Let accent and vocabolary, maybe even language, vary.

How about general generosity/attitude? In a small town that is struggling to get by, a person believed to bring danger and destruction would be entirely unwelcome, but they might help the person with open arms if the townspeople aren''t doing too bad and are somewhat nieve about life outside their town. People in a larger city may be just as likely to ignore you as to help/hinder. It could also effect price levels - a small town might have an entirely different economy where high-tech parts are practically worthless since they only have one piece of high tech machinery(maybe a tractor for the community farm or a weather regulator, etc) in the whole town.

The size of towns and their layout can really set them apart from eachother. If you have a huge city in the shape of a doughnut that''s stuck in a perpetual night, you''re defintitely gonna remember it when your traveling across a desert, and you run into a small town of five buildings thats just a little square.

-NeoMage

Just FYI, these are great ideas (heh, original or not). Usually I reply to all threads, but here I''m just shutting up and taking notes.

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Just waiting for the mothership...

I''ll second the motion for the disposition of townsfolk toward visitors/each other, and mention "skeletons in the closet," secret clubs/societies, etc. Also, the uniqueness of the town personalities. Towns in Diablo, for example, were all pretty much the same. One blacksmith, one magician-type, one healer, etc., and no one else really mattered. A lot of towns have the same format, which really kills individuality. Play Earthbound several times through. Those guys did it right.


Tolerance is a drug. Sycophancy is a disease.

This post that I wrote isn''t really about making towns different, but about how to implement making them different. It''s obviously not that hard to come up with ideas for differentiating towns, else you''d have no posts

Towns and cities should be explorable in a way that lets you get detail without tedium - if you can search every corner of every house and discover nothing most of the time, then being able to search only hurts the gameplay, since you obligate most of your players to take the time to search for the gameplay benefits. Similarly, districts of big cities shouldn''t be empty shells, but distinct, well-developed regions. If there''s not going to be anything interesting in a part of town, don''t let the player go there(or strongly discourage it by giving him the option of E-Z autotravel instead of blundering around).

One game that I think did this sort of variation-through-exploration very well was Betrayal at Krondor. Small towns were made up of their individual houses, and you could try knocking on the door of them all. Some were empty, but most contained a brief passage of dialogue or a shop or tavern. Big cities were hotspot stills that essentially contained as much as the small towns, only with city-type locations. The exploration was perhaps a bit limited, since there wasn''t really anything to hide, but this worked in favor of the game, I think, because it shifted the focus away from "town/city" to "adventure." Every location was relevant to your adventure in some way.

Simple, simple design - all the detail basically written into the script. But very effective for its needs. Doing a simulation to provide a sort of "emergent detail" as is implied by some of the suggestions here is a royal pain in the ass with only dubious benefits, and yet modern computer RPGs still try to achieve this(Morrowind for example), the result almost always being some sort of stupid exploit that lets you loot every house in town Most of those ideas would be compatible with this sort of design though. Cheers.

Cleanliness level of the city and its people. This can differ not only town-to-town, but within a large city as well. Slums will have trash in the streets, broken down buildings and equipment, narrower streets and alleys than the wealthy side of town.

Ambient sound will differ the same. Dock areas will have birds and water noises. A marketplace will be filled with constant background voices and the shouts of hucksters. Living areas could have the sounds of children playing.