As I wait for a raccoon to upgrade my home I have come to the realization that I play a lot of games that use time gates. Animal Crossing, Warframe, and Trove all feature this little “mechanic” and they all use real-world time as the gate. And these gates aren’t small.

The mere concept of time gates sounds like the most unfun thing you can imagine. So you’re playing this game and then it tells you you can’t do this thing anymore for a few hours, days, or the rest of the week even. I find it strange that these don’t end up bothering me.

Since Animal Crossing is the hot new thing I’ll start with that. The game is built around time gates. Literally, making buildings takes a day. Or the equivalent of a day I’m not sure exactly when it kicks over to the next day. But for all intents and purposes, there is a point in a play session where you can’t progress any further until something gets built. Or you can only buy so much from the shop in a single day. Even Nook Miles has a daily reset.

But that makes sense for Animal Crossing since it’s more or less a life sim. It’s a feature that the in-game time reflects the real-world time and there are cool things you can do with that. Like have insects and fish that appear in certain months, the map can change according to the seasons, and it makes the whole thing that much more immersive.

Warframe, on the other hand, has these arbitrary time gates because it’s free to play the game. It’s a fair free to play a game where you can see where the trade-off for time versus money is. Want to make a weapon? Cool, gather the materials and wait 12 hours OR you can pay some money and boom it’s done. Same with building Warframes (12 hours for each piece and 3 days to put the pieces together) and rooms for your clan dojo. Again, I don’t mind this because I’m getting a lot from this game while spending very little.

The one time gate gripe I did have was the Mastery tests. Mastery is basically an account level and the higher mastery the more weapons and features you have access to. You can take these once a day and if you fail you have to wait for 24 hours before you can attempt it again. I recently discovered that you can practice these as many times as you want before taking the official test so it’s not that bad.

Finally, we come to Trove. I’m not currently playing but this game is full of time gates. First up: daily bonuses. It’s only worth doing shadow towers on Mondays because you get the best rewards, it’s only worth farming gems on Wednesdays because you get 2 for every one box collected. It’s only worth gathering resources on Tuesday because you get a big bonus to materials collected. Then we cubits the “free” cash shop currency that’s obtained by filling up a bar doing dungeons that caps out once a day. And there are tomes that cap out rewards weekly. I think this is a perfect model for games like Trove though. It’s nice to be able to finish up a few things every week and log off and still make progress towards your goals.

I think for me they help reduce burn out. They artificially slow down progress. Otherwise, I’d end up eating through content pretty quick which isn’t always the best way to experience things.

Here’s an unpopular opinion: I don’t think the Animal Crossing Bunny Day event is that bad.  Is Zipper super creepy? Yes, his dead eyes do stare into your soul for a tad too long. Is it annoying to get eggs instead of materials/fish? Kind of. But you know what? Shooting down all those packages has made me really good at using the slingshot!

I’ve loved seasonal events since I discovered them playing Runescape. I love it when a game world opens up a little bit to the real world with decorations and items. Even better if the event’s worked into the lore. And I especially enjoy these events when they reward special items and cosmetics. I’ve always liked unique items that said: I was there. Well, there is always the potential to sell them later at a marked up price if it’s tradable but I rarely do that anyway.

Here’s what I think makes a good seasonal event:

A known time limit: It’s important to know when things end. If I want to put the time in to complete the event I don’t want it ending before I can complete it. Or if it’s something that’s already going on when I start a new game, I want to know if I’ll have time to do it when I get acclimated to the game. Bunny Day ends April 12th so love it or hate it’ll be over next weekend.

A good reward: Preferably some sort of silly cosmetic. I’m not putting time into the event for something I’m not going to equip/use at least for a little bit. Now, I’ll admit, most of the Bunny Day DIY recipes are awful but there’s some that make interesting/ aesthetically pleasing items. Plus, I can now wear a an egg as an outfit so there’s that.

A separate quest or additional drops for an event: This is where Bunny Day get’s annoying. Eggs replace material and fish drops which make it harder to get both. It’d be nice if there was a specific way to get eggs without sacrificing drops. Even better if there was a quest or an option to turn it off. For me, there are enough DIY recipes to collect and make that I don’t mind the egg drops because I have something to do with them. If I end up making all the recipes before the 12th at least I can sell them.

With that out of the way, let me tell you about the worst seasonal event of all time. The Borderlands 3 Bloody Harvest Halloween event. An event so bad it actually stopped me from completing the game.

This event relied on collecting ghost essence, or something, to fight a boss that would drop unique weapons. Unfortunately, these ghosts spawned whether or not you took the quest.  The ghosts spawned out of enemies you already killed essentially forcing you to kill them twice. Which is not something I wanted to deal with while I was trying to complete my first playthrough.  It started October 24th 2019 which was a little over a month after the game’s release and then apparently ran to December 5th. Which is just entirely too long for an event that fundamentally changes the mechanics of the game. And as far as I could tell, there was no way to turn it off.

Upon further research, that I definitely did just now,, it looks like there were rewards of weapon and character skins after all but I don’t think it would have made a difference for me. Ok, it may have lessened the pain and kept me playing but I don’t think this was emphasized in game because I never knew about it.