REAL TIME NARRATION IN VIDEO GAMES

Try not to artificially stretch the story out just to match some predetermined length requirement. I enjoyed 24, but I hated the way they had to draw things out so artificially sometimes.

I'm currently reading a book which is doing the same thing. It seemed like the story was winding down, coming to a natural conclusion (though I could obviously tell I wasn't far enough along in the book for it to really end) and the author threw in a somewhat ridiculous twist. Now the narrative is picking up speed again, and has blown by another natural ending point, although we have at least four new main characters introduced.

I like twists, but not when all they do is pave the way for a couple thousand more pages between me and the back jacket, especially since the core mystery/the part of the story I was most interested in has already been resolved/glossed over.

Games like Harvest Moon and Majora's Mask aren't really "real time". An hour in them isn't an hour in real life - it's either 5 minutes in real life, or as long as you want in real life. And you can manipulate the passage of time, you can pause, you can rewind time (by loading your earlier save even in games not named Majora's Mask).

For a game to be real time, it would need to be based on a web server that the player connects to.

Virtually any world event in an MMORPG is run in real time. Enemy invaders will show up in a player city, and friendly NPCs will show up and help fight them. You can fight alongside them, you can help by giving them materials, you can go out and attack the enemy's stronghold, you can heal people or stop fires or help build defenses. It takes as long as it takes, in real time, and when it's over it's over and it doesn't ever happen again.

Personally I feel like this is kind of a dick move because players will miss stuff. In offline games that sort of try to half-assedly replicate this, like Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song, where every battle you fight and every quest you complete increases the game's time counter and events happen around the world at specific times, the end result is similarly that players will miss stuff. It feels like a dick move to me because I don't like to miss parts of the games I play, I like to play the whole game. I'd probably put up with it in a short game though, like just a few hours long, since I can replay the game.

On the other hand, if all you mean is timed segments, then... tons of games have timed segments. I don't personally like them in RPGs, though, because to me one of the best aspects of RPGs over other games is that I'm never tested on my reflexes or timing, I can always stop and think to come up with a master strategy. Sometimes they can be a welcome way to change things up for one section of a dungeon, but doing an entire game in that style would require a different type of player than me.

Breath of Fire 5: Dragon Quarter is an interesting compromise. There's no literal timer but every attack you do and every step you take increases your dragon curse counter, and going into dragon form increases it super quickly, and if it gets to 100 before the end of the game you get a game over. So the game is timed in a sense, but you're limited via number of actions instead of via literal time, so you get that constantly rising stress and "oh shit I'm running out of time" feeling for the entire game but it also still has that nice strategic, thinking-man's-game feeling that a turn-based RPG gives off.

author=orochii
Once I thought of making that with my game. Entirely I mean. Getting the local time from the PC

Do you mean making it where it's coded to be based on your computer's clock? If so that has a major flaw. People just changing time backwards on the computer.