“June” - Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 1412-1416 AD
So in Tobi’s post about vegetation in the 15th century, he revealed the game’s story would take place in the spring. After doing some (unrelated) research in to ancient agriculture for a project I was working on, and listening to Three Moves Ahead podcast about The Last Express, I thought about two time-related questions I wanted to ask about KCD.
My first question is, will the main storyline continue without the input of the player? I feel the answer to this question is no, but I wanted to ask anyways. In most games, especially RPG’s, everything revolves around the player. The evil Dragon Trogdor will only attack the Imperial capital once the player activates the trigger for that quest. Even though the world is in immediate and terrible danger from Balzog the Lich King, he will wait to destroy the world until the player completes every side quest. This often stretches my suspension of disbelief. In The Last Express, and in a few other games, aspects of the story happen even if the player isn’t around - which is obviously more realistic, and I feel makes for a more interesting gameplay experience. Of course this is a massive game design decision which would have had to be made early on. It’s not something that bothers me terribly, but I think it would be interesting if KCD went down that path.
The second question is more about the level of the world simulation. How much will NPC activities and the landscape be affected by the passage of in game time? Will NPC activities reflect tasks which would have been done in the spring time in the middle ages? Most open world games have day-night cycles, and calendars that change, but the environment and NPC’s activites remain exactly the same. For example in Skyrim, a farmer might rake his tiny patch of “farmland” (about 3 sq m of wheat) every day of the year. He never has a vacation, goes to a temple, etc. Aside from some token activity, he is frozen in time performing the same task over and over - as if he was in hell. Yet the passage of time in the medieval period revolved heavily around the different agricultural activities of that time of year. The month of June in France, depicted above, was the time for the mowing hay. And people’s activities varied from day to day. People would have gone to church, to market, there would have been village festivals on saint’s days, etc. NPC’s have been shown performing different activities in the various video updates. Will they also perform time specific activities? If you walk in to a church on an in game Sunday, will you see a priest giving mass to a congregation of local villeins?
I think MadSmejki already stated they weren’t doing different seasons - but will there be any other changes in the environment as time passes? What would be the technical difficulties involved in something like getting peasants to mow hay meadows and leave haystacks behind? Or a village getting decorated for a saint’s day festival? I’m not terribly familiar with the CryEngine. I imagine that all this would probably be a b*tch to script, and likely extremley time consuming. I imagine it’s probably not a high priority at the moment either. But I think it would add a lot of atmosphere, and make the world feel more like a living place.
What does everyone else think? Anything you can tell us, devs? Thanks!
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