under the right circumstances, without generating penalties when players just ignore it. I would suspect that enough players would do it (if there were a purpose and a reward) that it was seem more "natural".

For example, eating:

Suppose that eating food in the wilderness or out in the middle of town gave ZERO benefit? Now suppose that eating at a campsite or while sitting down at a table at an Inn gave a benefit to the player? The benefit might be something like +1 to all offensive skills and spells.

Resting might work much the same way. No benefit if done in the middle of nowhere. But a nice benefit if it were done in a bed or at a camp. Maybe a +1 for the day to all defensive skills and spells.

It really wouldn't take much to nudge players in the direction you wanted them to go. The real trick would be making Inn's and Camps a place that encouraged people to interact and not just sit there scripting the act of sleeping and eating while ignoring everyone.

 

I got it... I'm just saying I don't think there should be many monsters roaming around to actively avoid. Maybe in the wilderness some wolves and bears, but they would be off to themselves most of the time.

What you're speaking about, in my view, a perfect situation for requiring things like camping, though. You go out to the woods, and if you're planning on being there more than several hours in gameplay, you set up a camping tent with a firepit, and start living off the land. It gives you something to do rather than routine hunting-and-clicking. If you're not planning to do anything intensive like fight monsters, no reason to even do that, because you'll just get a stamina hit, which you could take. Possibly, you'd intentionally set up camp at dark just because the wolves and other predators would come out towards the evening.

 

And again it all comes down to how fast time passes. I can totally do several hours of gathering and then I camp. But if I gather for two or three hours and discover that my character is now sleep deprived and starving because in game that was two or three DAYS... This isn't gonna be a top down turn based game. Telling me it took 1 hour per square traveled won't translate well. Telling me it took 4 move per square of rough ground isn't gonna work either. We are watching our characters run. In a given 2 minutes, I will run up to a tree, push through a single bush, and pull a mandrake root out of the mud. Finding out that was an hour of in game time, to move maybe 100 yards, will be aggravating. IF on the other hand the speed of time passage in game is softened, and I don't find time moving 24-48 times faster in game than out, then camping and living off the land will be cool.

 

Time perception is one of those things you just can't handle realistically. The player's perception of time passage must take precedence over the game's time. It's the same thing with dealing with calendars and seasons. If were to consider 1 year to be 356 game days that's only 356 hours. Or 1 year every 2.8 weeks. Throw holidays into that.. let's say 1 a month.. we'd be celebrating holidays every other real day. New Years every month would get kind of boring..

4 seasons a year.. well let's round up.. 1 season would last 4 real days. Imagine trying to take a vacation.. you've just missed a year out of your character's life. It's just not feasible or reasonable to expect players to view the world time at the same pace that the server does.

 

Only because the server keeps track of time. If it were a single-player game only where the time passes as the player was playing the game, and stopped when he stopped playing, then the passage of time could work normally.

Two or three hours is a lot of time playing a game, though. Even an hour is a lot of gameplay.

This is maybe why I don't see eye-to-eye with you on this. If I'm gathering wood or herbs in the game for an hour straight, I'm going to be pretty tired as a player. I'll want something else to do, and camping would provide that for me. It really isn't fun gathering wood for three hours straight in a game without taking a break. So, personally, I don't see taking a break as a big deal.

100 yards shouldn't be an hour of game time, and it shouldn't be one hour per square traveled. I'm not sure where your concern there is coming from.

 

If the day/night cycle is 1 hour in real time.. then 2.5 minutes in real time is 1 hour of game time. That's where the concept of 100 yards taking you an hour to cross comes from.. (granted that's probably walking).

You seem to be unaware of just how quickly 1 hour of real time can fly by when you're not watching the clock. Even 2 or 3 hours can go by fast when you've lost track of time.

Here's the thing.. you can take a break any time you choose.. but being forced to take a break frequently can be annoying and here's the thing.. most people won't be playing this Single Player Only. The passage of time can't "work normally".

All I'm suggesting is your idea be tuned to actual play time rather than game days. Stretch it out a bit. It's the frequency that makes it more or less tedious.

 

If it's necessary to make the time frame a bit longer to avoid tedium I'd be okay with it.

But I still don't know that an hour passes by as fast as you're saying. I've done crafting/gathering in games like UO and sometimes I wish the time would pass faster. An hour of resource gathering really is tedious in itself.

And if the time frame for the day/night cycle is still within an hour, in a lot of cases, you're still going to have to change your gameplay once a half hour is up in many cases. If you're gathering herbs and don't wish to be out at night because of monsters that are coming out, you'll still want to find a town to settle in, or make camp. So it makes sense to sync camp time with night time, at least a bit.

Are you still thinking the day/night cycle should be an hour, or should it be longer?

 

It's coming from the currently suggested times for a daycycle (one day per 30 minutes and one day per hour), and a little math. At that rate, time is passing 24 to 48 times as rapidly as in the real world. This means that two minutes of jogging and picking herbs, roughly 100 yards (guestimate of mine based on the currently available demo of play) would be covered in two minutes (48-96 minutes game time).

That's insane.

If you get tired of watching your character cover ground, and want to camp more often, then more power to you, I'm not stopping you. But I don't tire so fast. I get a few hours after work each day, and the occasional day off when I don't have better plans. When that day comes, and I CAN game for 8 hours straight, then I want the freedom to do so. Having my character need to sleep and eat every hour, especially if that is handled with high realism(and thus time consumption), would detract from that freedom.

------------------------------------------------------------This is my personal opinion concerning how fast time should move in regards to the need for food and sleep.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Games that I've played have had it around 40 minutes to an hour.. I think 60-90 minutes would be good..

Being out in dangerous areas harvesting isn't the only concern. It's allowing the player to play at their own pace. Yes you may find harvesting tedious. I've also known people who find it very relaxing. I myself can go for hours without needing a break.

Anyway my big concern is the individual perception of time and being able to play at your own pace. I've no problem with needing to rest and eat but I'd rather be the one choosing when the best time to do it is.

 

I had an idea -- what would you think about this solution:

When you're on a location map, time goes really slowly, so a day cycle is about maybe four hours. When you're on the overland map, time goes by at the slower rate, which would be about an hour for a day. You could also sleep on the location map and have time pass instantly if everyone in your party is sleeping together.

That would mean when you're traveling overland, you would need to camp and eat at the 1 hr interval to keep your stats up. But if you're doing something like resource gathering, it would be 4 hrs. If you're traveling overland between two locations, you're most likely going near a town and can stop in and go to the inn or tavern before you go out into the wilderness.

For most purposes I think it would work. The only snag is issues like the game calendar, and I don't know if that matters. Then you'd just have to have some system so if you enter a city with a lot of people you end up at all at the same time of day.

 

Well, it's great from the single player perspective. It does break reality a bit if I decide I need camp and sleep, but my party keeps adventuring, I step out of the location and camp, and then step back in, and somehow I've just fast forwarded time for me but not all my friends. Leaving resting and returning took what, three minutes? I don't think people would comment TOO much, beyond some jokes. So it's definitely one workable solution.

I don't see why the day cycle has to be an hour anywhere, that seems to me to be a convenience. I mean, what if the day cycle were 24 real hours? Who would suffer? You've stated that you generally don't play for a large number of hours per day, so you'd get to camp and rest and eat every day, I don't want the day fast forwarding and this way it wouldn't. Who gets hurt by that change?

 

I don't think it could be 24 hours, because the devs said there are events in the game that take place at night, and I'm expecting NPCs to have some sort of schedules, too. You don't want to force players to come online at a certain time, I think.

It could be longer than an hour, though.

About the breaking of reality.. it breaks reality a bit that travel on the overland map takes the same amount of time as travel in a hex, doesn't it? That's something we were discussing in another thread earlier. The fact that they chose to use two different map scales causes all sorts of time problems.

Plus, if the day cycle is an hour, NPCs have schedules, and you can't pass time, you'll have to wait a half hour at least in game time to see NPCs coming out of bed and into their shops. So you'll have to wait a half an hour to buy goods from stores.

No matter what solution they end up with, they're going to have to break reality a bit I think.

 

People have asked for shorten day cycles due to their work schedules and because the game will have time sensitive quests; additionally gate travel will depend on in game time - not sure what would be appropriate but 4 hour day cycle would seem fair to me (that way every person would have 6 shots at a day/night in game world play time).

 

Unfortunately this isn't possible online. The day/night cycle has to be synced up for all players. As soon as the game has to re-sync and someone's in-game clock jumps forwards or backwards as a result it's immersion breaker time.

Again I have to fall back on the player's perception of time. It doesn't matter how fast or slowing time progresses in-game.. an hour to the player is still going to be an hour. If the frequency of having to rest is too high it's too high.

I'm reminded now of magic users in NWN.. and ok fighters to. You had to rest to replenish your spells or even your health if there were no other options.. but you could do it at any time as often as you wanted. It was find because it was relatively quick. You regained health and spells at a certain rate.. For magic users it was a necessity.. but it was acceptable and part of the whole magic class. You can say it was forced as a means to regain your spells.. but it wasn't forced as a matter of time. That is they didn't have to rest to avoid the stick.. but they HAD to rest often if there were casting a lot or if they wanted to change their spell lists.

So what if we took a similar approach? Rather than having automatic recover for health.. or rather a fast recover.. what if you had to eat and rest in order to recover quickly. Resting in NWN only took a few seconds to under 1 minute and you're fully recovered. (health and magic wise). If you go without resting your recovery would be much slower.

You could say rather than starving or stat penalties.. the cost is an even slower recovery time or no recovery at all. Rest.. you recover and your otherwise recovery time improves. After all if you don't eat and rest it's natural that your body won't recover as well as someone who does.. but this won't have any hindrances in battle.. rather really only comes into play between battles during times when you would be recovering.

 

@Redfish True. I wasn't thinking much about NPC's going to bed. The last game I played that allowed that was single player, so I'd just camp and sleep to make it morning. And it's a valid point that everyone logging on, at whatever time, and from wherever in the world, should have access to the entire day. I just don't like the idea of being outrun by the sun.

So not 24, but not 1. Maybe 4. Maybe 6.

 

4 hours is really quite long.. and remember half of this is night time. Do you want to spend 2 hours in the dark needing light sources everywhere you go? I think under 2 hours is optimal.

 

It's not any more of an immersion breaker than if a player in a hex across the continent asks you to come over, and you're right there with him in a couple of minutes game-time. That's part of the problem we're talking about, right? Re-syncing game times would help the player on many levels, including being able to meet NPCs on their schedules.

You could do, that... but personally I still like the stick approach, because I like the idea that camping is a natural part of travelling, too. I personally think travelling should be a really big deal. I also think it will end up making sense for players to camp at night, too, anyway. The devs have said monsters come out at night, haven't they?

 

As long as I'm not hit with a timed debuff there. Some of us WANT to be up at night, specifically to play with the monsters.