There’s a serious lack of good vampire games. Hope this is good, not sure how I feel about the time mechanic. Playing metaphor now, which has a similar mechanic, and honestly not really a fan.
I think I’ll love the time mechanic. Pentiment has something similar and it makes choices meaningful. I don’t like how in many games when an NPC says “meet me there tonight” they will just wait for you for weeks on end. They should wait the very next night and then be pissed off that you stood them up!
It can either work very well or terribly I think.
It would have been terrible in TW3. There are too many damn quests to keep track of; when you get to Novigrad you spend the first couple hours being bombarded by quest hooks, some of which are not supposed to be resolved until Geralt gains 10 more levels (for instance Hattori’s quest line). Having to turn down a quest hook or fail a quest because of time constraints would be punishing through no fault of the player and therefore bad game design. Book Geralt would ignore all the side-quests and focus on finding Ciri, but that’d make for a very different game. Also 75 % of the quest hooks where you’re supposed to meet someone “at the docks tonight” are just a narrative shortcut. In real-life you’d say “sorry I already have a nightwraith contract, can you do tomorrow night instead?”.
If the reasons why you have to turn down a quest are well integrated to the narration and the player can only fail a quest because of actual time mismanagement, then it makes sense. IMO this seems most doable in a game with a reduced scope, up to 20 hours of content, where every quest is distinct and meaningful and can be kept in mind. Which I’m very down for because I don’t have much time for 100+ hour main story games anymore.
