THE EPIDEMIC OF LIFELESS TOWNS

"Hello? Where is everybody?"

Populated areas that aren’t…populated. It sounds kind of silly doesn’t it? Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen, this is a problem that commonly plagues RPGs. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been playing an RPG and have encountered the following scenario:

Walk into a big, beautiful city and discover that almost nobody lives there. A few people aimlessly wander the streets. but they don’t really have much of anything to say. In the early stages of the game, some of these people might provide information about how to play the game, but they never say anything else. A few people hang out in the Pub or the Inn and that’s all they ever do. Other people run the shops and that’s all they ever do. Still others stay in their houses and, you guessed it, that’s ALL they ever do! The mayor (or whomever is in charge) may or may not have anything useful to say. Maybe the hero has a friend who will help him or perhaps an enemy who obviously is seeking to do the opposite. But once those Non-Player Characters (NPCs) have completed their role in the story, the town is…useless. The people in the streets, in the Inn and the Pub have nothing new to say. The shops never sell anything other than the same items and weapons that were once vital but now are worthless as the heroes have discovered more powerful weapons and items to use. Nothing changes…ever. Sadly, I’ve even seen this problem in games with Day/Night cycles. (Seriously, are these NPCs a bunch of insomniacs who never sleep?) Except maybe for the occasional stop at the Inn, there is no point in visiting the town anymore. With few exceptions, the early Pokémon games have this problem in spades.

So what’s wrong with the above scenario? Nothing…if your storyline calls for an empty town full of robotic people where almost nothing happens. Otherwise, you’ve got a problem. Towns like this don’t exist in the real world. Even in small rural towns with maybe a few hundred people, there is always something happening. Maybe not something fantastically exciting, but different events nonetheless. Yes, many people tend to be “creatures of habit”, but even then there are always different things happening in their lives.

So, what should a city or town look like? Obviously, the answer really depends on your storyline but here are some thoughts.

1) Population

I’m being redundant on purpose here: Populated areas should be…populated! People don’t spend thousands or even millions of dollars to construct houses and buildings just for the sake of having them there. As with everything else, necessity is the mother of invention. When people move to an area, if they cannot find an existing place to live, they either build one of their own or move on; they don’t resort to living on the streets unless they have no other options. To put it simply, under normal circumstances the population should suit size of the city. (Of course, when I say “normal circumstances”, this excludes war, disease, famine, or other events that would have devastating effects on a city and its population.) At the moment, the only other explanation I can think of would be that your storyline calls for a city that is going the way of Detroit (no offense to anyone who lives there, but what has happened to that city is downright tragic).
Now, I generally haven’t seen opposite problem of cities that are over-populated, but I’ll address it anyway. It’s nice to have a lively, bustling city, but moderation is your friend here. When it comes to people meandering about in the streets, I would personally recommend something along the lines of at least 1 NPC per building or for each 10x10 block (100 tiles) on the map. In other words, if you are using the latter equation on a 30x30 map, you would have at least 9 people walking around. Of course, this equation is not absolute. In all likelihood, you will want to adjust according to the amount of walking space in your town, but I will leave that to you. Archeia_Nessiah has a different method regarding this issue. To quote him:

“Don’t put a lot of people in the town. Basically, don’t put some 20 people walking outside in the town grounds. Unless you’ve got the space, or each event is really important, try to limit it. I find that putting 1-3 people per LARGE house you’ve got walking outside, and 1 person for every 2 SMALL housings you have work pretty well in most cases.”
- Archeia_Nessiah, “The Do’s and Don’ts of Mapping Part 4”

Regardless of the equation you decide to use, you generally don’t want to have a city so packed with people that your player can barely move, much less get where he/she needs to go. Again, I haven’t seen this problem on a common basis, but it is really annoying when it occurs.

2) “Help! I’m lost!”

I’ll keep this part short. I have encountered a few games with cities that are difficult to navigate. Okasa in “Hero’s Realm” comes to mind. (Though, to be fair to kentona, I suspect that said difficulty was purposeful on his part as the rest of the cities in his game are relatively straightforward). The problem here is not necessarily the size of the city. Big cities that are well-planned work fine. The point is organization. You don’t want to send your player on a wild goose chase just to find a shop or an inn. Put simply, if you insist on using mazes in your game, they are much better suited for mini-games or dungeons.

3) Diversity

Big cities are diverse places. Forget fantasy for a moment and look at the real world. You’ve got Caucasian, African, Asian, Hispanic, Arabic, numerous tribal groups (some of which don’t really fit into the aforementioned categories), and just about any combination of races you can imagine. Depending on your game, perhaps you might even have an alien race or some other non-human or humanlike species somewhere in the mix. Keep in mind that the people within any given racial group are not going to all look the same (that can be easy to forget when creating/using graphics).
Within each of those primary racial groups you have different cultures and nationalities (i.e.: Egypt and South Africa are vastly different nations, as are Italy and Sweden, Mexico and Argentina, South Korea and Thailand, the list goes on and on.) What about religion? Are these people Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, or something else entirely? Maybe even sexuality comes into play within your game. Are your characters straight, bisexual, gay, ex-gay, ambiguous? Or maybe they are a species that reproduces in a way that does not require sexuality at all. (Quick afterthought: I know that not everyone wants to spend time creating graphics to represent all of these different beings, but I will go on record in saying that it is not as difficult as it seems at first…and that’s coming from someone with minimal skills when it comes to designing graphics.)
Furthermore, people from these different demographics may have different opinions regarding the events in the story. Maybe one group has suffered from prejudice and discrimination at the hands of the hero’s racial group in the past and feels uneasy about taking sides with him. Maybe that same group has been manipulated by an evil Warlord into believing that the prejudice they suffered before is still prevalent and therefore they need to fight back against injustice that may or may not even exist. That aforementioned scenario can make for a great storyline. Now, the hero has the opportunity to show the offended group that he cares about them in spite of their mistrust toward him.
In other cases, people within a racial or ethnic group may disagree on whether certain events are good or bad for their people. Obviously, an important point to remember is that, just like people in the real world, your NPCs are individuals with their own thoughts and feelings. Unless they are robots or are brainwashed, no two people are going to think or feel exactly the same way.

4) Dialect

It kind of goes without saying, but keep in mind that all of these different people will talk differently as well. There are many options here, but if you are creating a game with English-speaking players in mind, you probably want to avoid actually using other languages and instead use different accents. To be fair, accents can be difficult to express in text form, but you can make minor changes to words to add “flavor” to the language. For example, consider the following sentence:

“Brave hero, the world will be destroyed if you do not stop the evil Warlord.”

A character with a German accent might say it like this:

“Brave hero, the vorld vill be destroyed if you do not stop the evil Varlord.”

I know that there are other consonants in that sentence that someone from Germany might pronounce differently, but I wanted to keep it simple here. In other cases, people might replace ‘L’s with ‘R’s or ‘Th’ with ‘Z’. (Kentona did this quite well in parts of “Hero’s Realm”.) Keep in mind that vowels might be spoken differently as well. (I’m sure my Canadian friends know exactly what I’m talking “aboot.”)

5) Friends in town

Your hero has a friend in the town who is willing to help him complete a quest. The hero completes his quest and the friend congratulates him on a job well done…and then they never speak again? In the real world, you wouldn’t have any friends left if you treated them that way. Maybe that friend becomes the hero’s point of contact to help him keep tabs on what’s going on in that area. Maybe that same friend needs the hero to do him or her a favor later in the story. Maybe the evil Warlord hears about how that friend helped the hero defeat his forces and decides to capture/enslave said friend. Not only does this add content to the storyline, but it also provides our hero with a new side-quest.

6) Other NPCs

a) “I don’t know and I don’t care!”

Unless your hero is like a god in the city, it is likely that he will run into people who either oppose him or simply don’t care about his quest. Maybe those people change their attitude later on or maybe they don’t. I personally like the scenario where you have a very stubborn NPC who opposes the hero no matter what he does. This goes on until late in the story when it comes to the point where the hero finally loses his cool and chews the guy out for being such a dumbass! What happens after such an encounter, I’ll leave to your imagination.
Anyway, the point is, in the real world, not everyone wants to be your friend. I think it’s safe to say that I’m not the only one who has encountered people who seem to hate themselves and hate everyone else even more. You know the type: it doesn’t matter what you say or do, they treat you like garbage and they seem to almost revel in that fact that nobody wants anything to do with them. You don’t necessarily have to explain why they are like this. After all, we encounter all kinds of people in our lives and we don’t always get an explanation to why they are the way they are. When people are comfortable with who they are (for better or worse), they don’t change readily. Now, most people don’t want to bother putting a lot of useless NPCs into their games and that’s okay. Still, it adds some realism when not everyone in the game has “a dog in the fight” between the hero and the villain.

b) “Until we meet again…if we ever do.”

This part might be a little more difficult to pull off in RPG Maker. One thing that might be interesting to try would be to have NPCs that show up once in the story and then never again. Or, if your game keeps track of days and weeks, maybe they appear only once in a while. This is more realistic than we often take the time to appreciate, but in cities or other heavily populated areas, this is actually a common experience. We interact with people for a moment and maybe never even see them again after parting ways. Of course, you can do whatever you want with such one-shot characters. Maybe they possess one-of-a-kind items that the hero can never find anywhere else (DarkFlameWolf did this in “Land of Dreams” with the Traveling Salesman), or they provide rare information about the villain. Still others may not do anything for the hero at all. I imagine most people will want not to bother implementing the last idea, but it could add an interesting quirk to your game. Just make sure that it does not become a major distraction from the storyline.

7) Inventory in shops

Now, I know that this part in particular will probably not work for some games, but I wanted to throw it out there. When new developments are made in the real world, retailers tend to take note of them; to ignore it could be suicidal for a business. Do you see a lot of “mainstream” stores selling VHS tapes these days? Of course not, that technology is obsolete. You can still find VCRs in some places, but those are mainly for people who have a lot old tapes to watch…and people like me who are too cheap to buy a DVR (seriously, TV is just not that important to me)! Likewise, when it comes to weapons, you’re not going to see gun shops selling muskets from the 1600s, except maybe as antiques. (BTW, muskets were horribly inaccurate. If you were to aim one at a man standing with his wife 20 feet away, it would be about a 50-50 chance that you would end up hitting her assuming you hit either one of them at all!) Put simply, unless the shop is in a particularly isolated town, the inventory should change at some point. If you have many cities and towns in your game, this will help spare your player from the irritation of having to traverse the world in search of the items he or she needs. Of course, part of your storyline may include items that can only be bought/found in one particular place. However, when it comes to potions, remedies, and maybe even weapons and armor, there is no reason why such items should only be sold in one place. Modifying your shops in this way will also help your player compare different items to find which ones are better for the current situation.

8) The wheels of progress

In some ways, this part sort of builds on the point I was making in the previous section. Throughout history, human beings have consistently chased after a higher standard of living. Here are a few examples from ancient times. We needed more food than we could get by hunting animals and gathering from wild plants, so we created agriculture. In turn, agriculture required us to end our nomadic ways and build settlements. We had to protect ourselves and our crops from both wild animals and thieves, so we created more sophisticated weapons. We quickly figured out that some of those same weapons were useful for hunting and further increased our food supply. We realized that weapons were not enough to protect us, so we built walls around our settlements. Those settlements grew and eventually became city-states. Eventually those city-states joined together to form nations with governments and centralized military forces. All the while, we were making advancements in science, mathematics, technology, and even within the written forms of our languages. As we became more advanced, our life-expectancy increased and with it, our need for larger cities and larger buildings within those cities.
The longwinded point here is that change is inevitable in a city. Buildings get old and must be torn down, roads have to be resurfaced, utilities have to be maintained or upgraded, etc. If the timeline of your game spans years or even just months, you may want include such events. Furthermore, as a city’s population grows, more houses or apartments need to be built. This presents yet another opportunity to expand your storyline. Maybe the people in one of your cities have grown tired of being attacked/harassed by the Warlord and have decided build a wall around their city to stop him. Your hero has a vested interest in such a project and volunteers to help gather supplies for the task. But maybe the evil Warlord has taken over a quarry or a mine in an effort to prevent the construction and the hero has to battle it out with the Warlord’s troops in order for the project to move forward.

9) Mansions within…shacks

This one is a particular pet-peeve of mine, but I’m happy to say that I haven’t seen it very often. You walk into what appears to be a small building on the outside and find that the inside is a vast expanse. Now, I know that, in a lot of games, things are generally shrunk down on the outside to save space on the map. However, things make more sense when everything is kept to scale by use of a ratio. Is your building 20 paces wide on the inside? Then perhaps it should 5 paces (4:1) or maybe 10 paces (2:1) wide on the outside. Whatever ratio you decide to use, try to keep it consistent throughout the town and, if possible, throughout the game. I’m sure there are even a few games where people use a ratio of 1:1. That can make for really big maps, but I’m not going to knock it!

10) The villain attacks

The evil Warlord has a city under siege and is trying to starve the people into submission. Then the hero comes and puts a stop to his evil plans. The people in the city rejoice and the mayor gives the hero an artifact/weapon/key that he needs as part of his overall quest…and then what? So…does the villain attack again at some point? Or does he try some other scheme to gain control? The Warlord obviously thought it was worth his time to try and subdue the city. He wants control for a reason. Unless the hero rescued/removed/salvaged or otherwise neutralized the object of the Warlord’s desire, then perhaps the bad guy will try again at some point and, unless he is totally insane, he will probably use different methods the second time around.

Closing Remarks

“Hold on Minuteman, you said next to nothing about graphics! Don’t those matter too?”

Of course they do, but 1) My focus was on the mechanics of a city and the effects it can have on the story, and 2) Archeia_Nessiah already discussed this in great detail in his series “The Do’s and Don’ts of Mapping” and he seems to be far more knowledgeable than I am. I definitely encourage you to read his articles.

Anyway, sorry this ran so long. In truth, this article started out as an analysis of what my yet-to-be-released project is missing. Nevertheless, I hope this helps some people.

Posts

Pages: 1
I think this should be read by big gaming companies, they would make a better use of this guide than us! (Since, well, you know those are still committed by them) :3
This is a really nice article. And I have to agree with Chivi-chivik.

Though it wouldn't hurt to add some graphics and white space right?
It was pretty tiring and demotivational to read a wall of text.
Not many people have the patience to read through it all in one go.
A visual break or two would remedy this.

Ps. Archeia is a 'she', just so you know.
BurningTyger
Hm i Wonder if i can pul somethi goff here/
1289
I like some of these ideas. though of course not everything has to be realistic.
nhubi
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
11099
True, RPG's are fantastical versions of reality so applying rigid rules won't work, or conversely will feel too real and actually throw a player out of the suspension of disbelief. Still large towns with no population or non-communicative sprites and over-crowded hovels need to be addressed.

Still my biggest issue is 9). I absolutely detest the one storey wooden cabin on the outside that transmogrifies TARDIS-like into a palatial three storey abode on entry. The flaw that irritates me the most, and I'm a player, not a designer, is simple shapes. If your building is rectangular on the outside, make it sodding rectangular on the inside, it's really not that hard.

I remember a few years back playing a game (I really wish I could remember the name) where that actually became a running joke, the thief in the party used to check out the walls and floors of buildings where the internal shape didn't match the external to find secret passages or hidden rooms, it was hysterical.

BurningTyger
Hm i Wonder if i can pul somethi goff here/
1289
author=nhubi
True, RPG's are fantastical versions of reality so applying rigid rules won't work, or conversely will feel too real and actually throw a player out of the suspension of disbelief. Still large towns with no population or non-communicative sprites and over-crowded hovels need to be addressed.

Still my biggest issue is 9). I absolutely detest the one storey wooden cabin on the outside that transmogrifies TARDIS-like into a palatial three storey abode on entry. The flaw that irritates me the most, and I'm a player, not a designer, is simple shapes. If your building is rectangular on the outside, make it sodding rectangular on the inside, it's really not that hard.

I remember a few years back playing a game (I really wish I could remember the name) where that actually became a running joke, the thief in the party used to check out the walls and floors of buildings where the internal shape didn't match the external to find secret passages or hidden rooms, it was hysterical.

Sounds fun. I hope to take some of these tips and apply them to town design as well. Which reminds me of this: 14 questions for setting. So many people use the visual but forget the other senses and feelings. Even video games, though mostly visual, can use text descriptions to enrich the experience.
author=karins_soulkeeper
This is a really nice article. And I have to agree with Chivi-chivik.

Though it wouldn't hurt to add some graphics and white space right?
It was pretty tiring and demotivational to read a wall of text.
Not many people have the patience to read through it all in one go.
A visual break or two would remedy this.

Yeah, I thought about putting graphics in the article, but 1) Graphical design is not my strong suit and 2) I'm better at describing these kinds of things than I am at demonstrating them (those who can't do teach, right?).

Nevertheless, thank you for the kind words.

author=karins_soulkeeper
Ps. Archeia is a 'she', just so you know.

PS: My bad on that; sorry!
author=BurningTyger
I like some of these ideas. though of course not everything has to be realistic.


I agree; I was just trying cover all the bases here. But yeah, a lot of this stuff is subjective.
Heh, I know that this may be a bit late to post, but what the hell.

So first, pretty good article, you raise some interesting points, but, I'm going to play devil's advocate here, or rather, I think that there are a few things that are not dealt with in your post.

First of all, there is the issue of what towns actually are, in game design terms. In most RPGs, towns are not actually meant to be "towns" that is a place where people live and work and generally be all the things that towns usually are. Towns are basically tools, used to control the pacing of the game. The are made to serve as stops, clear notifiers that the player has finished a given portion of a game, as such they let the player rest, stock up, get new weapons, get new sidequests, but more importantly, advance the plot and the game. They let the player know that he/she is progressing in the game, and they let the designer, control character progressing (new weapons and new, more powerful enemies), direct the player to their next goal and expand the lore and culture of the world.

Because of that, you can't make towns be in a sense "interesting", players are trained, specially in RPGs, to search for everything that might be important, you make a town that big and with all that things, your player might feel overwhelmed, or worse bored and frustrated, so many things are there and so little are actually important (as related to game progression rather than lore)that the players stop exploring and that might make them lose stuff that are actually important to said progression, which again leads to frustration. And that is not even counting that players are also trained to look for places that are, in a word overproduced, places that look like they took time to make, players assume that there is something for them there. Your players might spend so long in the town that they might stop progressing or forget the story threads that you have laid out for them, which in the worst case scenario might make them lose interest in your game entirely.

The main problem, as I see it, is that of priorities, an RPG takes so much time and care to make that you must decide which parts are important to the game, while true that using your suggestions makes towns more interesting and more real, the fact of the matter is that it's preferable to spend that time into crafting the story and characters, balancing the game and making the systems better. Spending so much time in something that is, I'm afraid, incidental to the story that you are trying to tell, and the game you are trying to make, and specially if it might detract from those, is a bad idea. Changing the towns over time, adding systems to make the NPCs move and have routines, adding unique dialog to them (and dialog that changes over time too)and diverse NPCs, repeated villain's attacks (specially if it has little to do with the story), are a lot of work, and if your game has towns that are crafted a lot, but the rest of the game feels bad, then your players will stop playing the game, and all that work will mean nothing, since no one will see it.

Now I'm not saying that your ideas are bad, (except maybe the accent one, 9 times out of 10, it makes the characters stereotypical and gimmick, and you don't want that, at all), far from it, specially the shop inventory one, but as designers, we must always be aware of what exactly is our goal, and the best way to do it, and the best way to focus on it, that means carefully crafting the pace of the story and gameplay and keep our players directed and interested and also, knowing what is we must focus on, after all we don't have infinite time or resources to make our game.

Of course, all this is related to "regular" towns, if there are towns where the player spends a lot of time in, or is critical to the story then yes, do all that you can to make it interesting and alive.

In any case, good article, even if I disagree somewhat, it is a good, and necessary topic to discuss, and starting conversations about it is always a good thing.

LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Your whole premise that "lifeless" towns are bad is simply because they're unrealistic? I disagree with this premise. If something doesn't serve a purpose that coincides with the primary gameplay themes of your game, cut it. It takes up the player's time and distracts them from the actual game.

Figure out what you want your game to be about, and make towns do that. If your game is about puzzle-solving and deep combat tactics, towns should offer tools to help the player advance in these areas, and maybe not much else. If your game is about exploring the world and finding everything it has to offer, towns should help guide the player to more dangerous locations and have lots of secrets of their own as well. If your game is about a hero's linear journey as he encounters a villain, suffers because of it, prepares to face it and ultimately defeats it, the towns should provide the steps needed along that path to move the hero forward, mostly free of unnecessary distractions. If your game is about overcoming backbreaking challenges against all odds, towns should feel oppressive, tiny, and not particularly safe, and should make you work for your respite.

If your game is about crafting a living, breathing open world that the player can lose themselves in, then the stuff you listed in your article is great advice - but for most games, that's simply not what the game is about. It makes perfect sense to add this stuff in a game like Skyrim or Ultima Online. But if you added most of this stuff to Disgaea, Lufia 2, Etrian Odyssey, Dragon Warrior 4 or Diablo 3, it wouldn't make sense and would clash badly with the rest of the gameplay. It would diminish the game, not add to it. You wouldn't want the player to be spending substantial time exploring a town and getting to know its people and its streets so that they feel realistic and come to life - the player is meant to be doing other things.

Also, yeah, I've never seen accents written phonetically without cringing and wanting to punch the writer. This goes for anything, be it book, game or comic.
author=SOleyu
Towns are basically tools, used to control the pacing of the game. The are made to serve as stops, clear notifiers that the player has finished a given portion of a game, as such they let the player rest, stock up, get new weapons, get new sidequests, but more importantly, advance the plot and the game. They let the player know that he/she is progressing in the game, and they let the designer, control character progressing (new weapons and new, more powerful enemies), direct the player to their next goal and expand the lore and culture of the world.

Because of that, you can't make towns be in a sense "interesting", players are trained, specially in RPGs, to search for everything that might be important, you make a town that big and with all that things, your player might feel overwhelmed, or worse bored and frustrated, so many things are there and so little are actually important (as related to game progression rather than lore)that the players stop exploring and that might make them lose stuff that are actually important to said progression, which again leads to frustration. And that is not even counting that players are also trained to look for places that are, in a word overproduced, places that look like they took time to make, players assume that there is something for them there. Your players might spend so long in the town that they might stop progressing or forget the story threads that you have laid out for them, which in the worst case scenario might make them lose interest in your game entirely.

The main problem, as I see it, is that of priorities, an RPG takes so much time and care to make that you must decide which parts are important to the game, while true that using your suggestions makes towns more interesting and more real, the fact of the matter is that it's preferable to spend that time into crafting the story and characters, balancing the game and making the systems better. Spending so much time in something that is, I'm afraid, incidental to the story that you are trying to tell, and the game you are trying to make, and specially if it might detract from those, is a bad idea. Changing the towns over time, adding systems to make the NPCs move and have routines, adding unique dialog to them (and dialog that changes over time too)and diverse NPCs, repeated villain's attacks (specially if it has little to do with the story), are a lot of work, and if your game has towns that are crafted a lot, but the rest of the game feels bad, then your players will stop playing the game, and all that work will mean nothing, since no one will see it.

Now I'm not saying that your ideas are bad, (except maybe the accent one, 9 times out of 10, it makes the characters stereotypical and gimmick, and you don't want that, at all), far from it, specially the shop inventory one, but as designers, we must always be aware of what exactly is our goal, and the best way to do it, and the best way to focus on it, that means carefully crafting the pace of the story and gameplay and keep our players directed and interested and also, knowing what is we must focus on, after all we don't have infinite time or resources to make our game.

Of course, all this is related to "regular" towns, if there are towns where the player spends a lot of time in, or is critical to the story then yes, do all that you can to make it interesting and alive.



author=LockeZ
If your game is about crafting a living, breathing open world that the player can lose themselves in, then the stuff you listed in your article is great advice - but for most games, that's simply not what the game is about. It makes perfect sense to add this stuff in a game like Skyrim or Ultima Online. But if you added most of this stuff to Disgaea, Lufia 2, Etrian Odyssey, Dragon Warrior 4 or Diablo 3, it wouldn't make sense and would clash badly with the rest of the gameplay. It would diminish the game, not add to it. You wouldn't want the player to be spending substantial time exploring a town and getting to know its people and its streets so that they feel realistic and come to life - the player is meant to be doing other things.

Also, yeah, I've never seen accents written phonetically without cringing and wanting to punch the writer. This goes for anything, be it book, game or comic.


First of all, thank you both for the input. The constructive criticism is much appreciated. And yes, in many ways I agree. The point that I am making (and admittedly I should have made more clearly) is that some of the games I have played seem to attempt to give the feeling of a "a living, breathing open world that the player can lose themselves in" and fail to do so. Many of the ideas that I placed in this article came directly from my own dissatifaction with the feel of the towns in those games. However, I agree with what you are saying about these ideas not working well in certain genres. In fact, one of my all-time favorite games on this site ("Aurora Wing") does not utilize towns at all.

As for accents, that was not even really my idea. Kentona used accents in "Hero's Realm" and I thought it was a really cool idea. Not to piss you off to much, LockeZ, but if I ever succeed in making a game as awesome as "Hero's Realm", I intend to use accents as well.
this was a really stimulating article, and so was (is) the discussion that ensued.

i'm a long time player, coming into design some quarter century after beginning my 'career' as a gamer.

I have to say, over the years, I have held EVERY view presented here, at different times. when I started playing RPGs (DQ1 and FF1, specifically,) the small, unrealistic towns kind of bugged me.

later, during the SNES and PS1 eras, it became more and more possible to have these settings feel more like real cities. at first this was AWESOME, and really added to gameplay, as it felt like we were advancing (FF7 comes to mind, those town really pull at the heartstrings, though arguably, the director's theme for the game was life/death, his grandmother had just died, and he wanted a game about human connection and connection between humans and nature.)

that was the last time I really enjoyed that. from FF8 on, the big corporate JRPGs moved further away from good gameplay into being overbearing interactive soap operas. f**k u FF8+, honestly. I am now SICK to death of Square's excesses and overblown, broken systems and stories (which have lost all originality and luster as far as I can see.)

the irony is that now (as is a big convention in gen 8 games in general,) the tendency is to try to create a sweeping view of a world, a story and one's motivation there within is to use ECONOMY, that is, telling a lot with very little, then thrusting the player directly into the heat of conflict. I LOVE it.

I have a kid, and life is short. also, I like to play multiple games at once. I do NOT want to watch an hour opening for a game, and THEN explore a base city that will take me 3 hours minimum to see before I even hit a 'level,' and get down to fighting and grinding.

though I felt like it SHOULD have been more of a finished game (it was indeed cut short to put on the shelves,) SaGa Frontier, my all around fav RPG in the digital format evar, ALMOST balances all of this perfectly.

there are times when I wish some of the locations were just a LITTLE too simple with no real life in them, but honestly, you go into these huge "worlds," where you only see small parts, but what is NOT seen FEELS like it is there from what IS shown, and a few random NPCs just chatting about their lives and perspectives, many of which do NOT directly affect gameplay, paints a vast picture QUICKLY, which I love.

some NPCs DO change what they do and say over the game, and in order to finish the whole game, you have to play 7 characters ENTIRE stories to reach the final 8th scenario, and though you will be going to basically the same levels, things are ALWAYS at least SLIGHTLY different for each scenario. a pretty much background NPC in a bar in 6 of the scenarios MIGHT be the contact point for a HUGE mission ONLY in that once character's story. so you can imaging that character going on that adventure, while the other 6 will just talk to a drunk once, who will maybe complain about a waitress. the scavenger hunt effect makes the town FUN.

further, I actually like when towns and dungeons overlap a bit. the main port o Koorang in SaGa Frontier not only has the greatest varieties of shops, and most of the shops where you can sell or exchange (you can only sell certain items in the game, and ONLY if you can find a buyer who pays for them in bulk, making it a bit more realistic,) but really, it LOOKS and FEELS huge, even though there are maybe 6 or 7 actual areas to the place, INCLUDING the doors you can enter.

and underneath Koorang, is a VAST sewer dungeon (which is the best place to grind early for most scenarios, and actually has different treasures in each scenario,) which is in turn on TOP of yet ANOTHER, OLDER sewer system, which is again, on top of a cave, presumably what they built the city upon the first place. also, you can get into the dungeons multiple ways, and there are even multiple exit-back-to-city only exits.

anyway, they did a LOT with a LITTLE, which means that the cities feel like as much a part of the advancement and gameplay as the dungeons and battles. also, there are event specific battles IN the cities, mostly to do with storyline.

so yeah, I think the analogy is like a good city for an RPG will often be like poetry: very little words, but worlds are painted in moments.

and goddamnit, I better get to swing a sword or something within 30 minutes of start or imma seriously go play me some Blaster Master or Super Mario Land, or even Space Invaders, man. and while I LOVE NPCs and details which suggest a living place, I better be able to either clear the town and all its info within 20 minutes, or else there BETTER be sub games, or ways to earn money/exp/advancement IN the city, and it really does have to fit in with the rest of the game, and should NOT feel like games tacked on top of games. (except for games of chance or event specific games, like the opening festival in Crono Trigger.)

everyone here had great points. thanks for giving me plenty to think about.
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