Games with "real" time vs. in-game time

[Mirage]

The sims isn't a game where you immerse yourself in the actual environment, though.

[Fynn]

3 is actually an immersive open world, so it counts. Too bad they decided that 4 didn't need that

[Loony BoB]

But again Loony Bob. Most offline games let you fast forward time. TES and Fallout games let you just press t and forwards time one hour per second. Xenoblade lets you manually set the time to whatever you wish.

I still prefer actually feeling like the day is progressing. It's more immersive to have a faster flowing time because it allows you to actually "feel" the time passing by. Skipping time takes away that immersion for me.

[Mirage]

if it was up to me, i'd put one day into either 8 or 6 hours. 3x or 4x progression. I use this when i just cruise-drive in GT6, and it works great. Goes from dark to dusk in about one lap of the nurburgring, and then you see the sunrise on the 2nd or 3rd lap and then it's daytime on the 4th or 5th.

[Loony BoB]

I think car racing games are extremely different, though, for obvious reasons.

Personally, though, I would find it really weird to see a sunrise and sunset in a matter of a few laps of a racetrack. I can see how it would be cool, don't get me wrong, but it certainly doesn't fit in with any kind of immersion because of the entire fact that races are something heavily based on time.

[Mirage]

I think car racing games are extremely different, though, for obvious reasons.

Personally, though, I would find it really weird to see a sunrise and sunset in a matter of a few laps of a racetrack. I can see how it would be cool, don't get me wrong, but it certainly doesn't fit in with any kind of immersion because of the entire fact that races are something heavily based on time.

Nevertheless, PD thought it was a great idea to only put super-compressed 24-minute "endurance" races in the game, where you literally go from mid-day to midnight over the course of one nurburgring lap. It's stupid, and that alone was enough to put me off from those races. I really think 4-6 hour day/night cycles would work in an offline/single player game, especially if timeskip was possible. 90 minutes of daytime, 90 minutes of nighttime, 30 minutes dusk, 30 minutes dawn. It would give me time to really soak myself in the beautiful sunset, and not basically miss it if i was inside a building the 2 minutes it lasted.

[Vyk]

Yeah, much much prefer compressed time. Not sure what the ratio is for Elder Scrolls is but I think it's done well. And I don't mind having my character taking naps to kill time until a shop opens. Xenoblade did good but not realistic or immersive. So it was really game'y. But also super convenient

[Mirage]

elder scrolls is 24 minutes for a day i think, and that's way too fast!

[Formalhaut]

Game-time. I like how FFXIV does it - roughly an hour for a game-day. It's not too long but not too short. I dislike the idea of having to be gaming at a certain time in order to be able to access something - it's not user-friendly at all. You could fix it so that the game didn't match the real-world clock, but just time progression pace... but I would not want to have to leave my game sitting for 12 hours so the sun can come up/down in order for me to progress with whatever I was doing.

I do agree - I tend to game at night-time, due to me being busy during the day. If there was a morning or afternoon specific event going on, I'd have to really plan my day. Condensed is best, I'd say.

Having said that, I do appreciate the idea behind in real life time. Someone mentioned the act of sleeping to get to what time you want to be at, which is a good idea. It means you don't have to wait around for a time specific event to happen.

EDIT: Having thought about it, I think Lightning Returns actually did a decent job of it, to be honest. With the whole countdown as well, you really felt time slipping away.

[Zora]

Almost always in-game time. Real-time can work, but only if the game really calls for it or if the effect is almost exclusively cosmetic.

LIke, I'm okay with real-time in Animal Crossing, but would dread if a game like Xenoblade functioned in real-time.