You remember Oblivion from back in the day. It's worse than Morrowind in a lot of ways but the real-time day-night cycle and the NPC movement was engrossing. Quests where you have to go find people, and they can be in tons of locations are so interesting. Sometimes you have to figure out when someone goes home, Idk. Also characters would occasionally exhibit quirky behaviours. Every subsequent Bethesda game diminished this aspect hugely, it's one of the things I hate about Skyrim most.
Another series where the games never hit an early height of world sim again is Pokemon. Gold & Silver introduced day and night cycles that would have NPCs appear or disappear, wild pokemon encounters change, radio stations come on or off, certain items show up. For a system with 32kb of ram, it slapped. Other games have the cycle system but it's easily the most pronounced in G/S/C.
The "life sim"/'you are a loser farmer' genre as pioneered by Harvest Moon (and now happily overtaken by Stardew Valley and its ilk) have always had this kind of system, and I do like those a lot but if a game's not "about" its scheduling, it seems like they're more likely not to have it nowadays. STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl and its sequels had day/night at least, Metro did not... So if you know of any recent games that have really cool scheduling or realtime or day/night mechanics, hit me up. Also don't say Cybertruck'd 2077, game is boring and stupid :)
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Bear website talk about elder scrolls without getting mad at people for liking morrowind challenge: not possible
I literally like Oblivion and think it's fun, to me the lost bits from Morrowind (stuff like spears, many different armour parts, levitation and magic, etc) was mostly made up for by the new focus on physics, dialogue (even if it kinda sucked) that wasn't like reading from an encyclopedia, and yes the NPC scheduling. Nobody in Morrowind moves at all, and objects are 100% static; now you can knock stuff off of shelves and watch people move. People speak!!
So this isn't even like I think Oblivion is bad, I have some criticism for it but it's stilll pretty much good. I noticed in my Skyrim thread that people get REALLY bent out of shape if you say Oblivion was a step down from Morrowind
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