Settlements in RPGs

Pighardia

Pighardia

Pighardia

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9 Jan 2011
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Hi all, just a bit of a thought I was having earlier-

I play a lot of RPGs, and lately I have been a little disappointed that no progress seems to be being made in an area that I have felt for a long time has needed it: The towns and cites. In fact, they seem to be getting smaller, with less content!...Take Skyrim for example, a massive world, but only a few settlements, which is fine by me, but they are fairly small with few people inhabiting them. It seems that in a lot of games, cities are basically becoming small hubs with a few NPCs in them, that are pretty irrelevant. I like to have somewhere in a game to take it easy between the proper gameplay, and maybe introduce a few different things to do, not just move from area to area all the time!...Skyrim does a good job of providing the towns, but they are a bit lacking in scale for me.

I would like to play a good RPG that actually has a town/city that you can get lost in, and properly explore. I would like to praise the Assassin's Creed games for the way they do settlements, and I would love to play a proper RPG that does them in the same way the AC games do!
Out of the RPGs I have played, I would say that the game that does them the best is probably Morrowind tbh, and maybe Baldur's Gate, but even then they are too small with too little content. A special mention to the Imperial City from Oblivion too.

So, what are your favourite settlements, and which games do them best in your opinion? what would you like to see in this area?...also, any potential improvements in future games?(I'm looking at The Witcher 3!)

Cheers
 
I guess for Skyrim it fits in with the lore, Oblivion had a main city and so did Morrowind. My favorite one is the BG II one which I cannot remember the name of but that felt alive and was rather grand :)
 
Have to tip my hat to Divinity's Reach in GW2. I spent ages just wandering around it when the game launched.

Altdorf in Warhammer Online was pretty cool too. It was far too small, but had some nice hidden public quests and the like hidden away.
 
Actually, I have to say that the Final Fantasy games always include at least one pretty good city to explore. The one in FFIX in particular was pretty great iirc.
 
I liked the settlements in Gothic 1 and 2, particularly 2. Morrowind was great, I spent my first 15 hours running around Balmora (the first town you encountered).

The reason why modern RPGs don't have proper settlements anymore is because the 'grand scale' is used to hide lack of content. Even if Skyrim is immense, most dungeons are just recycled versions of previously encoutered content: get in, click click click, kill, get out.. If you do that in a rather small area, such as a city, it stands out and you notice it right away. Put a few miles, a small village, a cave and a dragon between them and it's not so obvious anymore. Additionally, the player sinks lots of their time into pointless exploring, further hiding the lack of content.
 
Tbh, my lest favourite part of Baldur's Gate was Baldur's Gate. There was just too much wandering around feeling lost and not knowing how to progress any of the quests. It slowed things down too much and made the game feel like hard work.

I'm fine with them building a large metropolis to explore, but the designers need to give a clearer idea of where to go if you're not up for talking to fifty random (and tedious) NPC's who are just there to make up the numbers.

I think the Witcher (first game) did a better job of this, but admittedly it was on a much smaller scale.
 
Zethor said:
If you do that in a rather small area, such as a city, it stands out and you notice it right away. Put a few miles, a small village, a cave and a dragon between them and it's not so obvious anymore.
Click to expand...

This is true, like I said you need to have a bit of a different approach to the gameplay within settlements. Take The Witcher for example, when you enter Vizima the game becomes a bit more of an 'investigation' and a bit less combat for a bit, though you are free to mix it up as you like as there are still plenty of combat quests to take. It works really well imo.
 
I wouldn't use Assassins Creed as a good example of what you are after, firstly because it isn't an RPG and secondly because the games are built AROUND the cities and settlements rather than in most RPGs (such as the Elder Scrolls) were the cities and settlements are hubs for the open world.

The issue will always be resource managements, you can either have huge sprawling cities OR a big, diverse open world.

Personally I would say MMO's definitely do it best, GW2 and FFXIV are especially good.
 
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Oh I would never claim that AC was some kind of RPG, far from it, but I do really like their approach to the cities they create...I mean the number of NPCs just wandering around(though not interactive at all, beyond killing them) really make them seem alive. Take the Elder Scrolls/Fallout games, where the main cities are separated from the main map as their own world-space, and feature cities like the AC games, and it would be immense!

The city featured in the trailer for The Witcher 3 looks pretty much as good as I have seen


0.46:cool:

Fenris said:
The issue will always be resource managements, you can either have huge sprawling cities OR a big, diverse open world.
Click to expand...


Question- Would you sacrifice the large open world, for better settlements?...I am thinking like AC again, have say the Skyrim map broken up in to different areas a bit like like AC3 is, or Kingdoms of Amalur for example?...or is there a compromise between the two?
I am not particularly bothered by loading screens tbh, but I am not sure I would like the idea.
 
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Why would they have to sacrifice large open worlds for larger cities? Maybe they'd have to sacrifice the number of cities (just maybe) but this is pretty much 2014 now, and with the hardware 'advancements' the consoles have made, if TES VI doesn't have cities the size of GTA and wilderness to match, then it will be a serious disappointment. One of the worst things about Skyrim (and Oblivion, even Morrowind too, but much less so) was the fact that towns had nearly as many shops as they did homes. I think that apart from Vivec in III, the Imperial City in Oblivion has the most habitats at about 85 or so, with about 600 NPCs inhabiting the cities of the entire province... LOL. Skyrim was the worst though, each settlement was pretty much a ghost town, I swear that the Imperial City and Vivec together have more NPCs than all of the towns of Skyrim combined.

I think that generic NPCs are needed for the next one tbh, mixed with a larger amount of unique NPCs than before. There isn't really a whole lot stopping them now, the new consoles have a ton of RAM and that was the main thing holding the amount of NPCs and size of the towns back, and of course with the PC version getting zero enhancements, we had to suffer because of it too.

TBH though, the only types of RPG games that have ever done cities etc, properly are MMOs, I was running around the first city in Neverwinter for ages, and the amount of players mixed with the NPCs did make it feel great. Still though, if there is one aspect that the RPG games of the next generation need to improve on, that's world design.
 
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Hong Kong in Deus Ex is really good IMO, although it isn't THAT big or populated it is fairly well designed and one of my favourite levels in any game.

Perhaps one way to look at it is that in some cases, a game may have a 'region' with multiple settlements in relatively close proximity / easy travel between and you could almost scale that up and consider it to be one large settlement.

Key challenges as I see it with large settlements include:
-Making them diverse enough i.e. the effort required to have lots of different building styles, lots of NPCs that you can actually have a meaningful interaction with etc
-Risk of alienating casual players who get frustrated at having so much 'filler' wasting their time or making the areas difficult to navigate
-Potential to get bogged down in a single place rather than exploring everything else the game has to offer
 
I quite like the hub areas in the original KoTOR, lots of people to interact with and side quests that require back and forth around the area. I enjoyed being able to play people off against one another.

Playing this again after Mass Effect (especially 3) highlighted how linear the side quests are in ME.
 
Daggerfall had HUGE cities but it was very basic compared to modern games. I think the big problem is that it would be a massive project to have huge cities and be comparable in quality to modern games. I doubt it'd increase sales enough to pay for the expense to create such content.
 
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