HiroVoid wrote...
I really doubt they're going to go with the manual day/night system again. A large tedious part of DAII that was complained about was how the day/night system pretty much forced you to scour areas at both times for unique events limited to that time period. It seemed more of a limitation of trying to extend the game's length than anything.
While I agree (and I would have nightmares about having to comb through each area twice for a day and night cycle, like in DA2), there are also lots of inherent difficulties with a day/night system seen in sandbox games like TES or GTA. Events that are determined to happen in the day or at night wind up being tricky to rig, as are quests that are tied to times of day as well.
It winds up being a huge undertaking that can overshadow many more aspects of the game than one would think on first review. For instance, if the story says the people in your keep won't survive the night, then you essentially have to create a time-based quest where you provide the help before the time is rigged to be day or else the quest is failed. Similarly, does the progression of time happen quickly, so that day and night changes within the span of 20 Real Life minutes? Or does it take hours for one day to pass? If so, will there need to be a way to "speed forward" time, such as a rest feature that skips time?
Having two separate maps, one day, one night, fixes almost all of these questions at a relatively minimal cost (simply copy/paste the map, add some shaders for darkness and move a few objects around). The amount of design question and programming roadblocks needed to overcome are much smaller.
Again... if the DA:I model does this, I will go crazy, because one of my huge pet peeves in DA2 was the number of times you had to scour the same exact map to make sure you didn't miss any loot, codex entries or quests (3 Acts, all with Day and Night versions of the maps, meaning you needed to do SIX sweeps of the same ten maps over the course of the game). If the size of DA:I is half as big as the team is making it out to be, that could involve two sweeps (assuming there aren't changes as the game progresses, of course) of every map in the game... ugh. That sounds daunting.