Every day, when I wake up, one of the first things I do is peek out the bedroom window into the outside world.  I do this for two reasons: First, to make sure the damn squirrels aren’t on my bird feeder (I am a crotchety old man), and second, more importantly, to see how the weather looks.  I do this because the weather plays a large part in most of the decisions I make first thing in the morning.  If it’s bright and warm and sunny, I can perhaps get by with a t-shirt.  If it’s cold and windy, I’d should probably think about a sweater.  If it’s pouring, I might have to consider canceling my hike in the woods later that day.  If it’s 90 degrees and humid at nine in the morning, I might also want to think about canceling it for completely different reasons.

The point here is: the weather is an important, constant factor in pretty much everyone’s life.  So why is it, then, that games tend to ignore it completely?

Weather has appeared in games for many years, but usually as nothing more than atmosphere (pun very much intended).  This, by itself, is not a bad thing – weather is a powerful tool for setting a mood.  Sneaking down an alley, knowing that zombies could be waiting for you around every corner suddenly gets a lot more frightening when the skies roil overhead and rain drops pound on the darkened pavement.  Conversely, triumph seems all the more triumphant when the Queen bestows a kiss upon you under crystal clear blue skies rather than under overcast conditions with heavy winds.

So, yes, games have certainly embraced the artistic side of weather.  But what about the practical side?  Does that pounding rain actually mean anything to the player?

COLD SNAP

The first game I can recall that took weather conditions into consideration was Ultima VII: Part II: The Serpent Isle on the PC.  At one point in your adventure, the Avatar and his companions travel to the northern end of the eponymous Serpent Isle and discover that it is a frozen landscape, covered with snow as far as the eye can see.

Stepping out into that icy landscape, the you quickly notice that after taking a few steps, your party starts shouting in pain and taking damage.  The trouble, it seems, is that they are freezing. The solution is obvious: run back to town, get them some heavy coats and fur hats, and the problem is solved.  While this seems pretty simple in retrospect, this was the first time I’d ever encountered such a thing in an RPG; the environment actually had a tangible effect on my characters.  In all the other games I had played, weather was just decoration, something that existed in the game world but had no actual effect.  Strolling across a desert in Final Fantasy was exactly the same as strolling across a pleasant grassland, and neither one ever changed.

This idea that being out in the cold could actually mean something in terms of in-game effects really struck me, and it thrilled me think of all the various ways other games could start to take weather into account.  Of course, that thrill faded away steadily as pretty much nobody else did anything with weather for many years.

Sports games, as it turns out, were the games that most embraced weather from an early point. This makes perfect sense, as the weather plays a critical role in almost every sport played outdoors, and ignoring it entirely would lead to less-than-authentic experiences.  From snow-covered fields in Madden to shifting winds in Mario Golf, sports games seemed to constantly be improving upon how they worked the weather into their systems.  From being able to set the conditions yourself, to having to deal with totally random changes, it always kept the player on their toes.  The most recent Madden and Tiger Woods actually tap into your online connection to find out the weather in the location you’re playing in and uses it in-game.

Wargames as well tended to use weather on a regular basis, with games like Panzer General 2 having varying effects depending on the conditions at a the start of a turn, though most of these boiled down to how useful your air force would be on any given day.  Additionally, these bad weather days were usually hard-coded into the scenario, meaning you could plan for them every time you played.

Outside of sports and war, though, weather remained noticeably absent as a real factor.  The next game I encountered that used it as something more than window dressing was Pokemon Gold/Silver.  Different weather conditions during battle affected the power of different types of moves: battling in the rain weakened fire attacks and strengthened water, whereas battling in blazing sunshine strengthened fire and weakened water.  Unfortunately, the weather conditions were pre-programmed for certain areas, though there were a few Pokemon moves that could change the conditions if you were able.  Pokemon Diamond/Pearl continued this line of thinking and actually allowed for random weather conditions in certain areas, with specific Pokemon being more likely to appear in certain conditions.  Again, these weren’t the huge steps forward I was imaging, but it was something, at the very least.

FORECASTING

To get inspiration as to how additional uses of weather could change games, one merely needs to walk outside and take note of the world around them. Weather, in our lives, dictates a great many things about how we interact with our environment, and ignoring the weather usually proves detrimental to our well being on some level.

Let’s take the Ultima VII example mentioned earlier and extrapolate it even further: Imagine now that instead of just a single area of the world that’s always cold, there is a chance that any time you travel around in the northern portions of the island, a mighty snowstorm could be whipped up.  The temperature would drop, and if your party was caught without proper gear, could find themselves suddenly freezing.  Perhaps it borrows a note from Pokemon, and new monsters also emerge from hiding when the snow falls to make things even more interesting.  Now, instead of a simple static location where we always know what to expect, the player must always be on their toes to deal with the random vagaries of the ever-changing weather.

Rain, too, offers us a myriad of options.  Light rains and fog may do nothing more than make the way ahead a little harder to see; heavy rains, on the other hand, impede both vision and movement, perhaps even changing the landscape around us – that little stream you crossed earlier becomes a far more dangerous obstacle when it is swelled with floodwaters.

RPGs, of course, are also not the only genre that weather can play a part in.  Real-Time Strategy games, to me, have always screamed out for the addition of random, tangible weather.  Rains to turn roadways to mud, slowing armies, or fogs that blow in, obscuring portions of the battlefield.  These concepts, while adding new elements of strategy, also help guarantee that players are always facing a new experience; it may rain during this battle, or it may not – every time the player plays through, they may encounter something completely different and have to change their tactics accordingly.

FPSes, too, could benefit from a little rain on their parade.  Perhaps I’m a glutton for punishment, but watching my laser beam get refracted off target by torrential rains and forcing me to engage my foes hand-to-hand sounds like some gritty fun every once in a while.

Maybe that’s just me.

SUNNY SKIES AHEAD

So is the inclusion of weather a must for games going forward?  Obviously, the answer is now; games have done quite well without it for a long time.  From my point of view, though, weather holds the potential of creating even more engrossing, captivating worlds.  Seeing environments that change around us, and that actually have impact on us as players, can go to incredible lengths to drawing us into a gameworld.

It has been a long, slow road for weather taking a meaningful part in games, but I retain hope that it is not a dead end.  As technology steadily improves, the potential for creating more dynamic and impactful weather effects becomes all the more likely, and all it takes is for one or two games to do it really well to show the rest of us what we’ve been missing.

In the meantime, keep your eyes on the skies and an umbrella handy; you don’t want to be caught unprepared.