The Use Of Time Cycles in MMOs

It all started during a simple walk to my nearby smoothie store. The sun was beating down from about a noonish position and I started to think, “What if an MMO’s in-game time reflected the real world on a 1:1 scale?”

I immediately dismissed the idea as ludicrous. Many MMO players are only able to play during certain periods of time. Creating a 1:1 day/night cycle, like what players experienced in Pokémon Silver and Gold, would result in a lot of people only ever experiencing particular time periods. They wouldn’t be able to manipulate the server time, so they’d never be able to take part in the time based events.

My thought process then moved to, “What’s the longest day/night cycle that would be practical? How many in-game days would one real day equate to?” It was around this time I stopped attributing a 50/50 nature to day and night. Instead of 6 hours of daytime and 6 hours of night, I was thinking about the split in 2:1 terms—e.g. 6 hours of daytime and 3 hours of night. Real life time doesn’t split perfectly down the middle and people tend to prefer daytime over night. We’ve seen such splits in most games with day/night cycles, so it only made sense.

Ultimately I decided on a 2:1 split—2 hours of day followed by 1 hour of night. That would equate each real world day to 8 in-game days, giving you just under 2 months of in-game time each week which lends itself well to each real world week being a season in-game and each real world month equating to a year of in-game time.

The Ramifications

Confused yet? Wondering what the hell you’re reading? Why am I talking about time in MMOs? Who cares how long a game’s day/night cycle is?

The point isn’t, “Wouldn’t a day-night cycle be cool?!” It’s about the potential ramifications that come from treating an MMO world more like the real world.

With a day-night cycle you could have time-based mob spawns, with certain mobs only appearing at night or during specific times. Instead of triggering real-time events every five minutes, they could be triggered every in-game Monday. (Yes, technically it’d still be time-based, but it’d be more flavorful.)

The Importance of Seasons

One of the key conclusions I came to was making each real world week equate a seasonal change. The first week would be Spring, the second would be Summer, so on and so forth.

What happens when seasons change? Trees change colors, weather patterns are altered, animals migrate from one place to the next, holiday decorations get put up and taken down, animal populations increase and decline, food becomes harvestable. Even in our technologically advanced age, seasons play a major role in our lives and the world around us. They literally bring Earth to life, personifying Mother Nature to the point where ancient cultures worshiped seasonal changes.

What if we took those ideas and applied them to MMOs? Instead of seasons changing based on location, what if locations changed based on their season? What if the starting town looked different depending on which week you visited? What if mob locations changed based on the in-game time of year? (Not all of them, because not all animals migrate, but certain ones.) What if quest objectives changed depending on the time of year?

You could also have in-game holidays, which would be monthly events tied to the game’s lore.

Why Bother?

MMOs have had and utilized day/night cycles before. Mabinogi is probably the best example, where certain mobs spawn during specific times and each real life day is treated as a new time period in-game. I’m not saying this is a brand new concept – after all, there’s nothing new under the sun – but I think it’s one that hasn’t been utilized to its full potential.

I think one of the primary reasons people jump between MMOs is because so few do even a decent job of creating a virtual world that feels alive. They try to create their lore through exposition that most of us click through without reading.

A properly utilized in-game time system is a great way to show us the world without directly telling us about it. You could have time events like the spirit of fallen soldiers appear at night around an old battlefield that’s been turned into a town, or something as simple as weekly hunting quests to control mob populations.

Creating a fleshed out world that feels alive is a key way to get players invested in a game’s world and to keep them coming back, and making full use of time is the perfect way to do so.