LET'S TALK ABOUT MAP DESIGN

Man this is the only place I've ever heard people suggesting it was okay. I mean I generally think that most RPG designers these days strive for maximum realism in their games, and most players have come to expect that. If you take a time machine back to 1995 then what people are conditioned to expect is going to be different obviously, but there haven't been any commercial games that did that kind of thing in decades and so players don't automatically accept it any more.

I try to find a balance between realism and functionality. In Luxaren Allure, most NPC houses are super-tiny and bathrooms don't exist at all, but I don't worry too much about it, as you don't really have to show where the NPCs bathe and poop (although you can if you want to XD)

author=LockeZ
I can't possibly imagine a situation where it's acceptable to make the building smaller on the outside. It destroys your game's sense of scale, it looks completely hideous, and there's absolutely no benefit. It doesn't even change how much walking you have to do in the town exterior unless you're an abominably terrible mapper. I mean how big do you need your goddamn buildings to be inside, seriously?

Unless you're making an extremely specific type of game (the type where you intentionally engage in terrible game design for the sake of nostalgia) you shouldn't have an FF4/pokemon style "town exterior" for most towns in the first place anyway, since how many towns have you been to that consisted of seven buildings? It completely destroys the player's immersion. You're just used to it because you've played way too many shitty games and come to accept that shittiness as a given. Locations should be chosen from a menu or a town map in 99% of RPGs.

This is the most amazing post I think I've read on this whole site during my time here.

I actually experimented heavily with real size buildings in Intelligence, particularly noticeable in the Brisbane City maps. I'll link a few examples.
http://i.imgur.com/k78Nw2W.png
http://i.imgur.com/M6BdtOb.png
Mind you, Brisbane is a large map, but it doesn't feel like you're trekking everywhere. The scale of it is tuned by progression (you cant enter the terrace or the west-side until certain plot things have happened) and exploring it will be the only thing that will take time and that goes for most cities, when west side opens up you also get access to a car that gives you 6 speed instead of 4.
http://i.imgur.com/2JGi4Bg.png
Warning: Large image inbound.

Ah, back when I was so naive about how cities worked.

Intelligence is as far from a realistic game as you get, just so you fellas know.

author=Feldschlacht IV

author=Darken
You're the only one I know who complains about these things.

I think this about sums it up. You're the only one I'd ever heard that is actually carrying a legit torch of complaint about this.

>Talk about map design.
>Hey actually don't do that!

I know LockeZ was being a bit of horse's ass about it but really guys almost 2 pages of trying to undermine his input? I'm a person who very much argues against realism in gaming, however when it comes to aesthetic locke makes some good points. Let's compare one of those games like Pokemon where house sizes are completely unreal to the interior size, to a game like Diablo II. Here's a screenshot of Diablo II's interior/exteriors in action.

Now I may be biased since Diablo II holds a special place in my heart, but I was quickly absorbed by this game's cozy interior/exterior phasing and became immersed instantly, I can't say the same for the two Pokemon games I played, Ruby and Fire-red, while good, the towns are the most unmemorable parts of the games, both pokemon and Diablo II aren't vying to be realistic, Sanctuary alike the Hoenn Region are alien worlds, Diablo's is simply rendered in a realistic style rather than cartoonish. Now I may be one of many to argue against the realistic style when games seem to go out of their way to render games to be as bland and as unappealing as possible, but an Alien world rendered this way can look very unique, just play Oddworld Abe's anything if you need proof of that concept.

And in both the games above, I never felt like I was walking for a gratuitous amount of time, I may have been, but the collectables/events and encounters never let me realize it. The only difference between them in the sake of this whole debate is that I played Diablo II for five years with barely little else and I beat Pokemon Ruby once and didn't quite finish Fire Red, upon which I never again touched them. I was far more immersed in the world of Diablo II.

LockeZ's point is valid and we can swiftly toss the realism thing aside, I'll say what I did two pages ago, it's not how the map is, it's how you present it.

If you're making a large city filled to the brim with stuff, no one is going to feel bored, especially not if you give them a car or hoverboard or something that makes travel a lot faster. Especially if you include 'sweet jumps' and 'hella stunts' or the ability to run useless NPC's down.

How exactly are we shutting down discussion by disagreeing? I'm simply rejecting the idea that we should make maps look realistic as possible... because... realism? That is one minor nit picking aspect that isn't motivated by actual game design. Your opinions on the Diablo vs Pokemon thing don't really consider that Diablo happens to be a isometric game where the engine allows you to seamlessly go into houses. You're just talking about a lot of subjective qualities that relate to aesthetics without really proving why scale made Diablo's aspects better than Pokemon's.

If you set out to make a realistic game, then your goal would probably involve proper scaling. But that's just a preference, not the end all goal that everyone goes for.

Consider: the reason why Diablo 2 and FF14 and Dragon Age: Inquisition (and Dragon Quest!!!!) allow you to seamlessly enter buildings in the world without a map transition is because the designers felt that it increased immersion and helped prevent the areas from feeling disconnected. It wasn't like they were just stuck with that engine, whoops, nothing they can do about it. They made a conscious decision that not only did they want to use a single scale but also a single map for the entire zone, making everything fit together perfectly in the physical space of the game world, to whatever degree was possible. In interviews with designers of RPGs, especially open world games and MMORPGs, you can very often hear them talk about how they believe it helps make the game world feel more like a cohesive, connected, whole world.

By contrast, Diablo 3 and FF10 and Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Quest 7 didn't do this. And none of those are bad games! Obviously. But their worlds don't feel as connected. It sometimes feels like you're being escorted by the designer between select pieces of an area instead of experiencing the area as a whole. It's definitely a lot easier to make a game with map transitions whenever you enter a door, since you can fudge a lot of the edges of the physical space, but you lose something. It's something small, but it's still something.

Okay yeah I thought the consensus was that everyone was against that seamless size map style and were blatantly denying it could even be good despite it being good in a lot of cases, my bad.

That house wasn't a great example, but Google images was being shoddy. Keep in mind poor estates back in the olden time didn't have all the facilities, some poor houses were a single room. Bathrooms back in those times were more commonly public facilities, and having no bed or just a burlap sack or rug or something to sleep on wasn't unheard of for poor fellas.

There are bigger houses that have beds and stuff but sadly turning up a screenshot was proving monotonous and i didn't have 30 minutes to install the game just to get one myself..

Until the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was very uncommon for houses to have more than one room unless you were quite rich! The average house was about 500 square feet (45 square meters) from the middle ages through the late 1700s. Once sturdy beds became common, they were often stood upright during the day to save space.

If your game is set in a medieval fantasy world, don't feel like you need to make big living spaces. A 4x3 tile interior is about the correct size for someone's house, historically speaking. You can do what you want because ~~fantasy world~~ but you shouldn't feel like that's weirdly small.

Right, but the reason they used that style of maps was because they wanted to make the interiors feel integrated with the exteriors. They obviously thought that was important. They wanted to make the world feel unified.

My suggestion to make them match in size is working toward that same goal, just in a different way.