Solasta - Dev Update #11 - Day & Night Cycles

The latest dev update for Solasta: Crown of the Magister shows off day & night cycles.

Hello everyone,

Are you ready for the first Dev Update of April? Well you better be, for we have tons of things to show you!

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Day & Night Cycles

You might remember us showing you a little sneak peek of the Day & Night cycle when talking about our new World Map screen in early February (Dev Update #7). For those who missed it - or who simply forgot, it's been 2 months after all - here it is!

You can even see the clock at the top showing the passage of time!

Back then, you were only able to see the changes in luminosity on that specific screen… But it is no longer the case! When your party is inside a location, time keeps going - so when you do a short rest or a long rest (1h / 8h), you will see the level change with the time of the day.

Before / After a long rest, from 10:50 am to 6:50 pm (8h)

Now for the fun fact: even when you're not doing rests, the time is actually flowing in real time. That means if you were to leave your computer with Solasta running for a few hours (without being in a menu), you may very well come back and see that the luminosity now looks a lot different! This should almost never happen if you're just playing normally, but just for fun here is what it looks like with a (very) accelerated video. As you can see, it's not just a question of having one "Day version" and one "Night version" of the level - the luminosity changes with the in-game time! It's also important to note that the changes aren't only visual - after a certain hour, you will be fighting under Dim Light conditions - and who knows, maybe even in total darkness!

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Feels like wasted time and budget on a useless feature that just makes people with poor sight have more difficulty to even enjoy the game. I hope there is an option to turn it off, because I do like the game in general.

It has its gameplay effects, so it is not useless. Will make night vision and low-light vision finally important in a game.
It could make things harder to see for some people, though. I'm curious if we will find something in the spellbooks for that…

Thats why parties carry torches. Someone might have to give up a shield through.

I'm getting more and more hyped over this. When I backed it, it was because I liked the demo and it is D&D after all.
Will be interesting to see who does verticality better - this or BG III?

I'm a negative for day and night cycles. I can understand the point, I've just never seen it work in an interesting way in a computer game ever. It works in P&P because everything's in your imagination clear as day, however, on a computer screen it's usually just a squint-fest with the added drawback of not being able to even play the game in anything approaching real world daylight.

Stuff like night vision and ultra vision and all that stuff should stick to dungeons, not the entire game world. You know, like having that one dungeon every now and then that's pitch black, just to add variety and shake things up every now and then. But for general exploration? Oh, get over this obsession with a dumb mechanic already, who's to say this planet we're adventuring on even has parts of 'night' that are even pitch black. Maybe they have 3 moons and two suns and the worst it ever gets is dusk-like. Which fucker keeps obsessing about imposing Earth Astronomy on every fucking fantasy setting they touch. Fuck off already.

Having said that, if Solasta makes it work and are the first people to ever make it enjoyable then I stand corrected! I'm not holding my breath though.

Usually not a fan of turn-based RPG's but this one looks very promising along with Wasteland 3. Can't wait to play both of them.

Looks fantastic! I'll keep an eye on this.

Daniel.

I liked the demo, nice clean interface, forgot that it was this game.

Maybe the party can just rest throughout the night in all outside areas which would alleviate the viewing issues mostly.
Also, there should be moon and star lit night-time level illumination, not complete night. Add to that torches and lanterns, making infra and ultravision(at least outdoors) probably redundant…hopefully lol.
Also if there's towns then no matter the time of day/night there will always be some illumination there.