Accumulated Non-Travel Time ("Subjective Timers")

Nifft

It seems like the timers in BGEE rely on in-game time. Specifically, I'm thinking of the various romance timers.

Having now played through the first few chapters several times, this results in some repeatable bad behavior: if I'm jumping from one area to another, I'll subjectively fly through these banters, while if I'm adventuring in a single area they'll come at a more normal pace.

So I'd like to suggest an alternative metric: Accumulated Non-Travel Time

This would be used for the EE romance banters (so they'd feel more naturally paced in the face of extensive travel), and modders could use them for their own banters.

The implementation should be pretty easy, since there's already a count of in-game total time. Just keep a separate count of accumulated in-game travel time, and when someone asks for accumulated non-travel time, subtract the latter from the former.

What do people think about this? Should I make a Feature Request?

Thanks, -- N

stygga

I don't quite get what you're saying. Are you saying that romances should be based on actual play time or "real time"? If so, that's how it works in bg2 romances. And it's annoying when you know what you're doing and can pass trigger marks story line wise and not be on the part of that romance in the romance timeline and completely screw it up, just because you know how to get through the game faster.

Nifft

In BG2, they're related to "real time". In BGEE, they seem to be related to "game time".

I'm proposing something closer to "real time".

Fafnir

Game time not only makes more sense, but is also much more practical.

redline

Fafnir said:

Game time not only makes more sense, but is also much more practical.

My major gripe with game time is that the pacing starts to feel kind of screwed up. Sure, Neera might have been with my party for a full 24 hours since we first picked her up, but when 23 of those were spent in map limbo between Beregost and Nashkel (equating to about 8 seconds of "real time"), it feels pretty weird for her to suddenly start piping up about our fast-paced lifestyle and glorious adventures.

Game time does make sense from a story perspective, and there are obviously issues with real time as @stygga mentioned, particularly in BG2 (*cough* JAHEIRA *cough*), but the game time implementation in BG:EE is a little... jarring. I think that's the justification for the OP's suggestion.

I don't know if the specific implementation @Nifft mentioned should be the feature request, per se (if Beamdog has a better idea, let 'em have at it), but something that takes travel (and resting) into account would definitely be preferable to what we have now.

KidCarnival

Yeah, I noticed that, too. It's strange if the NPCs use up most of their dialogue in the first third of the game, where you spend most time travelling from map to map, and seem very quiet once you reach the city and go to 0 hours travel time between maps.