Night/Day/Weather in game effects; A Discussion.

Night/Day/Weather in game effects.

Aside from Dark/Light, what are the benefits and drawbacks of having an in game time system, that is global for all players on regional servers? What about Random weather generators too?


Benefits:

-Light during the day, Dark at night, visually more advanced world mechanic.
-Added replay value for Mission areas that could have trigger events that only happen at night/during the day or certain monsters could spawn during the day/night.
-Character classes could be effected by weather/time. Necros could have +% Night Vision; Warriors +% Crit Strike in Daytime, Rangers -% Hit Chance at night, etc.
-Add an endless level of depth to creation of more skills, classes, missions, etc, as Skills could be effected by day/night/weather. Some skills could cause night/day/weather effects or be more/less powerful/efficient.
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Drawbacks:

-Development of in game weather/time system may be years away.
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There are two types of players when considering how it would effect the Guild Wars player base. Those that play at the same time of day all the time are the ones that could specialize in a character for that specific time. Then there are those that play at random sporadic times that would be able to make a univeral character, more adapt at playing any time/weather condition. Either way there is no unfair balance issue in reference to someones playing time.

To me, PvE has become boring, predictable, and the replay value is limited by the ability to change skills and professions. That means we are specializing in how to beat a certain mission, not how to improve playing as a N/W/Me/Mo/R/E. You can't specialize in PvE, your character needs to be able to switch between Attributes, else you threaten to stand around not using skills on your bar because theres no body available or the enemies are immune to conditions.

Day/Night/Weather could essentially effect Conditions, Enchants, Hexes, Elemental/Physical/Holy Melee/Ranged Attacks, Skills, Shouts, Signets, Spells either enhancing or debuffing it's effect slightly, adding a depth and reason to be more diverse as a character.

Well the time doesn't have to go 1:1 ingame, and that wouldn't make any sense anyways, as casual gamers that play on a specific time slot every day would only play ingame night or day. If one Tyria day would be 5 'real hours', ingame time would shift every few days, when it was night at 12:00 realtime, it's day at the same time some time later.

Developing a night/day system shouldn't be very difficult anyways, first stage could just be darkness/lightness changes without any assosiated skills, plus night/day dependant skills would be ingame at Chapter III, I'd guess.

Problem might be with certain missions, like Riverside Province, which feels a bit more 'sneaking in the night' mission, than 'zerging the Mantle daytime' mission

Its an intersting idea to have mission vary depend on the time.. but I don't think it is really needed. The Day/Night cycle should only be apply to town and exploration area, and don't think any bonus associate with it is needed. (but a Dark condition might be useible in night, as well as possible dungeon places. Carry a Torch to overcome it)

There seems not one source of global lighting dominating all in the exploration map, where the dev make it have several lighting source all over the map in order to make it look good. This could spell problem if want to do any real-time time cycle render. However, I think it would still be doible if only have 3 type of time-lighting/look, the day, night, and dawn/dusk, where each would be about 6 hour each. (so a game day would be about (10 to 18) hour of real world)

The biggest thing I want to see day/night cycle is to have monster be differnt in differnt time. Where one zone could be populated by one time of mob at one time, and another in differnt time. This add more randomness and replaiblity to exploration, as well as cut down on some farming. Also different time will also yield differnt quests and NPC as well.

i'm all for weather and day/night cycles.

as actionjack said, it could be implimented only in towns and explorable areas as to prevent any mission or story issues.

i don't think it's hard to impliment or program it either, as a lot of mmog's out there already have day/night cycles. The previous Christmas and New year's event showed that they could turn a city like LA from day into night with fireworks. Snow is easily seen in shiverpeaks and rain was already shown in the Stormcaller scene. (though i have to admit, the rain effects could use a little graphical tweaking)

Lets try to use the search button, along with checking the stickied "Index of Ideas" thread (the one that says to read it before posting a thread) to see if your suggestion's been brought up already. No need for another thread discussing another day/night idea. Keep it in this thread please.

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