Alright, bear with me for a moment. [b]Fact 1:[/b] Day/Night cycles are nothing new to the video game industry. But most games have a shortened cycle to make sure the player isn't spending 10 hours of play time in the dark. Notable games with a day/night cycle are Minecraft, Skyrim, the Assassin's Creed series, and the Far Cry series. [b]Fact 2:[/b] Bungie has shown off their work on the dynamic lighting in Destiny several times, dating all the way back to "O Brave New World". It's obviously something they are proud of and something they put a lot of work into. [b]Fact 3:[/b] One of the opening scenes from "Pathways Out Of Darkness" shows an overview of the solar system with the various planets moving in their orbits. Showing this seems to put some emphasis on the planets and their relationships to one another. [b]Fact 4:[/b] Bungie loves creating beautiful skyboxes. So here's the deal. If Destiny is going to be a truly persistent universe, its locations should have true rotational periods. That is, Earth's period would be 24 hours, Mar's period would be 24.6 hours, Venus - 243 days, Mercury - 58.7 days, etc.. The moon and Europa both have synchronous periods, meaning they are rotating at a rate that keeps them facing the planet they're orbiting, but they are facing different parts of their planet at all times and the sun is still showing up in different parts of the sky. Likewise, the moon's phase and location in Earth's sky would change with the lunar cycle. Ideally, this system would be linked directly with present day time. If someone is playing at 7:00 PM in Florida (North American Eastern time), it will be 6:00 PM in Old Chicago because it is in central standard time. When the sun is over England in the real time, it's over England in Destiny's world as well. For everyone. I'm also envisioning a system map, that you use to plot your ship's course, that shows the actual (years in the future) positions of the planets as they rotate around the sun (similar to what's shown in the vidoc). In conclusion, I believe there's evidence that suggests that Bungie has already implemented true day/night cycles, and I believe such a feature would be awesome. I really think true day/night cycles, and related features, would really add a lot to this game. Thoughts? Problems? Suggestions? [quote]2 days in: Alright, so the general consensus seems to be that 24 hour Earth cycles would be a bad idea because of the fact that people generally play at the same time every day. A simple adjustment to a different cycle fixes this. Something like 23 hours, as suggested by some, would keep a realistic sense of the passage of time while giving players that play at the same time every day the chance to eventually experience every aspect of the game. For more on this, see [url=http://www.bungie.net/en-us/Forum/Post?id=60215132&path=1]tsassi2's[/url] and [url=http://www.bungie.net/en-us/Forum/Post?id=60215257&path=1]nflash11's[/url] posts. The synchronized idea seems to have been received well. The only real issue comes from places like Venus where people don't want to wait 2/3 of a year for a full day cycle. Perfectly understandable. Personally I think Mars, Earth, Mercury, and Venus all having the same period would feel a little cheap. But if they made the length of Earth's period to something much shorter than 24 hours (3-6 hrs), 243 days becomes a much more manageable 30.38 to 60.75 days (1-2 months). How does that sound?[/quote]