Morbus said:
The thing is, they don't scale the other actions. They abstract time, instead of abstracting everything.
Actually, it only seems like that. But really, they don't. They abstract most distances as well, combat has always been abstracted in almost any game in many different ways and is thus already outside time.
Morbus said:
Yes, it's good when they abstract everything. It's bad when they don't. That's what I mean when I said "if you abstract time itself you are abstracting everything else". I didn't know how to explain it better, but you succeeded in that. If you abstract time, you have to abstract everything else that is dependent on it. I'm complaining about time abstraction, plain and simple. Just that.
Well, that's not really right either - there are a ton of games where abstracting time makes a lot of sense without tinkering with something else. For instance, most football games don't have 90 minute-games, because that would really be very little fun (although some offer the option), the same goes for a lot of similar games.
Most shooters don't feature any kind of timetable either, and the only feature of time in puzzle games is as a restriction on the puzzles.
And besides that, there's another big disadvantage to not abstracting time - you generally only get to see daytime action. For instance, IIRC World of Warcraft features a day/night system directly correlated to the actual time. So someone who only plays evenings will only see evenings in-game as well.
Of course, this is less of a problem in single-player games, but it still is somewhat silly. Especially when viewed in the context of almost perpetually abstracted distances where towns are very close together and walking inside a town takes nowhere near the amount of time it would in a real game (try walking from one end of a big city to another in real life, and then compare it to the time it takes to walk from one end of a city to another in Arcanum, for instance).
like making food more important?