Kingmaker has day and night, but there's no "cycle". The night is just a day with a darker color palette. There are a couple of quests where you have to do something at a specific hour of the day, but it's not like the quest takes a different route if you act before or after that hour: it's simply not there. If there's no difference between how quests progress if you act during the day or during the night, what's the point of having that cycle to begin with?
A proper day/night cycle would be cool, but what's the point of implementing it if there's no content that relies on it and it's just a shallow paintover?
A proper day/night cycle would mean going to bed at a reasonable hour, getting up at the crack of dawn, etc.
IOW, if you're going to have a day/night cycle for the sake of "realism" then you have to have a mechanic whereby your little heroes get tired, their performance degrades if they can't sleep, and they can only push themselves awake through a night now and then (e.g. maybe in a dungeon they might have to press on through the night, or on some tricky part of the journey through the country).
do you mean like fatigue in kingmaker
Yep, something like that.
Actually PFK has "spoiled" me on a few things. Their implementation of map travel (with fatigue) is the best yet in a modern CRPG, and the campfire sequences are a step in the right direction as well. Their storybook sequences are great too, and offer quite a lot of room for those skills that are less used in combat gameplay to get a chance to be useful.
Going forward, I'm going to be less happy with CRPGs that don't have that level of immersive detail.
And they could be refined further too, with more consequences to the day/night cycle, more of a sense of the time changing (the little semicircle at the top that changes from day to night is a great visual aid, but it could all be enhanced a bit). Random encounters could be refined, etc., etc.
