In my opinion - yes. In BG you could kite melee enemies. In PoE you had to stick to them or use abilities, otherwise you'd eat attacks of opportunity (which mostly meant you ate attacks anyway). I agreed with Sawyer when he said that the lack of melee engagement of any kind made melee less threatening/useful and more prone to exploiting (imagine enemies ignoring your warrior to get to your mage/archer), but his solution to this was not a good one.
It has been discussed to death. Kiting is a logical tactic and there's nothing wrong with it. It is only problematic when it becomes an optimal answer for everything. You could instantaneously improve Baldur's Gate by merely varying movement speed between creatures - let's say make spiders the fastest, then the wolves/dogs then the bears, then the small and big bipedal creatures, in that order. It would make kiting viable in certain circumstances and impossible in others, as it should be. No need for arbitrary mechanics. Sawyer boasted about "fixing" DnD but in the end he was unable to veer away even a little from standard DnD concepts, nor did he understand when they make sense and when they don't. Anyways, usefulness of kiting decreases towards the end of BG1 and is a minor problem in BG2.
It's not a tiny thing at all.
A day-night cycle is only valuable if it changes something else than lighting. For that, you need serious systems to make it work: NPCs schedules that change with the time of day, visibility and stealth differences, moments to trigger quests and events. Not many games have done it right. I can think of two: the Gothics, and Arcanum (and the Witcher 1 to a lesser extent). In both cases NPCs did different stuff at night than during the day. Night time has sleeping people, valuables behind lock and key, patrols, stealth possibilities, etc.
Either you go full cycle, or you don't do it. Larian is wise not investing resources if they're not willing to go all in on this.
Also, given the way Larian does TB while other characters not in combat are in real time, the flow of time wouldn't work well for cycles. Does time only pass for characters not in TB? In that case, what happens if players outisde the fight join it, while some are in nighttime and the others in daytime? Which visibility rules do you apply, for one? The alternative, that time passes for everyone based on a IRL clock, isn't better. In that case, one fight of 10 rounds could start during the day and end during the next day, a full cycle having passed while in fact the fight would only have taken 1min in D&D time (6s/round). Both ways of doing cycles would have problems.
You need serious systems? All you need is a different pattern for NPCs' spawning in areas, proper lightning and you're set. You can then add to this frame as much mechanical consequences as you want. Applying modifiers to skills and abilities based on lightning is relatively trivial. Baldur's Gate had all that. What exactly requires huge ammount of resources?
Oh come on, combat in games that have day-night cycle has already been tackled. Is Larian working in a vacuum? Are they making their first game?
rtwp was a casualization to attract the mainstream audience at the time you dumbshit
RTS genre was for casuals back in late 90s? Then what was Tomb Raider and its ilk? Super casual? Super duper casual?
You are being retarded for the sake of being retarded. It's not "too hard to understand", it's too chaotic and hectic to present the player with as meaningful challenges as a TB system could do. Since the player doesn't have precise control over the encounter, encounters need to be simpler and easier to deal with.
Please point me to the DnD-based cRPGs that have these mythical meaningful challenges, better and more complex encounters than Baldur's Gate. Because I have not witnessed any while playing ToEE, KotC, GoldBox/FRUA. In fact, Baldur's Gate 1+2 either has them beat or stands its ground in comparison.
Because they didn't want to add a day/night cycle that was purely cosmetic you fucking dipshit.
Ah, so someone made a poor argument and thus there overall point is automatically incorrect. And you will cling to it as much as you can, because even you know that your position is untenable. Your shilling is too obvious.
The point is that Baldur's Gate 1+2 to which this game is supposed to be a succesor do have a day-night cycle and it does have meaningful consequences there. Shady traders, modifier to stealth and unique encounters (the whole chain of semi-random vampire encounters in BG2 happen only at night).
Sure, you may deflect and point to this game being mainly about adapting 5ed Forgotten Realms. But wasn't Swen claiming that they want to give players unprecedent freedom and the ability to enact pnp shenanigans, improvise and whatever. But you can't even plan a night raid or ambush? Rofl. Oh, but you can throw boots at enemies. Muh deep complex gameplay.
