Tuco Benedicto Pacifico
Arcane
No, no, NO, NO.The lack of passing time is something that 99% of RPGs are guilty of though, sadly. Even BG1 and 2 with day and night cycles it's obviously just setdressing since nothing (Except during the underdark in BG2) actually cares about how quickly or slowly you do something.
We are talking about entirely different scales of the phenomenon.
You are talking about how the world in BG1 or 2 doesn't freak out when you waste a couple of days here and there, which I frankly couldn't give less of a damn about.
Conversely, I'm talking about how the world in BG3 seems to be permanently frozen in the same moment of the day. Both because you get no variation in lighting, NPC positioning, monsters encountered, behavior or anything else and because literally no one ever refences any time frame about anything, everything is two steps away from anything else, there's no implied travel time to get anywhere, there's no dynamic weather, there's no sense of scale or distance, etc.
"It's just set dressing". Well, set dressing would be more than fine enough on itself and we are not getting that, either.
Yeah, PF games manage this reasonably well (except for being occasionally a bit more obtuse about it and not letting exactly get the player get a grasp of what's a stake and in what type of time limit) but once again "getting punished for wasting time" is NOT what I was talking about and what I'm lamenting the absence of here.It's one of the good points about the Pathfinder games, Kingmaker more than Wrath of the Righteous, since it actually has a large number of quests that'll punish you for fucking around rather than treating things like an emergency.
We can make assumptions until the end of time, but that doesn't change the fact that it can be done, others did it and if it's a technical limitation is one where they bottled themselves in with their own hands.The instanced camping is weird though I'll fully agree, I assume they just did it for technical reasons
Hell, once again Pathfinder manages to surpass them in this area while using a far more economical and yet more versatile solution: you can camp pretty much anywhere there's enough room for it (given no enemies in your immediate proximity), you get dialogues and interactions between companions that go way past "One companion wants to talk with you", the system is entirely dynamic and contextual and it doesn't involve expensive cinematics and shit.
Not to mention that if "cinematic dialogues" is what they were going for and were adamant about, they already have a system in place to have the same conversation in different background. They only had to polish that system (i.e. Make sure characters don't pop in the middle of a big boulder before starting the scene) rather than move the entire team in the pocket dimension and creating the weird disconnect where you are teleported back and forth.
General speculation is that he's supposed to be a manifestation of Jergal.Speaking of the camp, did anyone else think that zombie guy sounded slightly Irenicus-like? They're fucking with the voice of course and even if it IS supposed to be Irenicus