Weather integral to gameplay

Individually we are greatly effected by the weather everyday, it determines how good we feel (for some more than others), it helps us decide what we do and sometimes how we do something. But weather in video/computer games is mostly lacking any of the effect it has in real life.

Sure there have been many impressive simulations of weather in gaming, Red Dead Redemption and Far Cry 2 come to mind as good examples. But imagine if those visually impressive scenes could also add depth and variety in terms of gameplay?

Here are a few simple ideas that could make weather more interesting, in a few different genres:

• A greater amount of monsters hide away in caves when it's stormy, so outdoor travel is more safe but venturing indoors isn't. Additionally different creatures would happily go outside in the rain (giant frogs?).
• Trees and plants could die in harsh warmth and cold, trees could be uprooted in strong winds changing the landscape and blocking roads. 
• Roads could be harder to drive on in wet and icy weather, this has already been done before but NPCs driving on the road could also have a greater chance of crashing.
• Certain dungeons and areas could become inaccessible at certain times of year due to floods, lakes can be crossed in the winter when they are frozen over.
•  (This is getting very ambitious) Small villages could be flooded resulting in many NPCs homeless, giving innkeepers in areas that aren't flooded a greater amount of income. 
• In the same respect to NPC dynamics, crops could rot in bad harvests resulting in less food for nearby areas. Possibly resulting in families of NPCs dying, or in good harvests families becoming more wealthy.

A number of these ideas are greatly ambitious, and could easily become repetitive and annoying if they were simply scripted. What I am saying here is so much can be done with weather and we should explore it further.

Before ending this I just want to acknowledge there are a few games which have added gameplay and depth due to weather. Those games being ARMA 2 and a few mods for Minecraft, please tell me if you can think of any others which drastically change gameplay.

For now, Adiós!

"Real Time Games"

Unfortunately when you mention games that involve a "real time" element, many people associate them with the likes of FarmVille style "Cow Clickers". Where to get a reward you have to wait long periods of time, only to do the same thing over again.

I personally think there is quite a large amount of potential in games which involve an element of real time. For instance Animal Crossing, a game I've personally never owned but one I like very much; makes good use of routine, seasons, an open-ended nature and real time events to make the world seem more real and interesting.

As someone who is very fond of games and hopes to be very much involved with the industry in the future,  I think of many ideas for games. Some good, some bad. I've often shied away from telling anyone my ideas, with the worry they'll get "stolen". I've recently decided this is a stupid way to go about things, as said by TotalBiscuit and many others the games industry is hugely iterative. Helping each other is one of the best things we can do to makes games more compelling.

So here's my idea for a game, involving many elements I mentioned about "real time" before.

Walking through the street, a man yells and runs up to you, the distraction of his putrid odour and big shaggy beard leads you to miss everything he mumbles. Everything except for the last thing he says: "Meet me by the inn, tomorrow at midnight".

If this scenario happened in say, one of the elder scrolls games, that NPC would be simply waiting there every day at midnight. You would find the location, press the corresponding key or button, wait until midnight and then talk to him. What if you couldn't do that? What if you had to play the game at midnight and then walk to the appropriate place in-game to actually meet him? Many people would claim that's a dumb idea, but hear me through. Lets say as the player, you forget or can't be bothered to meet the NPC at that time or place, but you decide to go to the inn the next day. To your horror you find your smelly, shaggy beard friend dead on the floor.

What I'm getting at here, is imagine if quest story-lines kept on going whether the player intervened or not. You could do this without a real time aspect sure, but the addition of real time would mean players are forced to not be very involved in some quests, which is paramount to the general experience of a game like this.

Anyway, thank you for reading this post on a few of my ideas, of course implementing this into a game wouldn't be easy at all. The disadvantages will be something I go into in another one of these posts, as it shares some of the same problems as cow clickers.

Please express your opinion about this, is this a terrible idea, am I crazy?

Adiós!