"Keeping time time time in a sort of runic rhyme"

"Will you, won't you want me to make you?
I'm coming down fast, but don't let me break you
Tell me, tell me, tell me the answer"

 

The Beatles - Helter Skelter

 

 

Fear tha space wolf, fer he gots apsides on the brain, Mundust in's nostrils an' a non-relativistic clock in's belleh, AaawooOOOO!!

 

On a completely unrelated topic I decided to catch up on my Wadjet Eye backlog with Technobabylon. Barely started before groaning at a tired old gimmick:

I've played enough adventure games to parse "a few hours" as "until the next scene featuring this backdrop" but every time I see a character reference an actual timespan I can't help recalling my thirteen year old self wondering "wait, so can I just leave the game running overnight to get another item?" No. No, young werwolfe, you cannot. Time is not time. Time is scene transitions. Also, don't let that old CRT monitor overheat, even if it does have a snazzy star field screensaver. And ffs wipe down your mouse and keyboard with rubbing alcohol once in a while!

Anyway, just to state this rant's thesis clearly like your high school teacher told you to do:

game designers, be consistent on whether time does or does not matter. When is time time?

 

Granted, in many or even most genres the question doesn't apply. FPS/RTS tend to be solidly real-time by the minute and second and millisecond and dick-measure their actions-per-minute, while turn-based strategy sticks to its turns whether we're talking cards or chess or Civilization. cRPGs though, for emphasizing immersiveness through everything from armor frills to pettable pets to the slant of light on a winter afternoon, routinely end up tripping over themselves when conveying critical or non-critical timeframes. Especially after Morrowind raised the bar on portraying a living, breathing world.

Games dumbed down from better formulae for mass appeal frequently feature the passage of time as shallowly as everything else.

Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption, despite emphatically warning you vamps don't tan, featured a grand total of what, one(?) mission where you sidestepped some windows? Otherise nights never ended. At least Bloodlines was a bit more honest about everything happening at night and just flatly ignored the issue.*

Greedfall would occasionally tell you to wait for night. So you did exactly that. Hit the "wait for night" button at your hideout, and that's all there is to it. They didn't even bother with an in-game clock.

Mechwarrior 5, as I already complained, has a timeline you just fast-forward until the next event.

Such one-to-one relationships are meant for imbeciles incapable of holding more than one thought in their heads at a time.

Time as mechanic needs many more factors feeding into it, with some of the best examples being suvival-themed games where bonuses rapidly decay, monsters patrol or everything revolves around day/night cycles. I may have trashed Don't Starve for forcing mindless restarts (and stand by that) but I did enjoy it making you fear the dark and stock up on protective light. Frostpunk and its meal/hunt larder management and outpost deliveries, Miasmata's pitch-black nights making you depend on your paltry lighter, Banished, Dawn of Man or Northgard staving off winter starvation, such adventures greatly benefit from their cycles.

My favorites let you set the cycle.

Mount&Blade made a name for itself as a hack'n'slash physics simulation, but as that market filled up became more noteworthy for its tactical or managerial sides. Even when your army is standing still during a siege it's doing many things at once. It takes time to build siege engines, time to knock down walls, time for other bands to trickle in as reinforcements, during which both attackers and defenders are eating into their supply of food, wounds are healing, morale drops, etc. Though I was disappointed at Bannerlord dropping food spoilage as a management concern, on the flip-side it enlarged the map allowing for longer and more diverse trade runs, buying low and selling high from desert to tundra and shore to steppe as territories shift ownership around you. Caravan management in fact makes an excellent premise for a game based on scheduling.

 

Vagrus: the Riven Realms is turn-based, with your actions per in-game day limited by action points as you shift goods across the desolate postmagipocalyptic landscape, but there's quite a bit of fine-tuning involved in keeping your comitatus' mood above threshold while occasionally driving them to exhaustion rushing to the next town by day's end, buying as little food as possible (to leave more room for saleable goods) while avoiding starvation, chopping the odd horse up for burgers, weighing the amount of food passengers might eat versus how quickly you can cash them in at their destinations, foraging chances along your route, food prices at your future stops, and so on and on. What a bother, and what a joy to be bothered!

But here we're already getting into some issues. While Vagrus's design remains consistent for basic managerial mechanics, its questing side is a bit hit-or-miss in that regard. Most quests have no limits. Some give you fairly clear deadlines but might drop them on you unexpectedly (Finndurarth) while others just get huffy if you passed some limit you were never informed of (the Ashkulites with the stolen corpse) and still others blatantly lie (wind shamans tell you to wait a week but according to forums it's just a couple of days) and for a more manageable but frequent nuisance the companion attitude minigame places cooldown timers on gifts but doesn't auto-track when you gave the last one.

 

Those copying The Elder Scrolls' formula tend to be both best and worst at this. KCD for instance puts a great deal of detail into NPCs' daily routines, whether it's Father Godwin preferring to eat breakfast outside before he takes a bit of time to mend his fence

or, since the 1400s are a benighted superstitious times, pausing for prayer by those great

 and small

or managing to fill your 24hrs despite most characters being uninteractable at night

 

I arrived at a camp in the woods some hours too early to question the locals about bandits. I could "wait until morning" but since this is a better game I instead filled my time with a bit of honest robbery (lots of low-level sound sleepers with no guards around) then read a book until they woke up. You can also fill that supposed dead time at night with travel or poaching or alchemy or bounty-hunting. Quests involving hunting/poaching for instance tend to be some of the most challenging/frustrating as you must both luck out finding game and get the meat back before it spoils - during daytime! Night has its own activities, making it feel - imagine this - different from day!

 

Unfortunately once again many quests don't warn you they'll be timed or don't tell you the timer, or don't tell you they'll keep you involved for some period of time. One of the most important pieces of information: you can put off the main quest indefinitely at the step requiring you to meet Lordy FuckFace for a hunting trip, even if it says in the "morning" while other times "morning" does indeed mean next morning, like Johanka getting pissy if you don't escort her to preach in the woods.

When is time time?

Your guess is as good as mine.

And those are hardly the only examples

Pathfinder: Kingmaker's barony management because rather infamous for blindsiding you with timed events you couldn't schedule properly.

That piece of crap GameDec had its third act "action" timer, where little indicated what counts or does not count as an action.

In Tides of Numenera it was crumbling houses and serial killings.

In BG3 Lae'Zel rushes you to meet her people in Act 1 but it doesn't seem to care when you do it. But later, merely talking to the newspaper owner automatically kicks off a timed quest. The prison break round timer doesn't care how fast you reach the boats, because you're expected to just abandon the prison breakers and rush out the door. Some events are set off by the number of rests you take... but moving between maps also counts as a full rest. Does that eat into my timers? Does it eat into my food supply? Best head for the wiki and forums, 'cause nothing actually tells you when time is really time.

Even the original Fallout rather infamously had to drop its campaign time limit for running against the game's main charm of exploring all the settlements.

 

In fact, while adventure games or city sims will occasionally run into this issue, you can look at most any cRPG over the past thirty years and find players infuriated by being forced to reload old saves upon discovering they've been on some invisible timer or weren't informed they'd be setting off a timer just by walking into a room. And that's all it does: force reloads, unless you know the campaign beforehand.

 

It's always been a running gag that what sounds urgent in video games (like the world about to explode) moves only at the speed of the plot, so take your time. Introducing more deadlines can be generously interpreted as an attempt to cure that lassitude or the well-worn cRPG pattern of sweeping all side-quests in order of challenge rating between main quest steps. I'm especially fond of "per day" or "per rest" advancement mechanics and encouraged such when discussing daily rests and inns/taverns. Yes, as long as you properly notify me what I'm getting into. Being surprised with a timed quest when I have ten others on my plate doesn't make me reschedule the ten to prioritize that one. It just makes me reload to avoid the starter pistol. Discovering that exactly two of my fifteen "do it by tomorrow" quests actually fail if not done by tomorrow... when it's already tomorrow... tests neither neither my priorities nor my time management skills, but only my willingness to cheat and read about every quest before talking to NPCs. If you're gonna do it, do it right. Gratuitously forced wiki binging OR DIE is not a feature I've ever been interested in buying. It's a bug.

 

I'm sorry, I must've lost track of time and got sidetracked... what was I talking about?

Oh, right, Kerbal Space Program!

Do you notice how in that first screenshot I have alarms set up for when my launches hit critical points, and precise to-the-second estimates for my vessels' orbital positions and target intercepts?

Why is that so hard for cRPGs to do?

When is time time?

Either your game's timed or it's not. If yes, notify me when a task is indefinite. If not, notify me of any exceptions before I undertake them and track the timer through the interface. But I should not have to play a constant guessing game over whether the pill you labelled "morning after" actually works the morning after!

And, yes, yes, I hear you scream that interface record-keeping breaks that devil-may-care adventuring spirit of immersion, sure, sure. But you know what else breaks immersion? Gratuitous reloads so companies can pad their "hours played" marketing fad.

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* I wonder whether Bloodlines 2 will... no, I will not seek hype, I will not seek hype...