In many RPGs the plot can be summed in two words: save the world. And if you want to save it then better do it fast. If there is no time pressure, then the world isn’t really in danger and therefore it doesn’t need to be saved.

But what we see in 99% of games is quite the opposite. You are being told that the world is in the immediate danger and you have to hurry, but you actually don’t. You can walk around, gather herbs, do all the sidequests, or even leave the game unpaused for a week and nothing will happen. The final boss will patiently wait for you in the final location of the game. But why?

It can be compared to skipping turns in strategy game – if you do it, then sooner or later the enemy will come knocking to your gates and you will lose (even if it’s on the easiest AI setting).

I know that there is a time limit in the Fallout1, Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny and King’s Bounty (the old one), but in the case of the first two the time limit is so generous that you don’t need to worry about it at all, and in the King’s Bounty it depends on the difficulty level (it may be an issue on the Impossible).

So, why don’t we see more games with time limits?

Possibly because time limits are annoying. I love the freedom of being able to explore the world and "waste" as much time as I want to do sidequests or just going to sleep to regenerate/let time pass. The fact that the world doesn't end sooner if I decide to spend a couple of days more in the forest doesn't affect my immersion. The alternative would be worse.

Point-and-click is another genre where, no matter how urgent things are, you can wander around and take your time to visit different locations and solve the puzzles (sometimes using everything with everything). Except for the not-so-common and dreaded timed missions, which are very unnerving.

I hate games with time limits, but I get your point! In some cases I actually wish real life behaved like games: when I have a great night with great company I don't want it to end, until I click "Use" on the "Bed" hotspot to trigger the day change event ;)

cause it's game.

Time limit on main quest would be incredibly annoying unless its very generous.

Imagine that in Witcher 3? 90 hour game and you fail because you spent 91 hours on it, because you took 1 hour just horsing around?
how do you reload? an hour before? or 40 hours before?

Time limits are the worst, even in small pointless sidequest.

Because many gamers don't like time limits. Maybe you're too young to remember this, but when Fallout was first released, there were a lot of complaints about the time limit. Interplay eventually released a patch that made the time limit less stressful. People still complain about it occasionally. Many RPGs present a large world for players to explore. Some players will feel cheated if they don't get to explore the entirety of it in their first and only playthrough. Not everyone is a hardcore gamer. It's kind of like asking why games today don't have permadeath.

Actually, this isn't always true, especially if you set things up appropriately.

* If the only enemies alive will not move unless you get close, skipping turns will not cause anything to happen (except that passive healing might trigger).
* If you are on a "survive for X turns" mission, and you are in good enough shape, skipping turns can cause you to win.
* In some strategy games, characters can attack when it's not their turn. For instance, in games like Fire Emblem and Disgaea, characters will counter-attack when attacked. In the right situations, this can result in the last enemy getting killed on the enemy phase.

Incidentally, in Disgaea 2 (PS2 version), there's a strategy where you keep skipping turns on a level with "Enemy Level Up 10%" geopanel effects. Wait a bunch of turns, then try to capture one of the monsters on the level. In the PS2 version, this allows you to get level 9999 monsters relatively early (for comparison, you are expected to beat the main storyline at around level 100, maybe a bit less).

"Quickly, I need to find Ciri!"
"Hey bro, do want to play some Gwent?"
"Uh, Ciri can wait"

But I don't want to say that every game needs time limit. To make it work other things should be designed around it. It could work in shorter games with high replayability and some randomness thrown in (so you don't have to do everything the same when you retry it).

It doesn't really make sense to have an open-world game with a time-limit, as open-world is about encouraging exploration whilst the main side-effect of time-limits is to kill off any desire to explore out of fear of arbitrarily failing from straying from a tightly defined linear path.

Personally I can only tolerate them in simple puzzle / single-player racing games (eg, Outrun). And perhaps some other games, eg, timed missions in Crookz: The Big Heist where there's a plot related excuse for it. They usually feel completely out of place in most FPS / RPG's though. Like you're being punished for playing how you want, instead of ALT_TABBing out, reading a walkthrough in advance, then being made to play according to "developer logic".

Yeah, I mean skipping turns in games like HoM&M while not doing much and seeing AI coming to you with a big army and crushing you, beacuse you were wasting your time.

And yet I still did, and it made the game much less fun than it could have been.

I totally get that for the sake of realism there should be time limits, the villains shouldn't be just sitting on their arses waiting for the player to kick down the door and shoot them in the head with a rocket launcher and all that, but realism also dictates that the player shouldn't be able to carry twenty swords, twelve armors and ten thousand gold pieces, that taking a battle axe to the chest would result in more than losing some abstract "health points" but otherwise being just fine and that I shouldn't suddenly get better at casting fireball because I helped deliver pie to a neighbouring village.

In other words, there really is no point brining realism into RPGs unless you hate fun.

Realism can be one of the reasons, but I was thinking more about making things more reactive and interesting. For examle there are some quests offered to you and you need to decide which ones are worth doing and which ones you have to reject. And in the second playthrough you can choose different quests. There are X locations and you cannot visit them all etc.

Also, the time limit doesn't have to be set in stone (like day 100 passes and you just lose). It could be related to the power of your enemy which grows with time just like in strategy game. And doing certain actions would give more time (or take it away).

I would agree, and I would also apply the same logic to permadeath, which also has the same issue.

Personally, I think a better approach, if you want to apply something like this to an RPG, is to instead have time pass only when a quest is completed; this would keep the game from having a real-time pressue while still making the player choose which quests to do.

Incidentally, I could point to Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song as a game with time limits that are defined differently; time passes when you win battles. I actually don't like this method of handling time, because it discourages fighting in a game with a fun battle system. (Well, that's only sometimes true; sometimes you can run out of early events worth doing, but it's too early for later events, so you have to spend time fighting enemies to progress.)

By the way, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song has another quirk; while there isn't a time limit for beating the game, there is, in essence, a minimum time. In order for the final areas of the game to be accessible, you must fight enough battles for the event rank to get high enough; only once you do that will the final areas of the game open. This would be like a game where you can't enter the final dungeon until day 100 or something along those lines.

Zelda: Majora's Mask has a time limit, but there is a way to reset time, which also resets most events and most of the world. The game also has scheduled events, including at least one with multiple resolutions, and you can reset time if you miss or fail the event.

Avernum 3 has time-related events (based on in-game days); if you don't solve plagues in time, the condition of many of the game's towns will worsen. Also, there is, if enough time passes, an event that, if not solved quickly enough, will result in a game over.

There are a few games where your ending is based on the time it takes; examples include the Metroid series and Castlevania 2.

Some (mostly) older games have a per-level time limit. Examples include classic Mario, classic Sonic, classic-style Castlevanias (note that Castlevania 2 doesn't count here), and many others. Also, arcade games often have time limits. (One interesting case: Donkey Kong has a time limit that increases with each loop, but eventually it overflows, resulting in you reaching a level where there isn't enough time to complete it, no matter how good you are (not even TASBot would be able to beat that level).)

I've had a similar notion, and another that goes along the lines of, "The bad guy is sending minions against me, repeatedly, so he should be getting the message that maybe half-assed measures are not going to do the trick." But instead the game lets you get more and more and more powerful until the big confrontation, instead of squashing you like a bug early on.

Of course, a game needs to be fun. And because of that, they often come up against a thing I can sometimes struggle with: suspension of disbelief. "This makes no damn sense!"

"Oh yeah, it's just a game. Go with it."

As others mention, time limits can often squelch the fun. For small missions, okay, they can add needed tension. For a game with a grand scope, it tends to go against the players' desire to poke around in every nook and cranny that the designers stuffed into the game. That's something I've encountered a couple times here and there: beautiful game world but you're forced to rush through portions of it and miss out on the effort put into the design, miss out on the little things that add character to the world.

I disagree. The reason I dislike Fallout so much is I've butted up against the time limit again and again. I like to explore and revisit places, and traveling killed the time. So much so that the vault has dies numerous times in many different ways. Including having Super mutants follow the water caravan I commissioned to go to the vault. The game is virtually unplayable to me with the time limit.