Every game I've seen has a sense of time. Day and night are pretty easy to program in. However what I've seen, no game tries to really put much effort into thier calendar besides just a visual reference. The only game I've seen put any extra effort was FFXI. Thier calendar was limited only to days of the week and phases of the moon. What I would like to see is a full fleged calendar. Why don't we have Seasons? Temperate zones have seasons, Equatorial zones have rainy and Dry seasons, and Arctic zones have longer and shorter daylight times. Once you figure out how to do that, add in Holiday's for you're world, we could even go over the top and add in holidays for seperate countries... A working calendar allows for various exciting quests. Spells that can only be cast during certain phases of the moon, artifacts that require a certain holiday etc.

A seasonal calender is one of those features I pine for in an MMO but I realize is beyond the reach of most developers. It's an absolute monster to implement. Having snow accumulate on the ground, leaves change colour and fall off, and bodies of water freeze is all tricky business. The only MMO I've seen take a stab at it is Dark and Light, and they have the benefit of developing their game on a powerful world building engine.

WoW has some of this but is loosely based off of the real world calender. So they had halloween and a christmas holiday ( with various decorations in the major cities ). Each had 'seasonal' quests. There are also special 'events' in game like "children's week". There is also some minor seasonal things like different fish ( winter squid vs summer bass ).

The trouble with having things only available at specific times is that not everybody can play at specific times. What if some things are only available during the day but I can only play at night? If it was cosmetic things, that would be ok. Like wearing different clothes or using different animations,etc.

WHat if the game day was only eight real hours long? Or six? This way, you could make every content available for every time frame on earth?

Lets take an average game day of 72 minutes.
1 month is 36 hours
1 season is 4 1/2 days
1 year is 2 1/2 weeks.

And you don't have to do gradual changes such as leaves falling off. etc. It may be a bit off, but if you just create 4 different instances of zones.....

^^ Looks like others had the same idea I did :)


MMOs are played by a worldwide group. Exactly what time zone would it play in?

I like the idea of having the "time" affect gameplay, but in a massively multiplayer game it really can't work strictly off of the real world time, because that time is different all over the place.

How do you fix that? Create your own "fantasy calendar", where the time doesn't have to match up with the real world. A day in MMOIX is 6 hours long. There are 12 days in a week. So, every three days it's a new week. Something like that, but it can be the same worldwide.

Sure, you won't look at your screen and out your window and see the same thing, but it would make the game accessible all over the world AND give a way to use time as a gameplay element.


(Note: 6 hour days will also allow abilities that are used only at night to be used by players who can only play during the day, because now there are 4 nights per day)