Quote:Original post by JamesPenny
Holy crap, a fantasy city sim sounds awesome. Try to attract heroes to trade there to boost your economy, invasions by monster, guild politics, magic. I would buy this.

They've made this game (sort of, it's actually much simpler than what you describe), it's called Final Fantasy: My Life as King, it's Wiiware.

Back to the topic at hand though, I think the kind of game you want to design is what D&D players would call an 'Urban Adventure' - everything takes place in the city. No need for many (if any), outside environments, all the quests, NPCs, adventure sites, etc, are all located within the city.

That being said, I think when you consider just the massive size of a city, you don't want players to have to walk through countless residential neighborhoods full of locked doors (unless you want to spend years making each house, even then there likely wouldn't be anything relevant to the game in each one.)

From my experience, the best way I've seen to implement a big city is to subdivide it into sections, and take a 'snapshot' if you will of each section, say a 5x5 block square where important things will happen, they do this kind of thing in Neverwinter Nights and other more recent RPGs. That way you get a nice bit of the city's flavor, plenty of room for NPCs and quest locations, and not a lot of needless running around.

I like that concept quite a lot wave.
Another suggestion would be to keep the NPCs nameless and mostly unresponsive if spoken too. That allows you to create a large number of them for the same of filling the streets and creating that tactical situation without distracting from the important NPCs. You could also assign houses to each at random and have TES: Oblivion style AI wandering, but lock the houses. At any point, if a new important and named NPC is needed, you can change a nameless one into him, guide the player to him, and maybe allow him access to that particular house.

The whole idea would be to make the player feel like there was a lot there without wasting development time actually making it. Procedural content could also be used very heavily in this sort of situation.

Exploring towns in Zelda, FF, and other classic RPG's was always one of my favorite activities. I too never had the impression of being immersed in a large town or city though in classic SNES RPG's and adventure games. I took them as iconic representations of towns rather than actual towns. Though if you think about it, almost everything in a classic RPG is an iconic representation anyway rather than the genuine article. The towns and castles on over-world maps were literally icons.

I've always favored bigger towns with more realistic scales and populations but I know this can be a deterrent to individuals who get lost easily. I'm the sort of person that can be dropped in the middle of the woods and still know which way is North. After visiting a location once I can picture the surrounding topology/geography in my mind as if I had a Satellite view of the region. Since I rarely ever get lost or confused about direction or location in games or real life I've always favored a little more complexity since complexity typically brings with it more variation and visual interest. However, I can understand how unneeded complexity is an undesirable feature if it leads to confusion.

I think it comes down to communicating to the player the important features and regions of your town or city so that they can easily understand what they do and don’t need to pay attention to. If each building or location in your city possesses implied importance then having a large city can be a bad thing as players will feel overwhelmed. It's important to establish a visual language in your town that communicates to players, which buildings are significant and which buildings and structures are unimportant. Hopefully, in this situation the unimportant buildings, locations, and features of the town simply become background flavor.

Centralizing and condensing the important buildings (shops, banks, inns, etc.) so that travelling between them is reduced is also important. My main motivation for exploring the rest of the town should not come from a necessity to find the shop I need, but rather as you have mentioned to engage in some secondary activity such as inciting a rebellion, rubbing shoulders with affluent members of the community, and so on.

Having navigation markers to help guide players to important locations or individuals in the city may also be something to consider. When playing Assassin’s Creed even if I wasn’t completely familiar with a city’s layout when I first arrived it didn’t matter because I had navigation points and markers to help guide me to those parts of the city that were important. Obviously this is a different genre and the game was handing me objectives to move me along but there are still some concepts that can be gleaned from this example.

For case studies of "realistically" sized cities in games, take a look at The Elder Scrolls: Arena and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Whether this use of scale was useful is subjective.

I'd say leave in the parts of the city that matter to the gameplay, then imply the city's actual size through other means. Unless you're going for a full-blown reality simulator, faking the city's scale would be good enough. You'd still be a step ahead of most games that don't bother to suggest any scale of their cities.

Now, if the entire game were to take place in one city then we'd have a different story.

Quote:Original post by WorldPlanter
I too never had the impression of being immersed in a large town or city though in classic SNES RPG's and adventure games. I took them as iconic representations of towns rather than actual towns.

Most games are iconic by their nature. The miniature towns are along the same lines as nondescript red potions that heal you, a person's abilities being rated by numerical "skills", and gold being the currency of everywhere.

I always liked the idea of localization
In that you have localized point of interest that you travel to that is fairly compact with lots of details and interesting npcs while still giving the impression that it is just a part of a large city
In case of MMO I like the idea of organically made cities where every house represents a player,and the city grows with the player base
You could also try to procedurally generate the town and then manually add the points of interests,however I do recommend the points of interest to be tightly connected and especially detailed just like you would if it were localized