SOLEYU'S PROFILE

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.