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  • Honestly, toughest part of Baldur's Gate 3 is recognizing how much there is to do despite the fact that you literally have specific characters haranguing you to move the story forward (I'm looking at you Frog Wife, we'll get to your fucking Creche when I'm ready!), which makes you feel like maybe there's a time limit. First playthrough I missed massive amounts of the game because I felt rushed by the characters in my party.

    On the other hand, maybe there does need to be a time limit so the urgency is real? In the original Fallout, on release, you had something like 100 in-game days before The Master found Vault 13 and it was game-over. They later removed this because it was seen as too difficult... but I actually dislike that it got removed. Maybe change how long the player is given, but still, give them something to press that urgency as an actual, real, urgent thing.

  • I agree with the other user who said it's a writing problem e.g. choosing the immediacy of end of the world plot device. Unless it's done with very specific circumstances, like Overcooked 1 where the first level is the Spaghetti Monster Apocalypse and then you jump back in time through a portal. I think Dragon's Dogma 2 is a good example of this exact problem the article raises though. It's a relatively short game, but there is no end of the world. There are 2 major events, your destiny as the Arisen to fight the dragon that killed you, and the in-world politics of a government and some corrupt individuals working to prevent this event for their own plan.

    I mention this game primarily because it uses a mechanic that many completionists tend to dislike - there are "timed" quests. Not all of them, usually ones that make sense to run out of time on (but again, not all of them.) So for example, at one point there is a quest to attend a masquerade ball, which is a permanent main story quest until you choose to attend. This is the exact issue the premise of the article brings up, where time is infinite until you decide to continue.

    And yet, at the same time, there are a few quests where you may encounter a random NPC who is asking for help for someone who goes missing, and if too many in game days pass by, well... They die.

    Ultimately I had other pacing issues with the story, but I did really enjoy how it goes about "solving" urgency when an in-game world timer exists. I've never been the biggest fan of time-managed items, (for example, raw potato, ripened potato, rotten potato over the course of 1-3 days), but Dragon's Dogma 1 and 2 both did it fairly well since the items that do expire 1) make sense, it's food, and 2) are in fair abundance. It helps solve the hoarding of your items, gives you a little extra money if you sell it as the right phase, and allows for varied item combinations as well (raw+item = curative, ripe+item = stamina, rotten+rotten = oil for lantern or status effect combinations).

    I think really the issue just comes down to what is fun gameplay mechanics? Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu for PS2/Gamecube had timed levels, a mechanic that makes sense for a game centered around saving people before they kill hostages. Star Ocean had an in game timer matched to clocks, so the only way to stop the timer was to turn off the game. After (24?) hours, it's game over. Quite frankly... timed mechanics are usually seen as gimmicky and are not very popular - they may have moments of appreciation, but I'm not sure if it's a beloved mechanic.

    Which in turn results in, "I have you now Spider-Man! In just 8 hours my bomb will blow New York to high heavens!" And then the player goes to help every child get their balloon back before the main story progresses.

  • Some games fix this issue by making the player trigger the change they want and bring the fight to the big powerful threat themselves, on their terms.

    In fact one of my favorite RPG has the player characters being the ones trying to end the world as they know it.

    I do think the extreme example, the old RPG trope of the big bad looming over in the red-tinted sky and being just minutes from firing the world busting laser while you finish your quest list, is rather cringe. Maybe don't invoke this in a game where time is basically irrelevent.

    • Some games fix this issue by making the player trigger the change they want and bring the fight to the big powerful threat themselves, on their terms.

      Yes but even in this scenario it's a bit strange that the threat in question is just twiddling their thumbs waiter for the player.

      • I feel like FromSoft's games have a nice solution to this in that generally speaking, the world has basically already ended and you're fighting through the wreckage to try to pick it up again. Not a viable option for every story, though, of course

        I would quite like to see a game in which the events play out both without a completely fixed schedule and without being within the player's control. If we take Skyrim as an example, since everyone already knows how that one works, imagine if:

        • Civil war battles happen whether you are there or not. You get some notice about them or can maybe even ride in at the last moment to turn the tide, but they're happening with or without you.
        • Your sidequests to win over jarls and find powerful artifacts stack the odds in your chosen side's favour. Intercepting the messenger on that one mission allows you to avert an otherwise guaranteed loss for your side.
        • Alduin is also doing stuff on his own schedule. If you leave him unchecked, one of your allied jarls might have their army decimated trying to hold off a dragon attack without you.
        • If you leave Alduin unchallenged long enough, jarls start defecting to the Dragon Cult and directing dragons with armies as backup towards your side, knowing that you are fighting for them and are the biggest threat on the board.
        • Leaving your civil war side unsupported means that Balgruuf won't agree to help trap Odahving. You then have to track down info about the portal to Sovngarde in an ancient scroll and take the long and arduous journey up the mountainside yourself on foot, leaving your civil war side without you for days on end

        You'd need to make sure that the player has control over when these events start, but it already does gate dragons behind that first quest to defend Whiterun. You want to just mess about in caves for the first twenty hours, sure, go ahead.

        Obviously Skyrim was never going to do this because it isn't trying to be that kind of game. It wanted to be a do anything go anywhere power fantasy, and that's fine. But I would like more games to do this sort of thing. I think some of Paradox's strategy games actually do quite a good job of creating this feeling, but the gameplay is completely different (and it only works until you get good enough to just break the mechanics in half for most of them)

      • It's not an RPG, but I think Owlboy handled it expertly.

        Each level, Owlboy is out to handle some dangerous issue that is happening. By the end of the level, he succeeds.

        The thing is, in the background, other things are happening. Almost every time you "succeed" the story moves forward to tell you, "oh, while you were doing that, THIS was happening that made all you just did basically pointless and we're all even more screwed than before you started this level."

        So, it keenly points out the enemies aren't waiting around, in fact, they're doing dastardly things while you're busy trying to save the day, so much so that your character continues to feel like a failure despite many successes. I think it's a great way to present and write a story, to show that your character isn't the only one in the wider world that things are happening to and can't handle all problems at once. Things happen outside of their control and outside of their vision, just like in our real lives.

      • Depends. If they're already in a position of power, they basically win if nobody rises against them.

        What often happens is they did try to stop the hero through the game, and failed.

    • In fact one of my favorite RPG has the player characters being the ones trying to end the world as they know it.

      Which one would that be?

  • This approach is so common in RPGs it's like dwarves with Scottish accents; a better question to ask would be whether there's an RPG that doesn't do it - one that hurries you up instead?

    I mean...Dark Souls is the obvious answer, but that's almost a different subgenre of RPG. Dark Souls does have side quests, but they are obscure and often incidental to the main quest. They also skirt this problem by having "time" be a loose concept in the lore - in every game, the world is in the process of slowly ending, in a literal way that fucks up the flow of time.

  • In Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, the world is ending, and the 13-day timer is very real. You basically get told "do as much as you can before the world ends" and let loose. So there's urgency AND side questing.

    And of course you have the opportunity to spend that time doing things that are completely irrelevant to making progress, like collecting silly outfits and forcing Lightning to wear them so that Hope can laugh at her.

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