Games that continue on without you

All other video games not related to the main farming series - Pokemon, Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia, and other indie-developed games.
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Kikki
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I don't know what this type of game is called. It's not necessarily a 'real time clock' game...I'm not sure. I DO mean games that continue to progress/change even if you're not playing, like Animal Crossing, and Animal Crossing does indeed operate on a real time clock! However, I'm also thinking of mobile games, that don't always operate on real time. (Though I think internally they must more or less operate on a real clock. I think! The timers at least seem to work on real time, though there may be no appearance of time passing in the game at all.)

Well, anyway. What are the best games you know of, that work that way? That you can do stuff in, then come back the next day, and see that new things have happened. Games where things change and new things happen are really fun to check in on, because you may have something new to discover. I'd like to know what games make use of that mechanic the best.

ACNH is obviously the BIG one. I definitely also recommend Farm Together, though that is a pure farming game with minor decorative functions. You could go big into decorating if you wanted it, but I personally find decorating in FT uninteresting and worse: inefficient (you could be using that land and those resources to keep and buy crops/animals/etc!) The biggest thing is waiting for your crops to mature. There are some very fast turn-over crops ready in 20 minutes (50% faster if you water them as often as possible.) and I find it's a pretty busy game if you're keeping lots of crops and animals, so that time passes in a blink. It's NOT a social game, though...you can't date or marry or ever talk to anyone at all, other than reading requests for crop or animal products...you're just farmin' your heart out.

It doesn't matter what type of game it is...mobile, console, MMO...what games make the best use of the passage of time to treat the players to new or changing content each day? I prefer console, myself, but anything is better than nothing. I'd like to recommend more, but ACNH and FT are, I think, the only ones I have on my Switch. Oh, and there's Egglia, too, to an extent...at least in that there are timers on growing roots, crystals, and baiting for spirits, as well as on energy/stamina/HP refills for party members who go out and scour the dungeons for goodies. Egglia's time passage is more on the annoying side, though...shows the game's mobile roots, as they were used to be able to charge money for things, but not because it actually contributes something good to the playing experience.

I could find a list of games that work like this on consoles, but just because a game uses a RTC doesn't mean it's automatically a fun. In fact, a game that uses RT in a poor way is probably more tedious than most games that don't turn out well. Besides, finding a list of games is easily done, but isn't all that effective...hearing about them from people who've actually played them is much better.

I'd love if ACNH had MORE that could happen to surprise you each day. As things are now, life is pretty predictable in ACNH, as I don't have much reason to care what visitor I've got in town. But still, it's a nice game to go into if you enjoy being surprised in small ways, such as with what recipe you find in a bottle on the beach, what fossils or gyroids there are to unearth, what visitor your town has, and what the weather'll be like when you enter.

EDIT: OH WAIT...I have Cozy Grove on Switch. I forgot, cuz I deleted it off my system, lol, for having such infuriating requirements for this and that. They've updated a LOT between then and now so by now it might actually be a good game, and maybe it always was, for some people, but for me at the time, it was just teeth-grindingly frustrating. But it's gotten so many updates...and I know several improvements addressed things that had frustrated me...that I'm tempted to redownload and try it, since I really like having new things waiting for me in games each day. I think this is why restarting ACNH forever remains an attractive option, even though you lose so much by doing it.
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Mikodesu
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Probably most games like this could just be considered "real time clock" games. Off the top of my head I can't think of an official category for them. I haven't played many games in the category, but Animal Crossing is for sure my favorite. There's a sense of "reality" to game worlds like that, something that's hard to replicate. Watching the sun rise in a game when it's rising outside. Watching the time change around you, the seasons, etc.

(This is NOTHING comparable, but for anybody who hasn't played/doesn't remember, Genshin Impact has a changing time of day to their log-in screen. It always makes me feel nice to get to the log-in before 8, because the 'sunrise' screen ticks over to 'daytime' then. :) And the sunrise screen is very pretty. Maybe there's something about the connection to YOUR reality that makes them special?)

Probably the only sort of similar feeling I've gotten from a farming game has been HM: A(nother) Wonderful Life. Not that it's real time, but days took SO long that the world had a similar sense of 'reality'. Some days are cluttered and pass in a blink, others are agonizingly slow, that sort of thing. I guess at least with a real-time clock you can just quit fast on the slow days. Which is a plus.

If there's anything I wish they would do better, probably they could use some more procedural content. It's probably too soon for AI generated content, but, procedural has been going on for years. Skyrim (as example) has "Radiant Quests" that are procedural, recycled quests to make sure you never run out of things to do in the game world.

Older AC games had a few things like that, pestering villagers enough to give you chores of weeding or planting flowers or deliveries to do. But they were very basic, and for whatever reason New Horizons dumped most of them. I would get bored of just those few 'quests' now, but as a kid it was very worth coming back for. Surely Nintendo devs are creative enough to come up with a couple replacements instead of just deliveries... (If you consider lost items deliveries, which I do.)

I wish there were a few more of these games, but it's a hard niche to fill. I dunno what outside of a life or farming sim would make sense. Imagine exploring Breath of the Wild in real time. :lol: Not for me, at least.

There are MMOs or always-online multiplayer games (or gacha...), but I don't get the same feeling from those. The game carries on without you, but the world doesn't change (usually). You come back to a pile of quests, but nothing else. Which I guess feels like its own separate thing.
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Kikki
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I know of another on Switch, called The Longing, but I haven't played it, and the main character isn't cute to me...he's actually leaning into the gruesome.

It is a real time game, though...but not quite of the same type as AC. The idea is that you have to wait 400 days for the return of the king, and you LITERALLY have to wait 400 days. You can spend your time however you like...there's a large underground world to explore, and puzzles hidden in various places. I've heard you can speed up those 400 days by reading the in-game books (keeping your mind busy makes time go faster, is the idea) but I don't know how that works...if the game takes a certain amount of time off the 400 days for each book read, or what.

I also know of one upcoming (pushed to 2023, I believe) that I'm interested in...The Garden Path.

I don't know how much reward there'll be in playing each new day, but I do think games that work like that are really compelling and it's why I don't time-travel until I'm so bored with the game that I no longer want to play it...time-travelling and gaining instant gratification from a game that normally withholds it can revive my interest for a month or two. But up to that point, I think the delayed gratification of having to wait for each day's newness is what makes AC such a winner. The whole controllable, reliable daily-life thing is what made it unquestionably the Game of the Pandemic, imo. I didn't care what game actually won 2020's GotY...socially, world-wide, the clear answer was ACNH. No other game had half that much impact, that I saw. Even politicians started campaigning via a game for a little while there. Protests took place inside the game. Etc.

I hope ACNH's huge success gets more developers to try out the kind of game that makes the player look forward to each new day. (But without punishing them for having a life and having to skip a day here and there.)
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Mikodesu
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Ohhh riight, the Longing, I forgot about that one! I've seen it in a video essay or two, and I don't think I would have wanted to play without the premise spoiled. (400 days all alone just sounds...horrible?) It has a bit of a hitch.
Spoiler:
As time goes on it starts to speed up, you get to skip quite a few days. It does start out fully real time though, I can't remember exactly how it worked.
I don't think I've seen The Garden Path before, but it looks interesting. I do like having NPCs come and go. It can get frustrating when you need one for a quest, but it does add to that 'sense of reality', that their entire world doesn't revolve around you. Definitely one to keep an eye on. It's going to need quite a bit to do, though. I can't imagine people being patient enough to wait in real time for a plant to grow without a lot of distractions.
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Code_Name_Geek
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I have a huge weakness for games that deal with the passage of time in some way, both through a calendar system like Story of Seasons or Persona and through the real-time clock method. I think something about the routine of the same thing day in, day out with little gradual changes just appeals to my brain.

My favourite game that's based on the real-world passage of time is undoubtedly Tomodachi Life, which is the second or third most-played game on my 3DS. Since you make all the Miis in the game yourself it kind of feels like a real-time version of the Sims, but where you're gently influencing your characters as opposed to controlling them. I used to play this game a lot in high school, checking in on my Miis during my spares and StreetPassing my friends to exchange travellers and stuff. There are daily occurrences like the shop inventories changing and I really enjoyed collecting as many of the food and clothes as I could. It's still a game I come back to occasionally to smile at the Miis I've made in the past and see what was important to me then (usually a lot of fictional characters, both original and pre-existing).

Another series that has some minimal touches of time passing is Pokémon, particularly in the DS and 3DS games. The world doesn't hugely change, but berries grow and different Pokémon show up at different times of the day and different items are available to buy on different days of the week (and Black and White even added changing seasons into the mix, though they didn't line up with real-world seasons). I loved the feeling of it getting dark in the game while it got dark outside, and hearing the night arrangements of the soundtrack. Most notably, when I was completing the National Pokédex in Omega Ruby I had to boot up the game every day and soar around on my Latios looking for the islands of the day, hoping to get one with the Pokémon I needed for my Pokédex. I think it was the most connected I've ever felt to the world of the game, where it felt like a second home to me. The newer games on the Switch don't seem to have as many of these elements, though, apart from the Diamond and Pearl remakes.

This isn't exactly a game, but another thing that this makes me think of is virtual pets like Tamagotchis, which is one of my other interests. Watching your little bundle of pixels grow and caring for them over the course of days or weeks hits a lot of the same spots that make these games appealing to me. Traditionally, virtual pets were different in that they were an accessory to your world rather than a secondary world for you to escape to, but some of the newer ones are starting to have more fleshed out worlds that you can actually travel around as well. I guess game-wise it has an analogue in Nintendogs, which also revolved around raising pets around a real-time clock. I think it would be interesting to see a modern take on the real-time pet-raising sim game with some more depth.
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Kikki
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Mikodesu wrote: Dec 07, 2022 5:29 pm Probably most games like this could just be considered "real time clock" games. Off the top of my head I can't think of an official category for them. I haven't played many games in the category, but Animal Crossing is for sure my favorite. There's a sense of "reality" to game worlds like that, something that's hard to replicate. Watching the sun rise in a game when it's rising outside. Watching the time change around you, the seasons, etc.

(This is NOTHING comparable, but for anybody who hasn't played/doesn't remember, Genshin Impact has a changing time of day to their log-in screen. It always makes me feel nice to get to the log-in before 8, because the 'sunrise' screen ticks over to 'daytime' then. :) And the sunrise screen is very pretty. Maybe there's something about the connection to YOUR reality that makes them special?)
Ah, I often forget or am too quick to quote-reply, but...I've always WANTED to get ACNH's time-of day (particularly sunset) to match up to my own, but I can't. Perhaps I'm just a little too far north? I haven't played the game every day for an entire year, so I may also have just missed the time when it would match up, though you'd think spring/summer/autumn would be when it did, and it's only winter that I haven't played in ACNH. Sunset happens right outside my bedroom window, so I'd have noticed it if they ever matched up while I was playing. Of course...I almost never play ACNH in the evening or night. It's slightly easier to get morning to match up, but even so...I don't think it did it all that well, for me.

I always thought it'd be neat if the weather matched my own, but I can afford to think that, because we get a fair bit of both rain and sun here...we're not an area where it's too rainy or too sunny. Any area that IS very rainy or very sunny, having the game mimic real-world weather would make the game poorly balanced. In any case...ACNH rarely actually matched up to my own reality, weather or light-wise, but I guess that's just luck.

Xenoblade's title screen has also always mimicked time of day, at least in day-or-night...can't remember if it does a more intricate day cycle with sunrise/sunset...hey, it's 6:33...I could go check right now...okay, XCDE is showing what looks like bright morning sun at the moment, but not actual sunrise (it's still full dark where I am, though!) I can't check XC2 because it appears that I've lent it to somebody (not a worry that I can't remember doing it, as it'll be my cousin or bro-in-law) but it's bright daylight in XC3 as well. I know they change to night when it is night. XC1 on 3DS did that, too. :)

I guess having a title screen have a day-night cycle is easier if your game already contains one, which Xenoblade does, though Xenoblade itself doesn't operate on real time but on the in-game clock (which is WAY faster than a real time clock. A day in Xenoblade lasts, what...10-20 minutes, I guess. I never thought to check, before. Day/night in Xenoblade is so nice, because the landscape often changes (like in Satorl Marsh, with all the ether trees lighting up like huge chandeliers.)

Well, anyway, there's no denying that ACNH was a massive, almost shocking success, so...maybe we'll see more games that do some of what it did. I don't need an ACNH clone...I just want a game that copies the most basic set-up: a real time clock, and a world that changes day-to-day, with or without the player. (I'd like if ACNH actually did MORE to reward the player with surprises each day than it does, but...oh well. Maybe the next AC? I bet we won't have quite as long a gap between ACNH and the next AC as we did beween ACNH and the previous AC.)
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Code_Name_Geek wrote: Dec 07, 2022 6:54 pm This isn't exactly a game, but another thing that this makes me think of is virtual pets like Tamagotchis, which is one of my other interests. Watching your little bundle of pixels grow and caring for them over the course of days or weeks hits a lot of the same spots that make these games appealing to me. Traditionally, virtual pets were different in that they were an accessory to your world rather than a secondary world for you to escape to, but some of the newer ones are starting to have more fleshed out worlds that you can actually travel around as well. I guess game-wise it has an analogue in Nintendogs, which also revolved around raising pets around a real-time clock. I think it would be interesting to see a modern take on the real-time pet-raising sim game with some more depth.
The old Tamagotchi games for gameboy also functioned on an RTC. I actually loved these, though there wasn't quite enough gameplay to do more than flip the gameboy on and off for a few minutes periodically to check it, like a real Tamagotchi. The sequels were in Japanese, I played the garden/ocean version a bit, but couldn't read enough to figure out the big funky boy/girl cart, which has a speaker to signal attention like the regular keychain version.

I was really disappointed that the DS games were minigame-focused! I loved these gameboy games, there's not much like them elsewhere, except for the keychain games (which I also play off and on, the new versions are pretty fun).

I used to really enjoy the old PC pet simulators, which often worked on RTC-like systems. The oddest one was FinFin, which was a simulated alien environment that you did, like, birdwatching in. The main character was a dolphin-bird named FinFin, and you could talk to it, though I don't remember the voice feedback working that well. You basically traveled around to multiple environments, and you could see different creatures coming out at different times of day, sometimes they would interact with each other or FinFin, etc. There were seasons and a day/night cycle, so the plants were also part of the biosphere. FinFin had a mate that would come out occasionally, sometimes you couldn't see FinFin at all, he might have had some sort of predator that came out occasionally, etc. It blew my mind in 1995 or whatever, but it really was a lot of sitting around and watching grass grow, you couldn't interact other than offering FinFin a treat (which he often didn't take), possibly blowing a whistle with the keyboard (which didn't elicit a huge reaction most of the time), and the aforementioned microphone.
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The untranslated visual novel Ciel Nosurge runs on a real time clock, or at least its first iteration did. Orginally a Vita title, you play as yourself stuck inside a mobile tv screen inside of the house of a girl named Ion. She's lost her memories and is stuck in this dreamlike world until she can remember who she is, so you start helping her. You help plan her day, help her figure out tasks, ect, and in doing so her memories gradually return. It originally worked that Ion had her own schedule so you couldn't just wake her up in the middle of the night to do stuff, but instead check in on her when she was awake and not busy with her own stuff. It worked relatively fine, but it was overall too time gating, especially for people who had busy schedules and couldn't always find time to check up on Ion.

Later re-releases ditched the real time mechanic entirely as you can now slow and speed up time respectively to get where you need to be faster. This is obviously better overall, but it is interesting to look back on the original release and how it did things.
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