Guild Wars 2

So, the day/night circle in game takes 2 hours of real time. That means for 1 day in real time, 12 days have passed in game time. The first story step took place in 1325 AE. Head of the Snake took place in 1330 AE. That means 5 years in game has passed, coinciding with the real time. Does that mean 1 year in GW2 equates 12*365 = 4,380 in game days?

That wiki says Mouvelian calender has only 365 days but that seems super off compared to what actually happens.

Any lore fan can confirm?

See, ANet never had their logic in their bright side. Some people tend to go deeply into the meaning of matters and as I never been thinking on this, it appears that it is just another scenario when the company just did not think over the things. Another example is the dome around DR which could be seen only from DR Story mission or from Lake Dorik, not from DR or Queensdale… wish more people were like you and me, believing that the small details are important!

DavyMcB.1603:

So, the day/night circle in game takes 2 hours of real time. That means for 1 day in real time, 12 days have passed in game time. The first story step took place in 1325 AE. Head of the Snake took place in 1330 AE. That means 5 years in game has passed, coinciding with the real time. Does that mean 1 year in GW2 equates 12*365 = 4,380 in game days?

That wiki says Mouvelian calender has only 365 days but that seems super off compared to what actually happens.

Any lore fan can confirm?

Is just a game mechanic, the in game day is 2 hours so that events can repeat at a particular time without people waiting a full day. The calender advances when the plot says it should. It’s nothing to do with the in game day /night cycle.

All in game maps can be thought of as stuck at a particular point in time. It’s just how MMOs have to work.

I’m not a dev, so I don’t have proper info on the day/night cycle thing. I imagine it has to do with the players ability to see tyria in both day and,night in a single, if very long, play session. The issue with the real world is that many people have responsibilities, like a job, that they have to go to and be away from,the computer. Instead of people who work late only seeing nighttime tyria, they get to see both day and night, depending on when exactly they play. Again I’m not a dev so I don’t have an answer for this one.

I do however have,an answer for the mesmer dome over divinity’s reach. The older maps don’t have the dome because they are stuck in time. Essentially, no time has passed in the core tyria zones as it allows new players to experience the game as it was released on launch day. Another reason is to not spoil what’s happening currently in the living world story. Yes current events are available for free to play players to experience, but I think it’s more to do with dragging old players into old zones to experience the current events stuff than anything else. It might also be a marketing ploy for "here’s some interesting stuff happening that you’ll only understand if you have Heart of Thorns, I don’t know the exact reason for it. But devs have stated multiple times that the old maps are “stuck in time” and as such that is why you don’t see the,dome over DR in core tyria zones and you do in Lake Doric.

Remember, each and every thing in the game was a decision by a designer, whether by the circumstances of programming or an,intentional design choice from the ground up. Nothing is chosen Willy nilly and everything,has a reason, whether we as players see them or not. That doesn’t mean the choices are flawless, but they are intentionally made.

Siniorica Sunmist.7218:

See, ANet never had their logic in their bright side. Some people tend to go deeply into the meaning of matters and as I never been thinking on this, it appears that it is just another scenario when the company just did not think over the things. Another example is the dome around DR which could be seen only from DR Story mission or from Lake Dorik, not from DR or Queensdale… wish more people were like you and me, believing that the small details are important!

I think the dome can’t be seen from queensdale since it’s a starter zone an thus locked to 1325, since that’s the year when you start playing. This is just my personal theory though.

As to the cycle.. over a period of 24 hours there is in total 15 hours of daylight, 30 min each of dawn and dusk, and 8 hours of nighttime. I think anet considered the fact that this is a worldwide game and decided to chop it up in 2 hour chunks, otherwise some people would always play during ingame daytime, others would always play during ingame nighttime.
Also, since there are events tied to the day/night cycle, those events would only happen once per day if they hadn’t used the 2-hour cycle, which would be inconvenient.

Edit: We think alike, castlemanic. I like it

Its just how the lack of creativeness works

It is 100% mechanics vs lore thing. In the same way that maps are not really frozen in time in lore, that is just the mechanic of playing the game during the map’s most exciting point in time. You could spend 1000 years in lake doric, and it is always going to look like the very moment DR was attacked. In this scenario, you can have any number of ‘days’ pass and it will always be the day of the attack. But lore wise we have had years pass at roughly the same rate as in the real world.

lol thx for the input. I guess I am hitting against the forth wall here. Although, in my opinion, they could just go with 1 year in tyria equals 4,380 days. Just says the planet spins faster or something. Or they can say 1 day in tyria takes 12 cycles. It would also be ok.

I mean we already have an imaginary world. That same world where 12 day/night cycles equating 1 day wouldnt be too far fetched.

DavyMcB.1603:

lol thx for the input. I guess I am hitting against the forth wall here. Although, in my opinion, they could just go with 1 year in tyria equals 4,380 days. Just says the planet spins faster or something. Or they can say 1 day in tyria takes 12 cycles. It would also be ok.

I mean we already have an imaginary world. That same world where 12 day/night cycles equating 1 day wouldnt be too far fetched.

Yeah, I am not a fan of the maps frozen in time thing personally, but it is what it is. I think it would have been better to have them design the maps from a neutral state, and have the bigger visuals tied to where you are in the story.

We skip around a lot in time. The personal story happens in the past, for example. So determining current time wouldn’t be easy.

Best suggestion off the top of my head; take an approximate time from the latest living story episode. Realize that the next episode will update the time. This new time may not be related directly to the time since the last LS episode.

-edit- @Moonyeti there is some change based on what you have or have not completed. Since this is a group map game… most stuff needs to assume you’ve completed to be consistent for the majority.

I think it’s a bit insulting to say that Anet obviously don’t care or are incapable of making days in-game and days in lore match up when people have given clear, game design related reasons for them to be difference.

To me it seems more likely that if they had never thought about it or didn’t care about an accurate timeline they’d either make days in-game match days in real life (presumably on Pacific time since that’s their time zone), or they just wouldn’t give dates for the different events and wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of making up a calendar in the first place.

Yes it is weird that a day is only 2 hours long. It’s also weird that in certain maps it’s permanently night time or permanently day time and in some no one’s even heard of Mordremoth and they’re desperately fighting Zhaitan and in others both Zhaitan and Mordremoth are dead. But that’s how things work in games.

I think it comes down to different teams having different priorities. For the lore and story guys the important thing is that the dates seem logical to us and we don’t need to read a mass of notes on how Tyria’s solar system works to understand their months and years – so they tied it to the real-world calendar (right down to the year starting on Wintersday which is New Years Day in real life).

For the people designing the maps the important thing is that players get to see both the day and the night version and that, because some events only happen during the day or during the night, we never have to wait too long to see it. Plus apparently most people prefer day time in-game to night. So they made the full cycle 2 hours and most of that day time.

Besides unless you pay for hours every day it probably evens out. I suspect the average player is only on for 2 hours a day, at most, so with a 2 hour day/night cycle their character experiences 1 day of game time for every real world day.

I’m not seeing the conflict between day length and year. Length of day has nothing to do with length of year. One is a planet turning on its axis and the other is a planet going around its sun. The day can both be 2 hours long and the year be the same as an Earth year. The Earth day is believed to have been less than 4 hours a long time ago, but the year was still a year.

When the day lasted only 4 hours

First & foremost, GW2 is a game.

It’s fun to compare things like Day & Night cycles and what that means for the planet’s rotation, the seasons, and so on, but it’s also a bit silly. The developers simply cannot worry about aligning mechanics with real life.

If you are going to worry about the day night cycle, then you also have to wonder at why the pact can fight every day, 12 times a day, to kill Mordremoth. Why Tarir can be saved by 500 people in five maps, but require an Exalted sacrifice in two other maps. Or how there can be 343,258 people wielding a ‘unique’ ring or 34,271 sporting the same ‘legendary’ weapon.

The day lasts 2 hours in our version of Tyria because it wouldn’t be fun if it lasted 24 hours. Events repeat every few hours in each map because it wouldn’t be fun if people missed out because of their work or real life schedules. Orr is the same today as it was at launch 4.5 years ago because, yup, it wouldn’t be fun if it changed every day (not to mention, turned out to be impractical for ANet to change zones constantly).

tl;dr have fun with doing the math, because it is fun, but don’t get bogged down in the results because the game isn’t trying to be a completely self-consistent world.

PS here’s the funnier version of the same idea (100 second video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1FcOLnlK_E