new gaming concept: in-game time & weather conditions synched to real life

[Driber]

I got some idea a few months ago for a new (well, at least I have not heard about it anywhere yet) gaming concept while playing a Zelda game and I decided to post it here and ask what you all think about it.

My idea is that since all gaming platforms nowadays having an internal clock embedded in the hardware, I would like to see games developed where the in-game time is synchronized with real world time.

For example, if you play a game at 2 in the afternoon, in-game it would actually be 2 PM and time would progress just as fast as in real life.

And if you would play the game in the evening/night, in-game would always be dark.

Similarly, I'd also like to see weather conditions reflect real life. If you play the game in January, the in-game world would be always snowy outside and if you play the game in the middle of the summer, it would always be hot in-game and heatwaves would rise from the ground and you'd see Fata Morganas in the distance on flat surfaces.

All of this would of course be optional - the player will still be able to choose between real world time and game time, or real world weather changes or game driven weather changes.

Also, this idea would of course only apply to games in which it would actually make sense, for example sandbox games.

What are you guys' thoughts?

And if this concept has already been incorporated into a released game, I'd love to hear which one(s)

[d1n0_xD]

That's a good idea, but like you said, if it's optional... I remember some mission in GTA: SA which you could do only at night, and it's 3 PM

[Driber]

Hehe, naturally

[Elliot Kane]

Honestly, no. Sorry Driber.

To stay up on the weather, it would require a constant internet connection, which I am immovably opposed to for single player games (I literally do not buy any game that even requires online authenification).

Being an insomniac, I also do most of my gaming at night. Pretty much al I'd see of most games is darkness.

There's also the issue of in-game realism. If you stop playing in the early morning and don't have time to resume until evening, your character(s) have just done nothing for an entire day from sunrise to sunset. In fact, nothing in their world has moved so much as a muscle in all that time. Suspension of disbelief goes right out the window.

Which, in retrospect, is probably the most important point, really!

[Driber]

I didn't mean that weather conditions should match exactly the conditions right outside your window, lol

If you thought I was hinting at an "always online, pinging a weather server every 5 minutes" game, that is not the case.

I also hate SP games which require a constant internet connection

What I was talking about, is that weather conditions would roughly match real life conditions, as in: when it's winter (your console will know the current time and date; no internet necessary) it would be snowy and during autumn, trees will be grown and leaves are scattered on the ground, etc.

Originally Posted by Elliot Kane

Being an insomniac, I also do most of my gaming at night. Pretty much al I'd see of most games is darkness.

If you can simply turn the feature off (or rather; it's turned off by default and the player has the option to turn it on), then how would this be a problem for late night gamers?

Originally Posted by Elliot Kane

There's also the issue of in-game realism. If you stop playing in the early morning and don't have time to resume until evening, your character(s) have just done nothing for an entire day from sunrise to sunset. In fact, nothing in their world has moved so much as a muscle in all that time. Suspension of disbelief goes right out the window.

I don't get this

If you stop playing in the morning, you save your game and when you resume your game in the evening, it would be dark in-game, just like outside.

How would that break the suspension of disbelief?

[Elliot Kane]

Driber,

If you stop playing in the morning, you save your game and when you resume your game in the evening, it would be dark in-game, just like outside.

How would that break the suspension of disbelief?

Coherent world. You save the game at sunrise, then load again at sunset. At that point, the internal logic of your game is busted wide open.

Save in the dark, load in the dark makes no functional difference. But the position of the Sun in your saves can make a LOT of difference.

[Jeffers]

Not so keen as time progressing as it does in real time, but the concept of Weather conditions is quite good and has been attempted/done once before I think (although I could never get it to work) in the original Black and White.

[aktrekker]

I've had this idea before, and after thinking about it I decided it might not be a good thing to have it tied directly to local time. If you do that the whole game world physics would have to match real life or you would notice that things are out of sync.

If you can only play at night after work, you would always be playing at night. This wouldn't be fun.

You want game time to advance more quickly than real time or you would never get anywhere. The game play itself would have to slow down to match what is possible in real time. Pulling yourself up over a ledge would take a long time (try it in real life). Walking or running would have to slow down to show a realistic speed (average walk speed is 4mph, large maps would be very slow to traverse).

There are many more things to consider. I finally came up with the idea of making it user selectable. They could choose to have game time match real time, or to have, for example, 1 hour real time represent 4 hours of game time, or 6 hours, and so on. It would still be a synchronous time passing at the same rate in the game, but would allow you to witness sunrise and sunset, and to play during day and night.
If the game remembers the date and time it started, it can calculate the difference between when you are playing and figure out what day and time it should be. This way time passes even when the game isn't running.

Taking the idea a bit further, it can also calculate character actions and locations in the map based on the day and time. When you continue a game the characters may not be where you left them. It would make it seem like life goes on even when you aren't playing.

Anyway, a long answer to say "No".

[sierra xb]

I would love to see this feature on certain games, mainly because I have this thing for excessive amounts of realism whenever possible. I have always been impressed when games try to duplicate real-wprld situations as much as possible, and i have been very interested lately in weather effects...so yes, I am all for this

[Poor Bison]

Originally Posted by Elliot Kane

Driber,

Coherent world. You save the game at sunrise, then load again at sunset. At that point, the internal logic of your game is busted wide open.

Save in the dark, load in the dark makes no functional difference. But the position of the Sun in your saves can make a LOT of difference.

Originally Posted by Elliot Kane

game

Suspension of disbelief in games is constantly broken. Keywords here being "Mission Failed... Retry?"

Issues such as what you raised would hardly be a cause for question in the minds of many gamers. Infact many of them would probably appreciate that the game has continued without them. Saving at night and returning in the morning to see the game change accordingly, would be a much different experience than say, saving at night (gametime) and when you load the game in the morning (realtime) it is still night in the game. That is how games currently work, and that breaks the suspension of disbelief far more than having the world continue while waiting for the player to return.

The game would not save in-game time data if the feature was enabled. If you disabled the real-time feature, then the game would continue to track it's own internal time. If you paused the game and disabled real-time, then the game would simply sync back to it's own internal engine. This would give the gamer good control over when they want the feature.

Plus, this would be a neat (though slightly unorthodox) way to give players control of the time of day in the game. If you are playing in daytime, and want to play at night, you can simply pause the game, adjust the time on your console and the game will adjust accordingly (as it is set to console time).

This would also allow developers to implement holiday specific features. Say, on December 25th they could theme the whole game to have a Christmas feel to it. On Easter, they could put small eggs at random locations in the game. On New Years Eve they could set off some in-game fireworks.

This idea has many positive things like this, and I am surprised it hasn't been implemented to any existing games.

I'm not sure what people who oppose this feature want from games, but the gaming industry needs more forward thinking like this! (And when I say forward thinking, I'm not talking about motion control or 3D gaming, they are gimmicks, not helpful and intuitive features).

[LARALOVERnr.1]

I voted yes, but I'd probably disable it almost all the time. The weather here in Holland is mostly not so good, so that would mean I would only have rain in my videogames :S

[Poor Bison]

Originally Posted by LARALOVERnr.1

I voted yes, but I'd probably disable it almost all the time. The weather here in Holland is mostly not so good, so that would mean I would only have rain in my videogames :S

Heh, as Driber said, the game-weather wouldn't exactly match what is happening in real-life. He meant that during winter months, the game would possess a wintery theme - snowy textures, cold colours, different cloud patterns etc. Autumn months would see a warmer colour range, leaves scattered across the ground. Spring would introduce a much more lush looking game, blossoms appearing, grass greener than it was in the other months. Summer would be all out bright, with big fat clouds and wind, heat-haze, etc.

Not real-time to the minute weather... that would just be depressing to turn on your console to escape a rainy day and find that your favourite game is full of rain too

[Driber]

hehe, thanks for the recap, PB. It's weird how me not mentioning at all anything about in-game weather being synched to local weather conditions and specifically only talking about the console clock, would lead to this very assumption.....and even after I explained it's not the case, the assumption is made yet again

Originally Posted by Poor Bison

Plus, this would be a neat (though slightly unorthodox) way to give players control of the time of day in the game. If you are playing in daytime, and want to play at night, you can simply pause the game, adjust the time on your console and the game will adjust accordingly (as it is set to console time).

Funny you should mention this, this is exactly what gave me this idea in the first place.

I was playing Twilight Princess and was slightly annoyed by the in-game time going extremely fast. The day (sunrise to sunset) lasts about 20 minutes, then the night pops up, which lasts about 10 minutes. I just could not really explore the world in a laid back way without every half hour having to adjust to a different environment and different background music.

So I thought, "What if the in-game time would be exactly like real life - then I could enjoy the energetic day light game experience during the day and the more relaxed, quiet world during the quiet night. And if I want to play only day during the night or vice versa, I can just adjust the system clock!"

Overall, I think we're very much on the same page on this one, PB, though that doesn't actually surprise me much

And I think you actually did a better job explaining my idea than I myself did

[The Zoo Boy]

I think that it is an awesome idea Driber, the only problem would be that during the holidays, I usually spend most of my gaming time at nigh, it would always be night, but you said that it would be optional so I would just turn it off during the holidays. So actually, an amazing idea that should get implemented in many games, especially sandbox like you said. once again, great idea.

EDIT: I just reread my post and it seems a little too praisy lol...but it was a cool idea, so I guess that's okay lol!!!

[Driber]

Ah yes, a member should never praise a mod, that's not cool

lol, seriously, though: thanks!

I'm glad my idea is well received. I think I'll try to get some dev studios' attention to this thread...

I've always been up for giving gamers much control over the game settings so that they could tweak it exactly to their liking. After all, games are all about having fun they way you want to!

[The Zoo Boy]

Originally Posted by Driber

Ah yes, a member should never praise a mod, that's not cool

lol, seriously, though: thanks!

I'm glad my idea is well received. I think I'll try to get some dev studios' attention to this thread...

I've always been up for giving gamers much control over the game settings so that they could tweak it exactly to their liking. After all, games are all about having fun they way you want to!

lol, no problem, but yeah, you hit the nai lright on the head there.

Originally Posted by Driber

Games are all about having fun they way you want to!

In fact, do you mind if I put that in my signature?

[Driber]

Go ahead. Oh no, this is gonna come back to bite me in the ass, isn't it? Damn my liberal outbursts

[The Zoo Boy]

Originally Posted by Driber

Go ahead. Oh no, this is gonna come back to bite me in the ass, isn't it? Damn my liberal outbursts

That actually made me LOL!!!

On a side note, my sig change wasn't working, and I couldn't figure out why...then I realized it had too many lines of text...should be good now lol.

[Rocket Propelled Rocket]

I think Burnout: Paradise has a real-time clock, but I'm not sure about the weather. I remember hearing something about a game, probably a golf game, that checks the weather in your area when you set it and has real time, I think it was for the Wii, not completely sure.

Anyways, if there was a function like that, in any game that I would play, I would probably keep it off, but turn it back on when there's a tornado or a big storm, because that's when it's fun. Other than that, I don't think it's a really good idea, because dynamic weather is nice to have, especially if it's been raining constantly and still is, or it's just plain sunny, for months.

[Driber]

Originally Posted by Rocket Propelled Rocket

I remember hearing something about a game, probably a golf game, that checks the weather in your area when you set it and has real time, I think it was for the Wii, not completely sure.

That would kind of make sense. The Wii has a built-in weather channel which shows your local weather and updates live when you have internet enabled on it.

I wonder if anyone else knows which game you're talking about...

[cazzer]

Originally Posted by Driber

I got some idea a few months ago for a new (well, at least I have not heard about it anywhere yet) gaming concept while playing a Zelda game and I decided to post it here and ask what you all think about it.

My idea is that since all gaming platforms nowadays having an internal clock embedded in the hardware, I would like to see games developed where the in-game time is synchronized with real world time.

For example, if you play a game at 2 in the afternoon, in-game it would actually be 2 PM and time would progress just as fast as in real life.

And if you would play the game in the evening/night, in-game would always be dark.

Similarly, I'd also like to see weather conditions reflect real life. If you play the game in January, the in-game world would be always snowy outside and if you play the game in the middle of the summer, it would always be hot in-game and heatwaves would rise from the ground and you'd see Fata Morganas in the distance on flat surfaces.

All of this would of course be optional - the player will still be able to choose between real world time and game time, or real world weather changes or game driven weather changes.

Also, this idea would of course only apply to games in which it would actually make sense, for example sandbox games.

What are you guys' thoughts?

And if this concept has already been incorporated into a released game, I'd love to hear which one(s)

It's quite a cool hour but considering that if i wanted to play a game in the day time i would have to log onto Xbox Live in the day time, i normally play at night see.
Also in games like Just Cause 2, GTA IV, Crackdown, it kinda sets a nice pace for the environment to change, that doesn't take too long.

In a game like Fallout 3 i am impressed by the fact that there is a detailed clock embedded in the game, what i mean is you can literally see what time it is to the minute, which unfortunately goes up every second or so.

[LadyRufina]

I do think it's a very good idea but not for TR. Maybe games like GTA and Elder Scrolls games where you could possible find sleep so it wouldn't look unrealistic when you save at sunrise and load at sunset like Elliot said.

[Driber]

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

@cazzer: Like I said, it would be completely optional. So if you can only play during the night, you could simply disable it and then the game would normally continue to follow game-time

[dumah's wraith]

Sure, why not? But it seems like a lot of work to go to just for a slight cosmetic change.

[Zulgbrtzchllha]

What you're describing was done in Animal Crossing. It even has animals that are only out during the day or night and special events on holidays. And you can always just save the game, change the date and time, and then go back (I used to do this). I remember at a Shadow of the Colossus message board years ago there was someone who was saying how cool it would be if the world changed according to the seasons, and someone involved with the game posted there and said that they were thinking of doing that sort of thing in games eventually.