I believe that games having a Day/Night cycle, that is, where the game changes from daytime to nighttime and back can aid greatly to a game’s immersion, double bonus points for adding lunar/solar cycles to it.
One of my primary criticisms of Star Wars: The Old Republic was the lack of day/night cycles. Now there is a decent reason for it missing, but I don’t know if I buy it. The main reason it is likely missing is that all the action happens on many different planets, and to be realistic, they would have to set different day/night cycles for each planet, but so what. So they need to add a few thousand more lines of code to customize the game engine and make it work, but it would have added greatly to the games immersion value. The lack of a day/night cycle and the way too many NPCs around had no names and did little to nothing but stand around are my two biggest gripes about an otherwise fun game.
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