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 :)

  • tamagotchicowboy [he/him]
    ·
    3 months ago

    Way out of date vs your request, but MMOs have this to a degree, in Everquest for example some npcs/events only happen at certain days or times of the week, then there's actually people too you can watch and maybe even interact with. Its something to see all the differences on each server's community, different unspoken rules, economies, etc. One of my favorite things in MMOs is to fuck with their markets once I'm high enough level to do so, its remarkable to see how like IRL it makes people's behaviors change and can either alleviate or cause drama.

    Oblivion was supposed to use way more radiant AI then it ended up doing a lot less since the engine couldn't handle npcs having full lives (even to this day AI overload is a thing for modders to think of), and AI would be busy stealing food from each other and dying horribly to the psychic guards sadness .