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!