Passage of time in games - Volume 1

Hi everyone. I've decided to start a series of articles on the passing of time in games (day/night cycles, day-of-week mechanics).

Watching how the sun rises and night turns to day on a game is always fun and pretty. It adds realism to the game, give the players the feeling that they're in an interactive world/town and add characterization to whichever place or characters are in the game. We will be talking about some of the games that use them, and how they use them, thinking of how well they implemented them or what they could have done to polish them better. The first game I could trace to implement a day/night cycle is Red Alert, an arcade game from 1981.


Ultima V
Ultima V. Though I haven't played the game, from reviews and player comments the cycle seems to go way too fast, not giving the player enough time to explore small places completely. Villagers do have different schedules depending on the time of day.



Harvest Moon Series

The harvest moon series have always contained some time-passing mechanism implemented, as the game generally has the player play through several years. In most games, each year is divided in four seasons, and each season in 30 days. Besides, each day may be sunny, cloudy, rainy or snowy, and there are special events on some dates (named festivals).

From the start, the villagers change their schedules depending on the time, though they don't walk from one place to another until later in the series. In latter games, each villager also has a different schedule for each day and weather, as villagers seldom go outside when it's raining and get more outgoing in summer. There are also birthdays on some days, and villagers changing their reactions according to day, weather, season, relationship with the villager, etc. There's enough degree of variation in these ones, even though the latest games seem to focus less on making each day seem different and more on formulaic gameplay and farming-mechanics.

Seiken Densetsu 3

 Ahh, Secret of Mana 2. The DNC was a nice addition to the game, also tackling the gameplay-changing-upon-time topic. Even though people didn't have strict schedules, shops changed their merchandise, NPC's changed their location and enemies were shuffled (some enemies even slept at night). Battle mechanics also changed, as one of the warriors (Kevin) could morph into a werewolf at night, thus increasing his attack power. Apart from time passing, this game also implemented a week-cycle of elements, giving more power to each day's element (Water, Fire, Wind, Earth, Leaf and Moon), adding one more day where all mana is balanced (and all inns are free, too!).

It was nice to see time passing when you took a ship or explored a dungeon, so I believe the DNC elements were enough. However, given that there was a whole day-of-week system, there was almost no impact in gameplay other than changing how elemental properties worked. Having some events working only on some days wouldn't have worked (as day-skipping is quite boring), but subtly changing dialogues or landscapes would have worked quite well on this one.

To sum up, we have seen games featuring simple day/night cycles, day-of-week cycles and games which implemented year-round mechanics. Most of them featured different schedules for each NPC, some of them changing upon weather, day of week and other variables. Nice touches include direct reference to a day's weather, changing gameplay according to moment of day and making fun the idea of the player discovering what each character does at different times, and when characters meet.

That's all for today, next time I'll be talking about Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask and Radiata Stories.