Dynamic Weather
Dynamic weather changes conditions in a game world on its own schedule, sometimes driven by a forecast model, so rain, fog and storms arrive without being staged for a particular scene.
State evolves over time. A weather system holds current conditions, transitions between them by probability or from a stored pattern, and pushes results into rendering, audio and gameplay, where rain may cut visibility, wet ground may change traction, and storms may keep certain characters indoors. Systems with mechanical weight also need forecasting or warning, or players experience them as arbitrary punishment rather than as conditions.
Sega AM2 built weather into Shenmue in 1999 using recorded conditions for the region and period the game depicts, so its skies follow something closer to a historical record than a random roll. Ambition of that kind suited a game measured in daily routine rather than in levels, and it depended on the storage that consoles were only then acquiring in the move to optical media.
Unstageable atmosphere is both the point and the difficulty. Weather makes a world feel indifferent to the story, gives repeated locations variety at almost no content cost, and supplies genuine mechanical pressure in survival designs. It also ruins carefully lit scenes, forces artists to make every location work under every condition, and tempts designers into forcing the weather at dramatic moments, which quietly undoes the system.
Lineage — traced back to a root
Every mechanic in this dataset resolves to an ancestral chain. This one is 2 steps deep, beginning with Day/Night Cycle in 1983.
Descends directly from
Forked into
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild made lightning strike metal, Red Dead Redemption 2 used storms as atmosphere, and Frostpunk turned falling temperature into the entire threat.
Carried forward by 13 later games
Look this mechanic up elsewhere
Also called: weather system, dynamic weather