What do you think of the Day Night Cycle?

[DotDotDot]

The Day Night cycle was introduced in Gen 2 and taken out in gen 3 and to my knowledge people were mad about this.
Personally I'm not the biggest fan of it (especially in the top down games) I feel like it doesn't really make sense that you and everyone else is up all night(I know the day lasting forever also doesn't make sense but I think it works better) especially in sun and moon when there are multiple times were you could just go to sleep at like 4 P.M.Anyway what do you think?

 

[TechSkylander1518]

The Day/Night cycle affects a lot of evolutions now, so it's not budging there. (Espeon and Umbreon couldn't be obtained in FRLG, which was likely part of the complaints) Fan games could get away with it, but they should make sure the new method is clear. (if they're using canon mons, at least)

Personally, I don't feel like it breaks immersion that much-my clock is always set to my local time, so I can't really say "why are you up at this hour?" when I'm up myself. (besides, the endlessly-repeating dialogue breaks that more for me) But I do think it'd be a lot better to show the effects a bit more, like how Lacunosa Town residents went home at night, or street lights turning on in Uranium.

 

[Dragonite]

I was all for the day/night system until I sat down and thought about it just now, You two already kind of hit the point that if there's no real purpose to having the sun go up and down (i.e. monsters come out at night and the NPCs go in) it just seems kind of, for lack of better ways to describe it, there for the sake of proving that the developers were able to figure out how?

But on the other hand, if it's purely there for aesthetic purposes (the sky turns navy and stars come out, etc) and the game otherwise doesn't change I guess there's no real harm in that, either . . .

 

[Hematite]

I don't think the day/night cycle was initially even meant to be a series standard, considering it was taken out after one region! It's definitely more aesthetic than anything and doesn't really achieve much. But even so, I like having it - even if it's just aesthetic, it's not as if there aren't other things that serve to make the games pretty. The aesthetic advancements with every Generation are always nice even if they're FUNCTIONALLY useless - just like Routes all used to look the same, but I'll always support any game that goes the extra mile to make them look different like XY and SM have.

The one and only thing I dislike about games that include the day/night cycle is when they make the night tone a crazy-saturated blue - I'd rather day and night looked too similar than for them to be so intense that you can't see anything at night. Worse still when streetlamps and such are ALSO super saturated overtones instead of just lighter. The only thing about Uranium that I didn't like was playing at night, because it was just too intrusive and hard to look at - especially in the rainforest on the way to Amatree, through which I had the misfortune to go both at night and while it was raining, because I could barely even see at all, haha. Always be careful with that! I would recommend a very pale blue overtone, and maybe reduce the saturation of everything at night? It might seem counterintuitive if you're going for realism, but I would never say to make the night straight-up darker, because that makes the aesthetic get in the way of gameplay instead of just being pretty and kind of turns the whole point on its head.