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Blue Milk & Cereal: Will You Miss Day/Night Cycles In TOR?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

In many ways, an MMO strives to simulate the real world. To a lot of folks, immersion is one of the most important factors in their enjoyment of the game. If something breaks that immersion, the game can become less and less appealing to a player. There are many aspects and layers to this immersion, but without a doubt one of the biggest contributors is the atmosphere of the game. The mood of the environment can be heavily influenced by the lighting in the game, and in many games over the years, developers have used a day and night cycle to help create that atmosphere. However, in Star Wars: The Old Republic, we already know that the day and night cycles will not be present:

Will a Day/Night cycle be in the game?
Daniel Erickson: No. It was a technical decision. Scenes look better if lighting is consistent.
James Ohlen: multiple worlds present in game with different # of suns/moons, so it became too difficult to make it work.

Keep in mind, this does not mean we will not see day and night in-game – in fact the developers have confirmed we will. All it means is that we will not see them dynamically changing at the same location/planet. The SW:TOR community has an ongoing thread about this matter, as well as a poll, that’s currently sitting at approximately 34% of people being unsatisfied with such a design decision.

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of this, but I can definitely see BioWare’s stance. Given that the story element of the game is so important, they need to be able to more tightly control the way a player experiences it.  Anyway, time will show if BioWare made a good decision in this area of the game.

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